Dutch big data firm bought by secretive U.S. intelligence firm

Dutch big-data startup Silk is being taken over by American company Palantir Technologies. How much is involved in the deal is unclear, Z24 reports. Silk's services will continue to exist, but the product will not be developed further. The 13 people working for Silk in Amsterdam will be taken over by Palantir. The Dutch startup was founded in 2009. It is one of many small businesses engaged in big data, striving to use new techniques to get new information from large amounts of data. With Silk you can structure information and make it searchable - similar to who Wikipedia pages can be linked to each other, according to Z24. What exactly Palantir does is unclear. The American company is valued at $20 billion. It makes software that analyzes large amounts of data such as phone numbers or bank details and then identifies relationships. The company's biggest clients are U.S. intelligence services CIA, NSA and FBI. Palantir was used in the search for Osama bin Laden and to catch stock market crook Bernard Madoff. It is not clear how exactly Palantir went about it. For Silk this was an unmissable opportunity, CEO Salar al Khafaji wrote on the company's site. "Wen we met the team at Palantir, we realized that we could work on more important data issues with a talented team."