"We are a very different company to Palantir,” says “discreet” French replacement

France's domestic intelligence agency, the DGSI, is walking away from Palantir, the American data analytics firm it first hired back in 2016 after the Bataclan attacks. The replacement is ChapsVision, a company most people outside French tech circles have never heard of. That's rather the point, according to managing director Silvano Sansoni, who bristles at the "European Palantir" label journalists keep slapping on his firm. Different values, different philosophy, he insists — though for marketing purposes he admits the comparison sells itself.

The numbers tell you why this is a gamble. ChapsVision pulls in roughly €200m a year. Palantir does €3.9bn. One is a discreet operation built through founder Olivier Dellenbach's 29 acquisitions, the other a Silicon Valley giant with deep US government ties. Prime minister Sébastien Lecornu framed the switch as a matter of national sovereignty, saying France can't keep leaning on tools built by foreign powers. That's a political statement dressed up as a procurement decision, and it lands at a moment when European governments are increasingly twitchy about their dependence on American tech.

Migrating the DGSI off Palantir's systems won't be quick or simple. Sansoni himself calls the current setup complex and reckons the switch could take 12 to 18 months. The contract is reportedly worth around €10m, and while the DGSI is the headline client, Sansoni says the real scope stretches across French government administration and agencies more broadly. He's framing this as the moment ChapsVision stops being a background player — the deal has already sparked conversations with governments in Poland, Germany, Denmark, Switzerland and Luxembourg, and German intelligence apparently picked ChapsVision over American competitors, though no contract has been confirmed there yet.

What ChapsVision is actually selling isn't raw AI horsepower — Sansoni is upfront that it isn't a model provider — but control. Agentic applications like translation, strong security tooling, and a promise that customers won't get locked into a foreign vendor's black box. Roughly 1,100 people work at the Paris-suburb headquarters, split across a customer base that's about 65% French, 20% American, with the remainder scattered across Europe, Japan and Singapore. Government contracts make up under half of revenue; the rest comes from corporate clients including Pfizer, Boeing and Exxon Mobil.

Sansoni's ambitions go well past this one contract. He's targeting an IPO by 2030, with revenue climbing to €1bn — an €800m gap he wants filled mostly through more acquisitions rather than organic growth. The company has raised about €275m so far, backers include Jolt Capital and Bpifrance, and more funding rounds are apparently coming to bankroll further deals. The pitch, as Sansoni puts it, is becoming a European champion with global reach. Whether a company built by stitching together 29 acquisitions can actually integrate them — Sansoni's own target is 2027 — before scaling to compete with the likes of Palantir is the question nobody's answered yet.