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Palantir cofounder and CEO Alex Karp A messy legal battle is brewing in the market for AI that reviews health insurance claims. Palantir Technologies has sued Y Combinator-backed startup Guardian AI and its founders—former employees of its healthcare division—for what it called “brazen” trade secret theft in the U.S.
District Court for the Southern District of New York. Palantir, the $198 billion (market cap) tech behemoth, alleged in the suit that founders Mayank Jain and Pranav Pillai, who had worked at Palantir from 2022 to 2024, stole trade secrets to launch Guardian AI, which uses AI to help healthcare providers fight insurance claim denials, through YC’s summer 2024 class. “Pillai and Jain took Palantir’s work and applied to a startup incubator to commercialize these projects for their own financial gain—and did so while still employed and working on these projects at Palantir,” according to the suit.
Trade publication Law 360 previously covered the suit, which was filed in early March. “This is quite new and we’re working on resolving it with Palantir at the moment,” Jain said by email when reached at his work account. (When reached at a personal account listed as his on email lookup service ContactOut, Jain wrote, “Please go and publish your article.
FUCK U AND PALANTIER,” [sic] and then responded again to say, “you have the wrong contact info in your records or are reaching out to a wrong guy.”) Health insurers increasingly use AI to assess claims, with UnitedHealthcare’s insurance denials sparking a national conversation after its CEO was fatally shot last year. More recently, companies like Claimable, which launched last October, and tools like FightHealthInsurance.
com, have sprung up to use AI to push back against denials. While Denver-based Palantir is best known for its defense work, it has a substantial healthcare division. In an interview with Forbes in February before the suit was filed, Jeremy David, Palantir’s co-head of healthcare, said that healthcare represented about 15% of the company’s commercial business.
“Our focus is to find the most important workflows that are broken,” he said then. “There is no mistaking Defendants’ work for anything but a rip-off of Palantir.” That division has created AI- and data-driven software to help healthcare providers get paid for the services they provide.
It uses AI to manage insurance denials, reducing both write-offs for unpaid bills and administrative work, according to the suit. Former employees Pillai and Jain allegedly secured $500,000 from YC, then flew to San Francisco to incorporate their new startup just days after leaving Palantir, the company said in the suit. Palantir further claimed that within weeks of their resignation, the two boasted that they had deployed Guardian’s AI solution and saved customers more than $150,000.
“There is no mistaking Defendants’ work for anything but a rip-off of Palantir,” according to the suit. Palantir is seeking treble damages and attorney’s fees for the alleged theft, and said in the suit that it also intends to commence arbitration against Jain and Pillai to claw back compensation. Palantir reported $2.
9 billion revenue in 2024, a 29% increase over the previous year, and said when it reported yearend results that it expected revenue of more than $3.7 billion for 2025. Cofounder and CEO Alex Karp is worth $8.
2 billion by Forbes estimates. The company’s healthcare division grew 267% between 2020 and the first half of 2022, according to the suit. In August 2024, Palantir Chief Technology Officer Shyam Sankar said in a post on X that Palantir’s software managed 21% of hospital beds in the U.
S. and called it “one of our fastest growing areas.” Neither Palantir nor its attorney at Skadden Arps responded to emails seeking comment about the suit.
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