Vanyar primed for success with Uriah Jacobs at the helm

With plenty of experience in SaaS and launching start-ups, Uriah Jacobs is on the hunt for more success with his latest venture, Vanyar, turning his attention towards Palantir Foundry and AIP. The firm is the brainchild of Jacobs and co-founder Rahul Garg. 

Both men have achieved success in the start-up space, with CEO Jacobs having served as founding managing director for APAC at Thirdera, a ServiceNow consultancy acquired by Cognizant in 2024, and Garg serving as co-founder of CloudGo, a ServiceNow partner acquired in 2023.

Together, through better interpretation and application of data, as well as proper utilisation of ontology, Jacobs and Garg are on a mission to help companies make the most of Palantir Foundry and AIP.

"There's two core components that can work, that kind of go together - one is Palantir Foundry, which you could think about as the data operating system that an organisation would have," co-founder Uriah Jacobs said.

"So it's designed to integrate data, analytics, and operational decision making.

"Think about workflows and all the components in the organisation. So it has a data component. The main thing that differentiates Palantir on this particular product compared to other products, it has a thing called ontology, which Palantir has probably made more famous, but other companies are starting to use it. Microsoft's using it in some of their data products, etc. 

"But essentially, this is the bit that separates Palantir's Foundry product from a lot of the other SaaS (software as a service) kinds of products that are out there. One is the data bit.

"The other bit is ontology, which is like a map of what that data is to your real world enterprise. So it could be mapping a pump, it could be mapping customers, supply chain components, all these different pieces. The ontology basically works by mapping that out of the base underlying data architecture.

"So that product can operate on its own. And for many years, they've got some very famous case studies, the likes of Airbus, etc. have run on that without AIP.

"Palantir then launched AIP, which is their artificial intelligence platform. And that sits on top of Foundry as essentially the thing that orchestrates and manages all the LLMs and intelligence on top of this platform. By having your ontology mapped out, your LLMs or any advanced AI things that you have on the platform have complete context across your organisation.

"So they can actually interpret data, make decisions, and then the other part of the system can go and take actions. And then it also avoids hallucinations and all those sorts of things.

"Most of these organisations are trying to do AI and they're trying to get something going, but they're extremely concerned about what happens with the security, what data can it access, how do I know what it did? Did it go off and do something that I don't know about and now I can't audit and I've created some sort of risk?

"Basically, these two things together are what solves that."

Jacobs identified a gap in the market and, having followed the ups and downs experienced by Palantir, knew there was an opportunity opening up. With two decades' experience in building enterprise companies behind him, and a healthy slice of good timing, the stars aligned for him to launch something new.

A significant aspect of Vanyar's journey came down to Jacobs' ability to identify just how important the ontology component would become, and recognising how applications and AI will work alongside ontology to deliver significant outcomes.

"I've been part of numerous start-ups in my history," Jacobs said.

"Essentially, I've followed Palantir for more than a decade. They've been really at the forefront of enterprise machine learning, AI and actual usage of it within organisations and government. And so I've been buying them from the sidelines, but the timing just never lined up.

"It just so happened that I exited from Third Era and finished up with Cognizant, so it just lined up really well where my co-founder Raul and I have been speaking about potentially doing a Palantir business for a couple of years.

"I think we just got the timing right, really, in that the ecosystem's not fully developed yet. So there's a lot of demand. There's a lot of gaps in the market. 

"One of the things we really want to solve is to develop and build more capability into this market, because if you look at Cognizant's numbers, they've just gone (straight up). So there's just not enough people in the ecosystem to work on this platform.

"We thought we would solve that problem."

Looking into the future, Jacobs believes Vanyar is poised for success, and can achieve that by targeting a market that remains largely untapped. While there has been plenty of application in defence, expansion into other segments is very much on his radar.

"The first hurdle that we've got to get over is getting to a point where we have some really fantastic stories and things that we've done for customers," Jacobs said.

"We're early, we are working on projects, and we expect to have some live soon. But the reality is it takes time to make a real difference in enterprise. But the first hurdles really are getting us to a point where we have got fantastic demonstrable work in the field, where clients are happy to stand up and talk about it.

"The macro thing, the whole idea of starting this business, this is something that every organisation needs to do. It's very targeted at large enterprise at the moment, and Palantir is well-known in government and defence, but they're not really known outside of the stock market, among (the commercial market).

"What I would like to do is to build an organisation that makes Palantir well-known amongst that other segment, and then expand that and make that a global company. That's really my long-term aspiration.