Note: Original article is written in german. Translation via Deepl Pro.

The discreet co-founder of Palantir Nathan Gettings has settled down in Switzerland and supports academic projects at universities in Zurich and Lausanne.

There isn’t much information available on the website: “The founder, an entrepreneur, has achieved considerable success in his career. Now that he is free from the constraints of commercial profitability, he can pursue his true passions – regardless of whether they yield a financial return or not.”

The founder of the Swiss «Chiwi» Foundation, which, according to its own statements, is dedicated to academic space research, evidently wishes to remain anonymous.

Yet his name can be found in company commercial registers with just a few clicks: The founder’s name is Nathan Gettings.

He is one of the co-founders of Palantir, currently the world’s most controversial software company.

A firm that supplies intelligence agencies, the military and police forces with data integration software that identifies and tracks targets in real time, thereby contributing to kill operations. Together with the WAV investigative collective, *Die Republik* has reported in a two-part series on Palantir’s activities in Switzerland – and on how the company spent years trying unsuccessfully to win over public sector clients.

Although Palantir has had little success here with its most important clients – the authorities – in contrast to neighbouring European countries, Zurich has become a key hub for its European operations. This was confirmed by two Palantir managers in an interview for the republik magazin.

Palantir’s establishment in Zurich has also been the subject of debate in the Zurich Cantonal Council. Green Party cantonal councillor Benjamin Krähenmann told *Die Republik*: “It is clear that such an inhumane company should not receive any favours from state bodies.”

However, it is not only the many ethically questionable uses of the company’s products that are generating negative headlines, but also numerous public statements by three of the company’s co-founders: CEO Alex Karp, investor Peter Thiel and Joe Lonsdale, who no longer works at Palantir.

They regularly attract attention with colonialist, racist and even fascist remarks. Karp speaks of the superiority of the West and claims that some cultures are ‘dysfunctional’, ‘regressive’ and ‘harmful’. Peter Thiel does not consider democracy and freedom to be compatible and funds start-ups that use AI assessments to evaluate female journalists and thereby seek to silence them. And Joe Lonsdale responded on X to a post calling for ‘communists’ to be ‘blown up’ with the remark: ‘Exactly. Why do you think we founded Palantir?’

However, another man in Palantir’s founding team, who is the subject of this article, has so far gone largely unnoticed by the public: Nathan Gettings.

Yet, as Palantir’s former technical director, he played a decisive role in shaping the company’s path.

Part of the PayPal clique

Nathan Gettings was long associated with billionaire Peter Thiel and is referred to by the business press as a member of the so-called ‘PayPal Mafia’. The term refers to former PayPal employees who went on to found or build numerous successful tech firms. As director of the risk and research department, Gettings played a key role in developing the crucial anti-fraud software.

At Palantir, he developed the first prototypes, which enabled the fledgling company to secure funding and gain access to US defence and intelligence circles in 2004.

The fact that Gettings is regarded as one of Palantir’s early technical architects is evident in the patents he has filed relating to the core technology: such as the idea for a flexible system that transforms a wide variety of often chaotic raw data – for example, Excel spreadsheets, text documents or database entries – into a unified, searchable ‘world model’ in which people, places, organisations and events are linked together. This ‘ontology concept’ is regarded as one of Palantir’s key technical innovations. The Foundry and Gotham products are also based on this concept: they are data integration platforms for government bodies, the military and large corporations.

Gettings left Palantir after around ten years; exactly when is not entirely clear. Many sources cite 2012 as the year he left. At that time, Gettings founded Affirm with his former PayPal colleague Max Levchin, a fintech company designed to enable lending even to people with traditionally low credit ratings (such as school leavers). Other sources cite 2016 as the year Gettings left Palantir.

Alongside his job at Palantir, he and his brother Adam Gettings founded Robotex in 2007, a provider of remote-controlled and armed security robots for fire brigades, the police and special forces. Thiel and Karp also served there at times as investors and directors, remaining on the board of directors until 2013.

There are hardly any public statements from the software engineer. He is regarded as the quietest and most enigmatic member of the founding quintet. And he seems to know exactly how to protect his privacy online from the reach of his own products. Hardly any photos can be found on the internet.

Only the Swiss Commercial Register and the Teledata business data register provide a little information. These sources reveal that: 49-year-old Gettings has been living in Hergiswil in the canton of Nidwalden since 2021 and holds Maltese citizenship. Indeed, he appears to have a residence at the address given, as a visit to the location confirms. However, he is not listed as the owner at this address in the land register. According to Teledata, he settled in Zurich in 2020.

Furthermore, since 2022 he has been running a foundation called Chiwi, which is dedicated to academic space research. According to the website, the founder aims to advance humanity’s collective knowledge in the fields of higher mathematics, alternative energies and space research.

The foundation is based in Zug. An on-site inspection reveals that the foundation rents space in the ‘Westhive’ co-working space, where a nameplate reads ‘CHWI’ (with one ‘i’ missing). It also has a ‘virtual office’ there (a PO box and address, as well as limited access to the workspace).

But what has prompted Palantir’s co-founder to set up base in Switzerland? And are there military and geopolitical interests behind Chiwi?

Unconventional application process

A phone call to tax lawyer Trang Fernandez-Leenknecht, who is listed on the website and runs the foundation’s secretariat.

She makes it clear right from the start that ‘the founder’ does not wish to be contacted personally under any circumstances and will not disclose any further information. And without even being asked, she emphasises that everything is being handled correctly from a tax law perspective.

Regarding his motives, she says: ‘The founder loves Switzerland’s discretion and the innovation in the country. He wants to give something back.’

Republik first came across the foundation with the cute name – ‘Chiwi’ is a combination of ‘CH’ for Switzerland and ‘kiwi’ for the New Zealand bird, which also adorns the logo alongside an astronaut’s helmet – quite by chance during a conversation with a fellow passenger on the train to Geneva. She turned out to be an astrophysicist who is constantly on the lookout for new research funding. She explained that a Palantir co-founder lives in Switzerland and supports ‘space research’ from the academic world.

This goes down well with researchers in this field, as research funding is generally scarce. Moreover, a tech billionaire here isn’t simply ploughing his money into just any old private space projects – in a reference to SpaceX and Elon Musk. He is genuinely interested in supporting academic research and is thereby attracting all the best research talent. Here, any source of funding is welcomed, even outside the established institutions.

On the other hand, the background of the founder, Nathan Gettings, is also raising questions amongst researchers and professors, as two other astrophysicists explain in an interview with Republik.

The full text is available here (in german): https://www.republik.ch/2026/08/27/co-gruender-von-palantir-finanziert-weltraumforschung-in-der-schweiz

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