Is Nova AIOS a Palantir Foundry clone?

No. Nova AIOS uses the same architectural shape that Foundry pioneered, the ontology plus agent runtime pattern, but the implementation is independent. We borrow the idea, not the code, and we make different tradeoffs at every layer. Foundry optimizes for Fortune 100 and Department of Defense scale. Nova optimizes for Philippine and Southeast Asian mid-market budgets, data residency, and language.

How much does Palantir Foundry actually cost in the Philippines?

Public reporting from Palantir's investor materials and customer disclosures puts Foundry's median annual contract at around 500,000 USD, with enterprise tiers reaching several million. As of mid-2026 Palantir has no published PHP price list and routes Philippine inquiries through their Singapore or US offices. The effective floor for a Foundry deployment serving a Philippine enterprise is roughly 28 million PHP per year, before professional services.

How much does Nova AIOS cost?

Nova AIOS deployments in the Philippines range from 150,000 PHP for a focused single-product build to 1.2 million PHP for a multi-product enterprise rollout, plus a monthly operations retainer typically between 50,000 and 200,000 PHP. A three-year total cost of ownership for a multi-product deployment lands between 6 and 8 million PHP.

When should I choose Palantir Foundry over Nova AIOS?

Choose Foundry when your deployment needs FedRAMP High or DoD IL5 certification, when your data sovereignty footprint spans more than ten countries with mismatched regulators, when your procurement team requires a publicly listed vendor, or when your scale is above ten thousand internal users. None of those apply to most Philippine or Southeast Asian mid-market enterprises.

When should I choose Nova AIOS over Palantir Foundry?

Choose Nova when your budget caps below 200,000 USD per year, when you need RA 10173, RA 11765, or BSP Circular 1133 baked into the permission model rather than bolted on, when your AI agents need to handle Tagalog or Cebuano natively, when you want a deployment in production within twelve weeks instead of twelve months, or when you want to talk to the founder instead of a sales engineer.

Can Nova AIOS handle the same workloads as Foundry?

For the workload shapes most Philippine and SEA enterprises actually run, yes. Document extraction, agent-driven customer workflows, regulated collections, AI-assisted underwriting, citizen service operations, and multi-product enterprise dashboards all fit comfortably within Nova's runtime. Foundry handles two workload shapes Nova does not target: classified government work above SECRET, and ten-thousand-seat global rollouts. We are honest about that boundary.

What is the three-year total cost difference?

Foundry's three-year TCO for a typical Philippine enterprise deployment is around 1.6 million USD or 90 million PHP, including the platform contract and the professional services to onboard. Nova AIOS's three-year TCO for an equivalent multi-product rollout is roughly 6 to 8 million PHP all-in. The difference is approximately twelve to fifteen times, depending on retainer size and scope.

What about Palantir AIP, the newer LLM-focused product?

AIP sits on top of Foundry and adds an LLM orchestration layer over the existing ontology. Pricing rolls into the Foundry contract. AIP is a strong product. The same comparison applies, the constraint is access and price, not capability. Nova AIOS includes an analogous AIP-style assistant layer at no additional cost above the base retainer.

Nova AIOS vs Palantir Foundry: a founder's side-by-side

An honest comparison written by someone who has stood up both. Where Foundry wins. Where Nova AIOS wins. The actual peso-versus-dollar math. And the three deployments where you should pay for one and never the other.

I have spent the last two years building Nova AIOS, an AI operating system shipped to Philippine and Southeast Asian enterprises. Before that I sat through a dozen vendor evaluations where Palantir Foundry was on the shortlist. I have stood up early Foundry pilots inside one US financial services firm and watched two Philippine procurement teams walk away from Foundry quotes in 2024 and 2025 because the math did not work.

This is not a takedown of Foundry. Foundry is the best AI operating system in the world for a specific shape of customer. The reason Nova AIOS exists is that almost no enterprise in the Philippines or Southeast Asia is that shape, and a $500,000 USD floor price will not become a $50,000 USD floor price no matter how much we wish.

The honest version of the comparison is structural. Foundry and Nova share an architectural pattern, the ontology-plus-agents shape I wrote about last week, but they optimize for opposite ends of a market. This post lays out the differences in a way that a Philippine CTO, a CFO, or a procurement head can actually use to make a decision.

The short answer in one paragraph

Palantir Foundry is the right call if your enterprise has more than ten thousand internal users, operates across at least five regulators in different countries, requires FedRAMP High or DoD IL5 certification, or has a procurement department that will not sign with a vendor whose stock does not trade publicly. If any one of those four applies, stop reading and go talk to Palantir. Nova AIOS is the right call if your enterprise is mid-market by Philippine or SEA standards, runs on a budget below $200,000 USD per year, needs RA 10173 and BSP regulations baked into the permission layer rather than bolted on after, and would benefit from agents that speak Tagalog or Cebuano natively. The rest of this post is the longer version of that paragraph.

The head-to-head

This is the table I wish someone had handed me in 2023.

Dimension	Palantir Foundry	Nova AIOS
Year first shipped	2014, after a decade of Gotham	2024, after two years of NovaGovAI prototyping
Median annual contract	~$500,000 USD (~₱28M PHP)	~₱400,000 PHP (~$7,000 USD) for build, plus retainer
Time to first production agent	12 to 18 months	8 to 12 weeks
Minimum viable team	20+ across customer and vendor	4 to 7, mostly customer-side with vendor pairing
Native language support	English plus enterprise-licensed translators	English, Tagalog, Cebuano natively tuned; SEA expansion in progress
Compliance posture	FedRAMP High, DoD IL5, SOC 2 Type II, HIPAA	RA 10173, RA 11765, BSP Circular 1133, NPC-registered, ISO 27001 path
Data residency options	Global, US-controlled-cloud or on-prem	Philippines, Singapore, hybrid on-prem; ASEAN-aware by default
Pre-built connectors	~300, SAP, Oracle, ServiceNow, Salesforce	~40 focused on PH and SEA stack, BPI/BDO/UnionBank APIs, BIR, PhilSys, LGU data
Ontology editor	Mature, time-tested, deep	Functional, simpler, opinionated for SEA workflows
LLM orchestration layer	Palantir AIP (separate or bundled SKU)	Nova Assistant, included in base build
Procurement profile	NYSE-listed, audited, RFP-friendly	Private Florida LLC, founder-led, PH SEC-registered in process
Customer support model	Dedicated forward-deployed engineers, global	Founder accessible, small team, Manila timezone primary

Read that table twice. Almost every row reads as "Foundry has more" or "Foundry has bigger." That is correct. The interesting question is which of those mores you actually need. Most Philippine enterprises do not need any of them, and pay an order-of-magnitude premium when they pretend otherwise.

Where Foundry genuinely wins

There are real Foundry-only deployments. I am not going to pretend otherwise. Four shapes.

One. Multi-country regulated rollouts. If your firm operates in fifteen countries, each with its own data sovereignty rules, Foundry has been doing that work since Brexit and the GDPR rollout. Nova has not. We can be ASEAN-aware. We are not ready to be everywhere-aware. If your AI OS needs to satisfy BaFin, FCA, MAS, and BSP simultaneously, choose Foundry.

Two. Defense and classified-adjacent work. Foundry has security certifications a Filipino startup will never get and probably should not try to get. If your customer is the US Navy, an allied defense ministry, or a critical infrastructure operator with national-security implications, choose Foundry. Nova is not built for that and we will tell you so on the call.

Three. Ten-thousand-seat internal rollouts. Foundry can scale an ontology and a permission model across an organization the size of a Fortune 100 with deep internal IT. Nova is built for the mid-market shape, typically below 2,000 internal users, with a small customer-side team. If your deployment crosses 5,000 active users, Foundry's back-office scaling is worth the price.

Four. Procurement departments that require a publicly listed vendor. Some banks, conglomerates, and government bodies have an absolute rule that mission-critical software must come from a vendor with audited public financials. That rule is real. Palantir trades on the NYSE. Nova is an LFGTTM LLC out of Florida. If the rule applies, we are not the right answer no matter how good the product is, and we will say that without trying to argue.

Honest acknowledgment

If you fit any of the four shapes above, this post is making the wrong recommendation. The right move is to keep Foundry on the shortlist and treat Nova as a vendor for the smaller, more local layer of your AI stack.

Where Nova AIOS wins for Philippine and SEA deployments

Five places. None of these are theoretical, all of them come from actual customer evaluations where the prospect went with Nova after pricing Foundry.

One. Regulation baked into the permission model, not bolted on. Foundry treats Philippine regulation as a configuration problem. You buy the platform, you hire a consultancy, you spend three to six months mapping RA 10173 and RA 11765 and BSP Circular 1133 onto a permission model originally designed for the GDPR and CCPA. Nova ships with these regulations as opinionated defaults. If your collections agent tries to call a borrower more than three times in a calendar week, Nova refuses. If your KYC agent tries to retain a document past the legally required period, Nova flags it. These rules are in the codebase, not in a 60-page policy PDF your engineers have to remember.

Two. Tagalog and Cebuano models that actually understand the country. Foundry can call OpenAI or Anthropic from inside a Foundry agent. Both providers handle Tagalog at roughly the same level you would expect from a model trained on internet data, which is to say, they can read Manila-flavored Filipino but struggle with Cebuano, Hiligaynon, and the code-switched Taglish that real customer service conversations use. Nova fine-tunes its LLM layer on Philippine call-center transcripts, BSP examiner reports, and barangay-level government documents. The difference is visible the first time you feed a real customer escalation into both systems.

Three. Twelve weeks instead of twelve months. A Foundry deployment with a US systems integrator runs twelve to eighteen months from kickoff to first production agent. A Nova deployment runs eight to twelve weeks. Some of that delta is scope: Foundry deployments typically include more legacy system integration work. Some of it is architectural: Foundry is built to scale, Nova is built to ship. For a Philippine MFI or a Cebu BPO that needs to put an agent in front of customers this quarter, the speed gap is not a luxury.

Four. Founder-accessible support. A Foundry customer at the median contract size talks to a forward-deployed engineer, an account executive, and a customer success manager. A Nova customer talks to me. On Viber. Within four hours during Manila business hours, within eight outside. This is not a sustainable model when Nova has a hundred customers, but for the first thirty it is the difference between "our AI vendor knows our business" and "our AI vendor is reviewing our ticket."

Five. Pricing that survives a Philippine CFO conversation. A Philippine bank's CFO will not approve a ₱28 million per year platform contract for a tool that the same bank could replicate, badly, by hiring three engineers for ₱9 million per year. The Foundry math does not pencil out at the median PH enterprise size. Nova's math does. We will get into the exact numbers next.

The actual peso-versus-dollar math

This is the section the procurement teams care about. Three-year total cost of ownership for an equivalent multi-product deployment serving a Philippine enterprise of roughly 1,500 employees, with three AI-driven workflows (customer onboarding, collections triage, internal operations dashboard).

Palantir Foundry, three-year TCO

Year 1 platform contract: ~$500,000 USD = ₱28M PHP
Year 1 implementation services (US or Singapore SI): ~$400,000 USD = ₱22M PHP
Year 2 platform contract (small uplift): ~$525,000 USD = ₱29M PHP
Year 2 services (steady-state): ~$150,000 USD = ₱8M PHP
Year 3 platform contract: ~$550,000 USD = ₱31M PHP
Year 3 services: ~$120,000 USD = ₱7M PHP
Three-year total: ~$2.25M USD = ~₱125M PHP

Nova AIOS, three-year TCO for the same scope

Year 1 build (multi-product): ₱1.2M PHP
Year 1 retainer (₱150K/mo × 12): ₱1.8M PHP
Year 2 retainer (₱150K/mo × 12): ₱1.8M PHP
Year 2 expansion build (one new workflow): ₱400K PHP
Year 3 retainer (₱175K/mo × 12, growth uplift): ₱2.1M PHP
Year 3 small enhancements: ₱300K PHP
Three-year total: ~₱7.6M PHP

The gap is approximately 16x. That ratio holds across the deployments I have priced for actual Philippine enterprises. The mistake some procurement teams make is assuming the ratio is explained by quality, that Foundry must be sixteen times better. The ratio is almost entirely a function of engineering-economics arbitrage, like the rest of the honest cost of custom AI in the Philippines. A senior Filipino AI engineer at Nova costs roughly $30,000 USD per year fully loaded. A senior Foundry forward-deployed engineer based in Singapore costs roughly $180,000 USD per year fully loaded. The price ratio in the deployment reflects the price ratio in the labor underneath it.

You are paying for the same architectural pattern. You are paying very different prices for the humans who build and maintain it.

Three deployments to pay for one and never the other

Concrete examples, anonymized but real.

Deployment A: a 12,000-person multinational bank with operations in PH, SG, HK, and AU

This bank pays for Foundry. The right call. They need cross-jurisdictional data residency, they have a procurement department that will not sign with a private LLC, and their compliance team requires SOC 2 Type II with annual third-party audit reports. They also have a $4M USD annual AI budget, so the Foundry quote does not blow up the financial plan. Nova is on their shortlist as a satellite vendor for Philippine-specific add-ons. Foundry is the core platform.

Deployment B: a Cebu-based microfinance institution with 240 staff and 41,000 borrowers

This MFI pays for Nova. The right call. They have an annual operating budget for technology of ₱18M PHP. A Foundry contract would eat their entire tech budget for the next two years and leave them unable to pay their software engineering team. They need RA 11765 and BSP 1133 compliance, which Foundry would require them to configure manually. Their AI use cases are bounded: collections triage, KYC, customer service. Nova ships a deployment in ten weeks for ₱950K plus a ₱120K monthly retainer. The same workload on Foundry would cost roughly thirteen times more for capabilities the MFI does not need.

Deployment C: a Philippine national government agency with critical infrastructure responsibilities

This one is messy. The agency wants the security profile of Foundry, the price profile of Nova, and the procurement profile of a local vendor. The honest recommendation we give is split: pay Palantir for the classified or critical-infrastructure-adjacent slice, where Foundry's certification stack is non-negotiable, and pay Nova for the citizen-facing layer, where Tagalog-native models, RA 10173 defaults, and twelve-week deployment time matter more than the FedRAMP badge. This is the only shape of deployment where the answer is genuinely both, and even there the dollar split is roughly 80 percent Foundry and 20 percent Nova.

What this means for your evaluation

If you are running a head-to-head right now, three things will help you decide faster.

Get both prices in PHP. Foundry sales teams quote in USD. Have your CFO convert and present the three-year TCO in pesos to the procurement committee. The conversation changes when the number is ₱125M instead of $2.25M.

Bring a real workflow to both vendors. Pick one actual business process, ideally one that touches a regulated activity, and ask both vendors to scope a deployment for it. Foundry will produce a sophisticated proposal. Nova will produce a shorter, faster, cheaper one. The right vendor for you will reveal itself in how each scope reads against your own constraints.

Ask both vendors which workloads they would refuse. A good AI OS vendor has a list of workloads they will not take on. If a vendor says they can do anything, that is the wrong vendor. Foundry will tell you they do not take on small-scale single-workflow deployments under a half-million dollars. Nova will tell you we do not take on multi-jurisdictional or classified work. The presence of refusal is the signal of seriousness.

Closing

Foundry is the best AI operating system in the world for the customer it was built for. Nova AIOS is the best AI operating system in the Philippines and Southeast Asia for the customer Foundry was not built for. These are not contradictory statements. They describe a market that has split, the same way the database market split into Oracle for the Fortune 500 and Postgres for everyone else, the same way the cloud market split into AWS for the multinational and DigitalOcean for the regional shop.

If you are a Philippine or SEA enterprise CTO, CFO, or procurement head reading this to make a real decision, the highest-leverage move you can make is to spend thirty minutes with both vendors on the same week with the same workflow in hand. The right answer will be obvious by the end of the second call.

If you would like the Nova half of that comparison, that is on the house.

Want a Nova AIOS quote against your real workload?

30-minute call. Bring one workflow, ideally regulated. We will scope a Nova AIOS deployment against it on the call, including the peso math. You decide whether to put us next to a Foundry quote.

Book a 30-min strategy call

Last updated: 16 May 2026. Foundry pricing is sourced from Palantir's public investor materials and from procurement quotes shared by Philippine enterprises during 2024 and 2025 vendor evaluations. Where exact figures are not publicly disclosed, the ranges reflect the midpoint of those quotes. If you have more accurate numbers and want them reflected here, drop us a note.