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]
By late 2025 Palantir’s market valuation had crossed $1 trillion, with the majority of its revenue coming from CIA contracts.[5]
Etymology and legality
The agency’s venture-capital arm was created in the immediate aftermath of September 11, 2001, when the CIA obtained congressional approval — made possible by a legal waiver under the Patriot Act — to invest in private companies through a venture-capital vehicle.[6][7] Kiriakou notes the name as a deliberate construction — “intel” + “Q” (a wink at Q, the quartermaster of the James Bond films) — and characterizes the existence of a for-profit CIA venture business as itself a category of conduct that would otherwise be illegal: “the CIA now is in the venture capital business for a profit. Which is illegal. … Not if you’re writing the laws.”[8][9][10] In-Q-Tel is, in Kiriakou’s description, wholly owned by the CIA.[11] He draws a parallel between In-Q-Tel and the broader shift toward U.S. military venture capital in national-security technology acquisition.
The intelligence-tech pipeline
John Kiriakou cites Will Hurd — a CIA case officer he mentored who went on to Congress and the OpenAI board — as a further example of the same intelligence-and-technology convergence that In-Q-Tel embodies.[12][13]
The waiver and the first bet on Palantir
John Kiriakou says that after 9/11 the CIA got a congressional waiver to open a venture-capital arm, In-Q-Tel, and that its very first investment went to Palantir, now a multibillion-dollar company. He marvels that this is even legal.[14][15] Kiriakou has given differing figures for that first check across interviews — 1.5 million dollars in one account and 15 million dollars, which he called “a fortune in 2002,” in another.[6]