Palantir acquired a Dutch startup that creates data visualisations

Big data company Palantir has acquired Silk, the Dutch startup that created data visualisations and websites.

Silk announced that it had been acquired by Palantir in an email to users sent on Wednesday.

A blog post published on its official site says that the company "realized that we could work on even bigger and more important data problems with an incredibly talented team - even if it meant no longer working on the Silk product."

The company was founded in Amsterdam by CEO Salar Al-Khafaji in 2011, and eventually expanded to include a sales team in San Francisco.

Customers could use Silk to create basic free data visualisations or more advanced paid ways of presenting data. That's certainly going to be useful to Palantir, which is paid by corporate clients and the US military to sort data and make it more useful.

Here's what a Silk data visualisation looked like:

Here's Silk's full blog post announcing its acquisition:

We're happy to announce today that the Silk team is joining Palantir.

Silk started with the goal of helping people get the most out of their data. Over the last few years, we've worked relentlessly on a vision to help people structure, query, visualize and share data.

We're proud of the product and community we built, and of all the data journalists,activists, NGOs, businesses and many other kinds of people that were able to find important insights and tell great data stories through Silk.

When we met the Palantir team, we realized that we could work on even bigger and more important data problems with an incredibly talented team - even if it meant no longer working on the Silk product. We decided to join Palantir because we believe we can achieve a larger impact there than we could at Silk alone.

What will happen to Silk.co?

Silk.co as a platform will continue to operate. Nothing will change to current Silks, and you can still create a new Silk for free. However, because of our new roles at Palantir, Silk.co will operate "as is" and we will not be able to provide technical or customer support to new or existing Silk accounts any longer, nor will we be doing any further development work or adding new features to the hosted Silk.co product.

Your data, including the data in your Silks, email addresses, passwords, and any other information will remain confidential and as always, not be shared.

We have immensely enjoyed working on Silk and helping all our users, and are looking forward to the next chapter ahead with our friends and future colleagues at Palantir.

Best,

The Silk Team