Planet Labs

Planet Labs (Planet Labs PBC, branded "Planet") is a publicly traded American Earth observation company based in San Francisco that designs, builds, and operates the largest commercial fleet of Earth imaging satellites, with the goal of photographing the entire Earth's landmass every day. Its stock trades on the New York Stock Exchange under ticker PL.^[1][2][3].

Founded in 2010 by three former NASA scientists, the company sells daily monitoring imagery (PlanetScope), sub-meter tasking imagery (SkySat and its successor Pelican), hyperspectral data (Tanager), and derived analytics to customers in agriculture, defense and intelligence, civil government, finance, insurance, mapping, forestry, and sustainability.^[1][2]

What It Does

Planet operates a vertically integrated model: it manufactures its own small satellites in bulk, launches them as rideshare payloads or from the International Space Station, and sells subscription access to the resulting imagery archive and analytics through its Planet Insights Platform. The company describes its value proposition as multidimensional Earth insight: looking broader with daily monitoring, closer with high-resolution tasking, and deeper with derived data products.^[1]

Data and Methodology

The core PlanetScope constellation is made up of Dove and SuperDove 3U CubeSats weighing about four kilograms each, orbiting around 400 kilometers and delivering roughly three-to-five meter resolution imagery daily. The SkySat constellation of twenty-one satellites provides sub-meter imagery, video, and rapid revisit tasking; in 2020 Planet lowered the fleet's orbit to improve orthorectified resolution from eighty to fifty centimeters per pixel.^[2]

Newer systems extend these capabilities: the Pelican constellation offers fifty-centimeter resolution with revisits of up to ten times per day globally and thirty times per day at mid-latitudes, using NVIDIA Jetson-based edge computing to process data before downlink, while the Tanager hyperspectral satellites, developed with the Carbon Mapper Coalition, detect and quantify methane and carbon dioxide point-source emissions.^[1][2]

Products

Current offerings on the official site include Planet Monitoring (high-frequency global coverage), Planet Tasking (rapid-revisit high-resolution imagery), Planet SuperRes (generative-AI-enhanced imagery), Planet Analytic Feeds (imagery transformed into insights such as roads, buildings, and vessels), Planetary Variables (quantified measures like soil water content and forest carbon), Planet Mosaics (formerly Basemaps), Planet Hyperspectral, and the cloud-based Planet Insights Platform that unifies data and tooling.^[1]

Some imagery is available under an open data access policy, and the company provides disaster data freely during major crises.^[1][2]

Buyers and Use Cases

At the time it went public, Planet reported more than six hundred customers, about ninety percent of them on annual subscriptions, generating roughly 113 million dollars of revenue in fiscal 2020 and 191.3 million dollars in fiscal year 2022.^[2]

US government customers have included NASA, NOAA, the Foreign Agricultural Service, national laboratories, and defense-related programs; a subsidiary contract in 2024 incorporated SkySat and PlanetScope data into SeaVision, a maritime domain awareness system. Civil and humanitarian uses include deforestation monitoring through Norway's NICFI-funded tropical forest basemaps covering sixty-four countries and data provision to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization. Financial-sector buyers use the data for commodity and supply-chain monitoring alongside providers such as Orbital Insight and Kayrros.^[1][2]

Recent sovereign deals underscore the defense shift: a 230 million dollar agreement with SKY Perfect JSAT for ten dedicated Pelican satellites signed in January 2025, and a 240 million euro German government-funded contract for dedicated satellite capacity announced in July 2025.^[2]

History

Planet was founded on December 29, 2010 as Cosmogia by former NASA scientists Chris Boshuizen, Will Marshall, and Robbie Schingler, who built inexpensive CubeSats in bulk rather than large one-off satellites. Demonstration satellites Dove 1 and Dove 2 launched in April 2013, followed by the twenty-eight-satellite Flock-1 constellation deployed from the ISS in early 2014. The company raised 183 million dollars in venture funding by May 2015 and acquired BlackBridge and its five-satellite RapidEye constellation in July 2015.^[2]

In April 2017 Google sold Terra Bella and the SkySat constellation to Planet, taking an equity stake and a multi-year imagery purchase agreement. Planet went public via a SPAC merger with DMY Technology Group IV announced in July 2021 at a valuation of 2.8 billion dollars and completed that December, adopting the name Planet Labs PBC as a public benefit corporation.^[2]

Subsequent milestones include completing the SkySat fleet at twenty-one satellites in August 2020, launching Tanager-1 in August 2024, Pelican-2 in January 2025, and Pelican-3 and -4 in August 2025, and announcing a Berlin manufacturing facility in September 2025 intended to double Pelican production capacity. The company conducted workforce reductions of roughly ten percent in 2023 and seventeen percent in June 2024.^[2]

Compliance

As an operator of imaging satellites licensed by the United States, Planet is subject to government-imposed restrictions on imagery distribution. In March 2026, at the request of the US government, the company imposed delays and then a complete ban on releasing new imagery of the Middle East region during the Iran War, a material consideration for alternative data consumers relying on timely coverage.^[2]

Landscape

Planet competes with other vertically integrated Earth observation operators such as Satellogic and ICEYE (radar), and differs from analytics-only geospatial firms that resell third-party imagery. Its daily-cadence PlanetScope archive is widely used as a base data layer across the geospatial alternative data ecosystem.^[1][2]