Polish Firm DataWalk Replaces Palantir at US Justice Department

The US Department of Justice has selected the Polish analytics platform DataWalk to serve its money laundering and asset recovery section, replacing the previous Palantir solution. It's one of the clearest signs yet that a European company can beat an American giant on its own turf, in a sensitive area tied to the country's financial security no less.

A digital corkboard for investigators

DataWalk grew out of technology built by co-founder and CTO Krystian Piećko, originally developed as an archive management system called PiLab. Over time the project evolved into an enterprise-grade analytics platform, now often compared to a digital version of the corkboard detectives use to connect clues.

The system links scattered data from multiple sources and runs graph queries across billions of interconnected objects, surfacing hidden patterns and suspicious relationships. In practice, that means tracing networks of financial links, transactions and entities at a scale analysts could never handle manually.

Taking on Palantir on its home turf

Palantir has long been seen as the dominant supplier of such tools to US government institutions and security forces, including the military, with contracts running into the billions of dollars. Losing this particular application within the Justice Department to a far smaller Polish company is therefore an event that goes beyond just winning a tender.

DataWalk emphasizes a different approach to client data. Unlike Palantir's model, the company gives clients full control over their data and infrastructure, without requiring the vendor's engineers to have access to the systems, and with full transparency into analytical operations.

We are a Polish, sovereign data analytics platform that has earned the trust of US federal institutions - Paweł Wieczyński, CEO of DataWalk

Clients from banks to law enforcement

The DataWalk platform is already used by financial institutions such as Ally Bank, Barclays, Rabobank and Morgan Stanley, where it supports fraud and money laundering detection. The Ally Bank case study shows the scale of the potential benefits: using the system, the bank identified more than $20 million in potential fraud losses and saw business value within just 19 weeks of deployment.

The company also says it holds itself to ethical limits, refusing to sell its software to sanctioned countries or to regimes with questionable human rights records. That positioning is meant to set DataWalk apart from competitors sometimes associated with less transparent use of citizens' data.

Financial results and share price

Despite rising revenue, the company still reports losses. In the first quarter of 2026, DataWalk posted revenue of 4.03 million zlotys, with an adjusted EBITDA loss of 11.76 million zlotys. Management attributes this to the seasonality of public-sector contracts, most of which close in the second half of the year, and maintains its target of roughly 70 percent CAGR revenue growth for both 2026 and the longer term.

A key part of the strategy was shifting the licensing model to a subscription basis, which helped push gross margin up to nearly 80 percent. The company's shares trade on the Warsaw Stock Exchange under the ticker DAT.

What it means for Poland's tech scene

For Poland's tech sector, the contract with the US Department of Justice carries symbolic weight beyond the company itself. It shows that a homegrown firm can compete for government contracts against American giants in an area where trust in the vendor matters just as much as the system's technical capabilities.

Amid Europe's push for digital sovereignty and reduced dependence on American data platforms, DataWalk's success can be read as evidence that European alternatives to tools like Palantir are already technologically mature and deployed in practice, not just on the drawing board.

Sources: Gazeta Prawna (gazetaprawna.pl), DataWalk (datawalk.com), StockWatch (stockwatch.pl)