Helix Foundry Brings Palantir-Style Ontology to Open Source

Hunting for a way to model your whole business as one connected graph? Palantir Foundry has been the expensive answer for years. Helix Foundry is an open-source take on it, and it just shipped.

It pulls customers, transactions, users, and other business entities into a single graph you can query and explore, and it is local-first, so your data stays where you put it.

What Happened

Helix Foundry is an open-source version of Palantir Foundry. It lets you build your own company ontology by connecting data from databases, APIs, files, and services like Stripe, so those entities stop living in separate systems and start living in one graph.

Under the hood it uses HelixDB to store the ontology, S3-compatible storage for data snapshots, and DuckDB to transform and analyze the underlying data. You can also ask questions about your data with AI, and the answers come back backed by executed SQL rather than guesswork.

The project is local-first and fully open source.

Why It Matters

Ontology work like this used to mean an enterprise contract and someone else holding your data. Here you run the stack yourself, point it at the systems you already have, and query the result as one graph.

If you have wanted Foundry-style modeling without the price tag or the lock-in, this is the thing to go read.