In-Q-Tel is the Central Intelligence Agency’s openly acknowledged venture capital arm. Its function is the financing of private-sector development of technologies the agency intends to deploy — a practice that, post-September 11, came to dominate the agency’s technical-acquisition strategy. “It is far cheaper and far easier to just buy something that’s already been invented than it is to develop it from scratch. … Post-9/11, money is not an issue at all. And so DARPA is doing it, NSA’s doing it, CIA’s doing it, and then within In-Q-Tel they’re financing it in the private sector. So the sky’s the limit.”[1][2][3]
Palantir
The single most prominent In-Q-Tel investment to date is Palantir Technologies: “They gave Palantir their first — it was like a million and a half — to get off the ground. Very first investment. And now look at Palantir: just this year for the first time they have more than a billion dollars in revenue. So it’s a success story.” Kiriakou notes that within the CIA itself Palantir was initially unpopular but is now widely used for intelligence applications including targeting.[3][4]