Palantir acquires web scraping start-up Kimono Labs

Palantir Technologies the firm that began life data mining for the US intelligence services has acquired web scraping start-up Kimono Labs. Palantir plans to expand its data collection capacity using Kimono Labs tool that extracts data from unstructured web content. Last year Palantir raised around $680m in funds, which placed a $20bn valuation on the firm, in order to expand into financial services. The US SEC is understood to use Palantir technology to search for clues of potential insider trading and other market abuses. 

Kimono Labs, which claims its Internet data-collection tool is used by 125,000 developers, is so excited to be acquired by Palantir Technologies that it's shuttering its service.

The CIA-backed Big-Brother-Meets-Big-Data cult company seems to have snagged Kimono Labs as an acqui-hire, since the target's announcement says its staffers' “new roles at Palantir” mean “it will not be possible to continue providing the publicly available cloud hosted Kimono product”.

In other words: we like your engineering, guys, but we're not buying the product.

The service, which scraped Websites and pulled the results into structured data (instead of the text files you get using, for example, wget ), will be shuttered on 29 February.

“From that point forward users will no longer be able to log into kimonolabs.com services or access any data via the website or API endpoints”, the announcement states.

That's also the date that any data you've got in the Kimono Labs cloud will fade from view, so it's a good idea to get busy making local copies.

As a sop to punters, Palantir is offering a desktop version of the product as a download. “The software, available for Mac OSX and Windows, will integrate with a new version of the chrome extension and perform all data collection locally on your machine.”

The desktop version will transfer users' APIs, API rules, configuration information, and the URL lists users scrape, but not the data. The API import will be available until March 31.

Users discussing the shut-down at Hacker News aren't pleased. One commenter writes “they're giving all but ~2 weeks notice to said 125K developers, data scientists, and businesses to migrate off the platform? That is an abysmally small amount of time and if I was a paying customer, I'd be furious.” ®