Innodata Inc. (NASDAQ:INOD) shares surged almost 13% on Thursday after the company announced that it has been selected to provide high-quality training data and data engineering services to Palantir Technologies Inc (NYSE:PLTR) to support its AI-enabled platforms for rodeo event analysis.
Innodata will provide specialized annotation, multimodal data engineering, and generative-AI workflow support for thousands of hours of rodeo video footage. This work allows Palantir’s AI models to track animals, riders, and movements, automating performance metrics for events like bull riding, bronc riding, bareback riding, and barrel racing while integrating directly into Palantir’s secure development workflows.
Wedbush analysts see the deal representing “another major validation point for INOD reflecting the accelerating demand for high-quality data engineering capabilities with AI becoming critical to value creation across the enterprise level.”
They noted that Innodata is “standing out from a quality perspective with customer’s data science/engineering teams, which is key in becoming a premier player in this rapidly growing and evolving industry.”
The Palantir deal follows Innodata’s recent award of a prime contract position within the US SHIELD program, highlighting the company’s growing use cases across multiple industries and its plan to further diversify revenue away from primarily Hyperscalers in 2026.
Wedbush noted that shifts in the AI data market, such as Meta’s investment in Scale AI prompting other Hyperscaler customers, including Google, OpenAI, and xAI, to pivot away from Scale, have strengthened Innodata’s market positioning and expanded its opportunities to win new business.
The analysts expect Innodata to see transformational revenue growth in fiscal year 2026, with most of its eight Big Tech customers expanding, several new Big Tech clients being added, and potential for three of these customers to generate combined nine-figure revenue as the company enters the US Federal, Enterprise AI, and Global Sovereign AI markets.
The analysts maintained their ‘Outperform’ rating and $90 price target on Innodata, well above current levels of about $63.
“Overall, we continue to believe INOD is well-positioned to further capitalizing on significant demand for its AI solutions and increased opportunities to win transformational new business for the company as it expands beyond Big Tech with many sectors/new markets looking to optimize their data through generative AI leading to the massive rise of the data annotation industry,” the analysts concluded.