Wait, Partiful’s Founders Worked at Palantir?

For those too young for Facebook Events, too unhinged for Paperless Post, and too self-serious for email or text, there’s Partiful: the app that blows up your phone with reminders about the imminent arrival of your co-worker’s friend’s spring picnic. Only TWO WEEKS! Twenty-four hours! Two hours!

The event-invite app was launched in 2020 and allows party hosts to blast invitations to their network, keep track of who’s coming, and send updates to their guest list with a few quick taps. Anyone you’ve been on an invite list with — your “mutual” — can invite you to their next event, whether you know them or not.

“We want to make it easier to get to know friends-of-friends,” Partiful’s website says. The app has been called the “least cringe option to get people to your party” by the New York Times. That’s debatable: As GQ’s Matthew Roberson wrote in an essay called “Stop Sending Me Partiful Invitations,” its aesthetic reads as a “full-body cringe. It feels like a way of corporatizing the concept of hanging out.” Picture a vaporwave interface, motivational emoji, and chatty TikTok lingo — plus the option to “boop” your friends.

You might be familiar with Partiful’s basic app functions. Lesser known, though, is the Partiful founders’ connection to a controversial data-mining firm foundational to the Trump administration’s sweeping surveillance efforts. As a 2017 report from the Intercept details, Palantir Technologies helped the National Security Agency develop XKeyscore, its “widest-reaching tool” that tracks nearly everything a user does on the internet, according to the agency itself. Currently, it supplies tech infrastructure for ICE’s mass-deportation programs and the Israeli military’s bombing campaigns in Gaza. The company is at the front lines of the effort to optimize AI for war.

In late April, a blog post titled “We Don’t Use Partiful” started circulating in my group chats. The post, written by curator and activist Jessica Hallock and published on her influential local-music site, NYC Noise, points out that at least six of Partiful’s staff members are Palantir alums, including the app’s CEO and CTO, Shreya Murthy and Joy Tao. (Partiful, according to Murthy, is a 25-person company.) Palantir was co-founded by right-wing billionaire Peter Thiel, one of President Donald Trump’s most prominent supporters, and helps clients draw conclusions from vast quantities of data, including how likely an individual is to commit a crime. One of its first investors was the CIA.

In an email, Hallock told the Cut that she had first encountered Partiful invites in New York’s DIY music scene. When event organizers submitted Partiful links for her to share on NYC Noise, she had difficulty explaining her hesitation: “I was at the bar trying to show some avant-garde dancer an Intercept piece while sounding paranoid AF.” In her post, she also draws attention to the venture-capital firm Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), which reportedly led Partiful’s initial-seed-funding round and has backed many successful start-ups. (Murthy declined to confirm Andreessen Horowitz as an investor, though she directed me to Partiful’s Instagram account, where an a16z partner is listed under “our investors” in the “about us” Stories highlight.) Its founder and general partner, Marc Andreessen, is a Trump surrogate who’s a self-described “unpaid intern” at Elon Musk’s DOGE.

“If Partiful wants to go from working for The Worst People to being welcomed by lefty communities, I think it’s fair to ask that they tell us something about what they stand for,” Hallock said.

Murthy, Partiful’s CEO, told me she didn’t know much about Palantir when a recruiter reached out to her in 2014, a year after she graduated from Princeton with a degree in politics. “The mission I was pitched was building software to solve hard problems, and that sounded interesting,” she said. She was considering two offers at the time: “I didn’t want to go work at JPMorgan Chase, so I took a chance.”

Murthy and Tao both worked at Palantir from 2014 to 2018. Murthy was an enterprise lead, deployment lead, and business-operations-and-strategy-team lead. Tao was a product engineer credited on several Palantir patents. Murthy said that she and Tao exclusively worked on private-sector projects.

“I didn’t agree with a lot of the government work, and I consistently chose not to work on that side of the business while I was there,” Murthy said. I asked her about which government work in particular she didn’t agree with. She paused. “Um, the statement I’ll make on this generally is I don’t agree with Palantir providing data-analysis technology to organizations that violate human rights,” she told me.

When she started working there, she said, Palantir was “not well known at all.” I pointed out that by 2014, it had already been the subject of public controversy. A 2013 Forbes profile notes that, after whistleblower Edward Snowden exposed the NSA for spying on U.S. citizens, Palantir’s reputation as federal agencies’ go-to data support “threaten[ed] to contaminate its first public impressions and render the firm toxic.”

Murthy pushed back. “The level of interrogation of both my political views and decisions I made 11 years ago seems like a level of scrutiny that isn’t really being applied to any other company, from what I can see of your coverage,” she replied. I explained I don’t typically cover tech companies. “You covered Simon & Schuster recently, didn’t you?”

Some former Palantir employees have publicly condemned the firm as the Trump administration seeks to dramatically expand state surveillance: “I simply cannot live in a world where my grandchildren have to be processed through a database, where their everyday activities, including social-media posts, as citizens are tracked, collected, and used for an authoritarian government’s policing database,” Juan Sebastián Pinto, who worked in marketing at Palantir, told NPR’s “All Things Considered” on Thursday in a segment.

Murthy, though, is reluctant to speak about it. “Frankly, this is just not something that I see a ton of our users having concerns about,” she said. Online, she has indicated that she has benefited from having Palantir on her résumé, tweeting in 2022, “me talking to VCs: ‘I used to work at Palantir,’ me talking to candidates: ‘I used to work at a large tech company.’” But she has also distanced herself from the company. Responding to a since-deleted tweet in October 2024, Murthy denied that Partiful had received funding from Palantir and stated that she “left [Palantir] for good reasons.”

Still, two and a half weeks later, she participated in a “fireside chat” with several high-profile Palantir alumni, or the “Palantir mafia,” per the event’s organizers. The invitation was sent out via Partiful. I asked why she agreed to speak on the panel if she disagreed with Palantir’s approach to human rights. “I was actually critical of Palantir in that fireside chat,” she said, though she was reluctant to share her specific criticisms on the record. “I had the opportunity to engage in person, which is where I think really thoughtful and meaningful conversations happen. I did that in my personal capacity, but that’s very different than being super-public about it.”

As big tech cozies up to the Trump administration, privacy rights have become a growing source of public concern. Partiful collects personal information like your birthday, contacts — if you allow permission — IP address, and location, like many similar apps. In order to see an event’s address, you must submit your phone number. The app’s interface lists your “mutuals” and shared events; mine included people I could not recall having ever heard of or met.

Partiful, which is free to use, does not currently generate revenue. It sustains itself with venture-capital funding, Murthy confirmed. But at some point, Partiful will have to make money; the question of how it will do so has been the subject of speculation and self-referential jokes by the brand’s X account. Partiful’s privacy notice reassures users that it does not sell their information. Murthy reiterated this in our conversation, which occurred on April 28: “We do not sell data to third parties, full stop,” she said. (Yesterday, Partiful officially announced it will be integrating Fizz, a new Instacart drinks-and-snacks app, into its invites.)

Still, Partiful’s terms and services contain several ambiguities regarding its use of data, though Murthy repeatedly insisted in our conversation that it’s “boilerplate language.” Partiful alerts users that it may disclose personal information to government entities and private companies “as we believe in good faith to be necessary or appropriate” for a list of outlined purposes. It also reserves the right to disclose or transfer information “in connection with, or during negotiations of, any merger, sale of company assets, financing, or acquisition of all or a portion of our business” — in other words, to hand over your data to another company, regardless of whether a sale ultimately happens or not. In regard to the latter, I pointed out that this seemed to give Partiful broad leeway. “That’s not realistically something we’re planning on doing,” Murthy said. “The only thing that’s, like, raising the kinds of doubts you’re talking about is a set of actions [working at Palantir] that we took nearly a decade ago … Asking that level of a question is just at odds with both of our stated intentions.”

Before my conversation with Murthy, I spoke with John Davisson, senior counsel and director of litigation at the data-privacy watchdog Electronic Privacy Information Center, for help parsing Partiful’s privacy policy. He agreed certain parts seemed vague. He flagged a clause that states Partiful may use “anonymous, aggregated, or de-identified data and disclose it to third parties for our lawful business purposes,” saying, “It’s a provision so broad you can drive a bus through it. Not only are we talking about providing information directly to government agencies but also potentially selling it to [data] brokers or companies, who then sell it to brokers, and those might become accessible to law-enforcement and intelligence agencies using that same commercial market.”

I brought this up to Murthy, who said, “In practice, this is not at all how we’re running our company. Using personal information in the ways that you’re applying is something we do not agree with at all.” Whether you take her word for it is up to you — like a party, you can decide whether you like the vibe enough to stick around.