Satellite Leader: Planet Labs Joins OPTO Sessions

Founded in 2010 by three former NASA scientists, Planet Labs [PL] designs, launches and operates a constellation of advanced satellites. These collect geographic information system (GIS) data sets, from images of the Earth’s surface, to methane and carbon emission levels. 

“Planet’s mission from the get-go has been using space to help life on Earth,” explains President and Chief Financial Officer Ashley Johnson on the latest edition of OPTO Sessions. Rather than NASA, Johnson got her start in private equity. Later, working as COO and CFO at Palo Alto-based fintech Wealthfront introduced her to the importance of managing recurring revenue to ensure a company’s financial health. 

This experience has shaped Johnson’s approach at Planet (as the firm is usually known): “You really need to have the customer at the center of how you think about your business… our business is recurring revenue as well, since it’s selling data streams to our end customers.”

Planet’s business model is simple: it sells the GIS data it collects via its constellation to companies and governments around the world. However, it is the company’s technical capabilities and wide range of customers that differentiate Planet from its competitors. 

Stratospheric Innovation 

Satellites used to be a prohibitively expensive business. 

Being primarily the purview of governments meant that satellites which made it to launch were equipped with technology that was tried and tested. Public actors often deemed the newest imaging capabilities to be too risky or unreliable and, as a result, the capabilities many satellites provided were outdated before they even made it into orbit.

Johnson provides a relatable illustration: “If you can think back to the phone that you had 10, 15 years ago, would you want to use that phone, much less take pictures with it? And yet these are the types of delays in technology advancements that Earth observation satellites were suffering.”

As the company’s technological capabilities have improved, Planet has changed the game by sending up more, and cheaper, satellites. Whereas its SkySat model — launched in 2013 by Alphabet’s [GOOGL] and acquired by Planet in 2017 — cost roughly $10–12m per satellite, the company’s latest model, the Pelican, is designed to be roughly $4–6m per satellite.

The benefit of frequent launches — and less financial risk — means that each satellite sent up is equipped with the latest imaging capabilities available. Currently, the company has more than 200 satellites orbiting the Earth, capturing “the world’s most robust data set of the change that’s happening on the planet.”

Their fleet is complemented by satellites with high resolution imaging capabilities, and satellites with hyperspectral sensor capabilities, which, Johnson explains, “allow you to see things that you can’t see with the naked eye.” This capability has a lot of potential applications. For example, the Carbon Mapper Coalition uses Planet’s Tanager-1 satellite to track methane emissions around the globe. 

Another key way Planet is expanding the range of data it collects is by increasing revisit, or the ability to capture numerous images of an area of interest over a set span of time. Ultimately, the company aims to continuously scan the Earth’s surface, helping to identify areas of interest that potential clients might otherwise be unaware of. 

As Johnson explains it, Planet is “moving away from this idea of a single large satellite to a distributed network of satellites, but also moving away from the idea that you only look in the area where a customer knows that they want to look, and instead you’re scanning the Earth every day.”

Solving Global Problems

This approach means Planet’s data sets can benefit a wide range of actors. Given the uniquely global nature of Planet’s business, it serves both government — including defense, intelligence and civil government bodies — and commercial clients.

These are radically different markets, with different sales cycles and levels of familiarity with complex GIS data sets. 

“Commercial procurement processes generally rely on very clear understanding of ROI and how this gets incorporated into a budgeting process,” Johnson unpacks. In contrast, “on the government side, it’s really understanding the procurement processes, what type of sourcing practices they need to adhere to per government regulations, where the government is in their budgeting cycles and how far in advance you need to lay the groundwork for a procurement around this kind of data set.”

Even within the public sector, Johnson points out, the needs of clients can vary considerably. Whereas intelligence clients may have decades of experience working with satellite imagery, civil governments utilizing the data for zoning or construction purposes may require more guidance. 

The company’s technological capabilities and client-focused approach are providing it with lots of room to grow. Taking the Tanager-1’s hyperspectral sensor capabilities as an example, Johnson points to the potential to address an increasing range of issues, from insurance risk assessment to environmental conservation. 

“Tanager-1 has 400 spectral bands that are today telling us where methane leaks are. But what can that tell us tomorrow in terms of impacts to biodiversity, impacts to water quality, specialized agriculture that we can be doing that is uniquely designed for the ecosystem that you’re growing those crops in?”

Ultimately, what does success look like for Planet Labs? In short, “moving from just geospatial data analysts digging in and understanding what’s embedded in our data set, to any data scientist anywhere using this data set to solve problems that we’re not even thinking about today.”