Palantir buys Poptip, a startup that helps brands make sense of tweets

A social media startup and a big data company that works with government agencies might seem like an odd couple, but hey, Palantir went and bought Poptip.

Terms of the deal weren’t disclosed. Poptip will join Palantir on Friday, according to a blog post today from Poptip founder and chief executive Kelsey Falter.

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Not long ago, Poptip graduated from Techstars NYC, with plans to help companies improve their communication with consumers on Twitter. “With Poptip, feedback has finally come of age,” Falter said at the time.

Poptip has grown since then. It has rolled out tools for running surveys that take input from Facebook and Twitter posts as well as a dashboards and alerts for the terms people mention in tweets. Now it works with nearly 60 brands, including Budweiser, L’Oreal, and Spotify.

A tool for creating polls might seem simple, but actually, the acquisition could give Palantir some extra help in the domain of natural-language processing, which can bolster all sorts of applications.

That area has stood out to investors recently, with funding for startups like AlchemyAPI, Clarabridge, Idibon, Narrative Science, and Synapsify.

And indeed the blog post from Falter suggests that Poptip will expand its scope once well-funded Palantir has subsumed it:

At Palantir, we will continue to build innovative products for data analysis in the commercial sector that will be transformational for industries. Over the past two years Poptip has developed deep relationships with respected brands and has gained invaluable insight into their needs. We’re thrilled to be able to continue building products to help these companies as part of the growing Palantir team here in New York.

Poptip started in 2012 and was based in New York. Investors include Lerer Ventures, RSE Ventures, SoftBank Capital, and David Tisch.