Peter Thiel’s Palantir acquires data visualization startup Silk

Palantir Technologies, the secretive data company cofounded by Peter Thiel, has acquired a data visualization and publishing startup called Silk, the startup announced today.

Following the deal, the team behind Silk will join Palantir and leave the existing Silk product behind, the announcement said. The Silk service will apparently live on “as is,” without plans for future development.

“When we met the Palantir team,” the Silk team writes, “we realized that we could work on even bigger and more important data problems with an incredibly talented team – even if it meant no longer working on the Silk product. We decided to join Palantir because we believe we can achieve a larger impact there than we could at Silk alone.”

For now the deal looks like a talent acquisition more than anything else; there are currently no signs that Palantir plans to use Silk’s tech internally. We’ve reached out to Palantir and Silk for comment on the deal.

Visualizations available on Silk range from journalistic research — like data on crash reports involving Google’s autonomous cars — to light-hearted projects such as this map of “The Weirdest Festivals Around the World.”

The startup, based in Amsterdam and San Francisco, was backed by New Enterprise Associates and Atomico Ventures.