Planet Labs PBC Q2 2027 Earnings Report

Planet Labs PBC EPS Results

• Actual EPS: $0.02
• Consensus EPS: -$0.02
• Beat/Miss: Beat by +$0.04
• One Year Ago EPS: -$0.07

Planet Labs PBC Revenue Results

• Actual Revenue: $116.05 million
• Expected Revenue: $104.53 million
• Beat/Miss: Beat by +$11.52 million
• YoY Revenue Growth: +58.20%

Planet Labs PBC Announcement Details

• Quarter: Q2 2027
• Date: 9/3/2026
• Time: After Market Closes
• Conference Call Date: Thursday, September 3, 2026
• Conference Call Time: 5:00PM ET

Planet Labs PBC (NYSE:PL) is an Earth-imaging and geospatial data company that operates a constellation of satellites designed to provide frequent imagery of the planet’s landmass. The company collects, processes and delivers satellite imagery and related data products through cloud-based platforms and application programming interfaces.

Its offerings include PlanetScope imagery for broad-area monitoring, SkySat imagery for higher-resolution observation, and specialized products that support change detection, mapping and environmental analysis. Planet also develops data products based on satellite imagery and other remote-sensing technologies, including hyperspectral capabilities, to help customers analyze land, infrastructure and natural resources.

Planet serves commercial and government customers worldwide across industries and use cases such as agriculture, forestry, mining, mapping, civil government, defense and intelligence, disaster response, climate monitoring and infrastructure management. The company was founded in 2010 by Chris Boshuizen, Will Marshall and Robbie Schingler, and became a publicly traded company in 2021. Will Marshall serves as chief executive officer.

Planet Labs PBC Q2 2027 Earnings Call Transcript

Key Takeaways

• Positive Sentiment: Record Q2 revenue reached $116 million, up approximately 58% year over year, while non-GAAP gross margin was 59% and adjusted EBITDA was $13.9 million. Growth was led by satellite services and continued momentum in data and AI-enabled solutions.
• Positive Sentiment: Planet raised the low end of its fiscal 2027 outlook, now forecasting revenue of $430 million to $441 million, non-GAAP gross margin of 55% to 57%, and adjusted EBITDA of $3 million to $10 million. Management also expects to remain adjusted free-cash-flow positive for the full year.
• Positive Sentiment: The satellite-services pipeline expanded to more than $4 billion, with over 25% classified as near-term opportunities, including a German dedicated-capacity award worth up to €25 million over five years. Planet also highlighted an $8 million NGA contract and a new European defense agreement.
• Neutral Sentiment: Planet is accelerating investment in Pelican and Owl satellites, manufacturing capacity, supply-chain resiliency, and AI solutions, increasing fiscal-year CapEx guidance to approximately $100 million to $115 million. Owl is expected to provide roughly 10 times more data at up to 10 times lower latency, potentially supporting higher pricing and additional applications.
• Negative Sentiment: Q3 revenue is expected to decline sequentially to $101 million to $105 million, partly because the Swedish satellite handover pulled point-in-time revenue into Q2. Q3 is also expected to post an adjusted EBITDA loss of $6 million to $1 million, while the $120 million raised through the ATM program during Q2 creates additional shareholder dilution.

Presentation

[Operator]

I will now hand the conference over to Cleo Palmer-Poroner, Director of Investor Relations.

[Cleo Palmer-Poroner, Director of Investor Relations at Planet Labs]

Thanks, operator, and hello, everyone. I am joined by Will Marshall and Ashley Johnson, who will provide a recap of our results and discuss our current outlook. We encourage everyone to please reference the earnings press release and earnings update presentation for today's call, which are available on our investor relations website. Before we begin, we would like to remind everyone that we will make forward-looking statements related to future events or our financial outlook. Any forward-looking statements are based on management's current outlook, plans, estimates, expectations, and projections. The inclusion of such forward-looking information should not be regarded as a representation by Planet that future plans, estimates, or expectations will be achieved. Such forward-looking statements are subject to various risks and uncertainties and assumptions as detailed in our SEC filings, which can be found at www.sec.gov.

[Cleo Palmer-Poroner, Director of Investor Relations at Planet Labs]

Our actual results or performance may differ materially from those indicated by such forward-looking statements, and we undertake no responsibility to update such forward-looking statements to reflect events or circumstances after the date on which the statement is made or to reflect the occurrence of anticipated events. During the call, we will also discuss historic and forward-looking non-GAAP financial measures. We use these non-GAAP financial measures for financial and operational decision making and as a means to evaluate period-to-period comparisons. We believe that these measures provide useful information about operating results, enhance the overall understanding of past financial performance and future prospects, and allow for greater transparency with respect to key metrics used by management in its financial and operational decision making.

[Cleo Palmer-Poroner, Director of Investor Relations at Planet Labs]

For more information on the non-GAAP financial measures, please see the reconciliation tables provided in our press release issued earlier today, which is available on our website at investors.planet.com. Further, throughout this call, we will provide a number of key performance indicators used by management and often used by competitors in our industry. These and other key performance indicators are discussed in more detail in our press release and our earnings update presentation, which are intended to accompany our prepared remarks. At this point, I would now like to turn the call over to Will Marshall, Planet's CEO, Chairperson, and Co-Founder. Over to you, Will.

[Will Marshall, CEO, Chairperson, and Co-Founder at Planet Labs]

Thanks, Cleo, and welcome everyone joining us today. Planet had another outstanding quarter, delivering a record $116 million in revenue, representing approximately 58% year-over-year growth. Non-GAAP gross margin was 59% for the quarter, better than expected, demonstrating the ongoing scalability of our business model. For the fourth sequential quarter, we achieved and in fact well exceeded Rule of 40, which is our revenue growth rate plus adjusted EBITDA margin. Our revenue growth rate was driven by strong execution across our satellite services deals, as well as continued momentum in our data and solutions business. We completed commissioning and handed over the first sovereign Earth observation satellite for the Swedish Armed Forces and successfully launched our next-generation Pelican tech demo. This week, we shipped our second Tanager and 18 SuperDove satellites for launch.

[Will Marshall, CEO, Chairperson, and Co-Founder at Planet Labs]

Both at home and abroad, Planet's data, AI-enabled solutions, and sovereign satellite capabilities are proving critical to the challenges and opportunities governments and companies across all industries face every day, from disaster response to resource management to national security. Defense and intelligence was once again an area of strength for us with over 90% revenue growth year on year. I want to highlight two recent wins in this sector for our data and solutions business, both of which landed in August and therefore are not included in our financial metrics for the quarter. We were awarded a new $8 million contract with the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, NGA, to deploy Planet's Global Monitoring Service, GMS, in support of national defense priorities, with options to expand and extend this work. Planet was the only vendor considered, as our solutions are truly unique.

[Will Marshall, CEO, Chairperson, and Co-Founder at Planet Labs]

We've created a deep archive of thousands of images for every point on Earth's land mass, enabling a peripheral vision, which with AI-powered pattern recognition on top, provides customers with the strategic indication and warning capability to proactively recognize patterns and identify emerging threats. This program grew out of a successful pilot with the Defense Innovation Unit in support of INDOPACOM, and we're incredibly proud to see GMS graduate to an operational program. We were also awarded a seven-figure one-year agreement with a European defense and intelligence customer to supply high-resolution global mosaics and support operational planning. Turning to satellite services, our team's execution against our backlog for our satellite services customers contributed to the strength in our defense and intelligence results.

[Will Marshall, CEO, Chairperson, and Co-Founder at Planet Labs]

As we discussed last quarter, in May, we launched our first satellite for the Swedish Armed Forces just four months after the satellite services contract with them was signed. The space systems team's rapid commissioning of that satellite enabled us to officially hand over to the customer, which contributed to the Q2 revenue outperformance. In August, the German government announced that we were awarded a tender for dedicated capacity satellite services. The tender award includes options and has a maximum possible value of EUR 25 million over five years. Overall, our satellite services pipeline progress has been extraordinary. In particular, we're very pleased with the maturation of this pipeline. Today, we have over $4 billion of identified opportunities for satellite services, over 25% of which is qualified as near-term pipeline.

[Will Marshall, CEO, Chairperson, and Co-Founder at Planet Labs]

Planet is extremely differentiated here due to the strength of our operational history, as we've launched more Earth-imaging satellites than any other company in the globe, and due to our speed of delivery. For our two most recent satellite services partnerships, we've delivered a first satellite in orbit within two and four months of the contract award, respectively, compared to many years for the space industry historically. We are also increasingly finding that our customers and prospects want both AI-enabled solutions and satellite services. This bundling creates synergies and is even more differentiated. Governments are articulating an urgent imperative to secure sovereign access to space, understand threats in and around their region, modernize their defense capabilities, prepare their infrastructure for natural disasters and other catastrophic events, and maintain their strategic edge.

[Will Marshall, CEO, Chairperson, and Co-Founder at Planet Labs]

More broadly, across the civil government sector, second quarter revenue grew over 5% year-over-year, and we continue to see encouraging momentum both in the U.S. and abroad. To share some recent highlights, during the quarter, Planet signed a new contract with the Rwanda Space Agency to provide national high-resolution data and analytics for government ministries, departments, and agencies, as well as public universities. The satellite imagery data will be used in policy and decision support on agriculture, urban management, spatial planning, disaster response, amongst other applications. This deal marks Planet's first national program of its kind in Africa. Also in the quarter, Planet signed a renewal with the New Mexico State Land Office. Since 2019, this long-standing partnership has evolved into a sophisticated multi-product strategy that enables that land office to monitor, protect, and manage over 9 million acres of public trust land.

[Will Marshall, CEO, Chairperson, and Co-Founder at Planet Labs]

Shifting to the commercial sector, revenue grew over 15% year-on-year, reflecting the continued focus from our teams on landing and expanding in larger opportunities and leveraging AI-enabled solutions. To highlight a few interesting use cases in the sector, last month, we signed a six-figure expanded renewal with a hyperscaler AI developer for global monitoring of data centers and semiconductor manufacturing facility construction. Planet's Pelican high-resolution data is used to track construction milestones for those facilities, which are strong indicators of supply chain health and computing capacity. Planet partnered with FarmQA to develop and commercialize AI-powered agronomic intelligence tools for enterprise agriculture.

[Will Marshall, CEO, Chairperson, and Co-Founder at Planet Labs]

The first application of the collaboration is already in the field: an AI-driven sugar beet yield estimation model currently being piloted with multiple sugar beet cooperatives during the 2026 growing season. Finally, Planet partnered with Bragger Technologies to integrate Planet's high-frequency satellite data into their spatial intelligence platform, enabling automated change detection and near real-time analytics for natural resource management and civil government applications. Stepping back, AI is enabling us to move up the market into a higher value, higher growth segment. We believe we currently have under 5% market share of today's overall Earth observation market, which excludes satellite services. With the innovations we are making across solutions, real-time insights, and next-generation monitoring, we believe we are poised to rapidly expand our market share.

[Will Marshall, CEO, Chairperson, and Co-Founder at Planet Labs]

Perhaps more importantly, we believe that AI is expanding the potential market for these capabilities by enabling users without geospatial expertise to leverage this critical data into their daily operations and expand to further applications and segments. Planet is uniquely positioned to capture this expansion as our daily scan mission is core to those expanded applications and most ready and relevant for AI utilization. Turning to technology and operational updates. In July, we successfully launched our next-generation Pelican tech demo, which included several technology advancements across payload, on-orbit compute, and satellite-to-satellite communications. This satellite forwards our path towards delivering 30-cm class resolution imagery. As a reminder, this satellite is a tech demo and is not expected to serve customers. Just this week, we shipped our second Tanager hyperspectral satellite to the launch site, along with 18 SuperDoves. They are slated for launch this fall aboard SpaceX's Transporter-18 mission.

[Will Marshall, CEO, Chairperson, and Co-Founder at Planet Labs]

We are very excited to be growing our fleet in support of our partner, Carbon Mapper, and doubling our capacity for methane and CO2 detections and enabling higher revisit rates. Overall, we are investing in launch, both to diversify our supply chain and in response to synergies with our key satellite services government partners. To that end, in July, we announced a launch partnership with Isar Aerospace. Under this agreement, Isar is scheduled to launch a Pelican next year, which we plan to build in our new German satellite manufacturing facility. With both the satellite and the Isar launch vehicle Spectrum being built in Germany, this would be a national first for the country, demonstrating the value of commercial space in rapid advancements in German sovereign space capabilities. Relatedly, I wanted to provide an update on the German manufacturing facility, which is expected to roughly double our manufacturing capacity.

[Will Marshall, CEO, Chairperson, and Co-Founder at Planet Labs]

This project is progressing at pace with the facility setup and clean room fit-out scheduled for September and plans to begin building in the facility this year. There has been considerable interest from the German and European governments in this new facility, and we believe it positions us well to serve critical needs of customers and prospects in the region. Over the summer, we also opened a new office in London as we scale our European presence and establish a hub for our customers and partner relationships in the region. Finally, our AI app has progressed to the open beta phase. This pioneering tool is focused on making Planet's massive global data archive queryable through natural language.

[Will Marshall, CEO, Chairperson, and Co-Founder at Planet Labs]

By leveraging Planet's proprietary 10-year archive of daily data and integrating LLMs, it can help lower the barriers of entry for non-technical users across all markets, allowing teams without geospatial expertise to accelerate their adoption of Planet's products. Given our momentum with our AI-powered solutions, I wanted to take a moment to discuss our upcoming next-generation monitoring satellite, Owl, and our excitement over that program. We are already seeing significant traction with GMS and MDA among our most critical partners and customers, and feedback indicates that OWL program will unlock massive value for them. They would like to see us accelerate that program, which we are beginning to do.

[Will Marshall, CEO, Chairperson, and Co-Founder at Planet Labs]

This program will upgrade the data underpinning the solutions from 3-m to 1-m class resolution, enabling the detection of smaller objects such as smaller vehicles, as well as reduce the latency to as little as an hour in key areas, enabling faster response. Owl represents, in that sense, a massive leap forward. To put it in perspective, it will deliver roughly 10 times more data and do so about 10 times faster. We expect Owl to reinforce our leadership position in broad area monitoring and analytics with greater resolution and lower latency, which puts us in the position to capture market share from the high-resolution market and power downstream solutions with higher fidelity insights. In closing then, our strong performance this quarter demonstrates clear execution across the business.

[Will Marshall, CEO, Chairperson, and Co-Founder at Planet Labs]

We delivered robust revenue growth, disciplined execution, and major strategic wins with our large government customers while growing our pipeline across all of our offerings. By expanding our international footprint, advancing our next-generation constellations, and lowering technical barriers with AI, we are positioning Planet to capture a rapidly expanding Earth observation market and building a foundation for sustained long-term growth. With that, I'll turn it over to Ashley to discuss our financials. Over to you, Ash.

[Ashley Johnson, President and CFO at Planet Labs]

Thanks, Will. It was indeed a strong quarter, supported by outstanding execution from our teams and exciting technology developments. Turning to our financial results, revenue for the second quarter came in at a record $116 million, representing approximately 58% year-over-year growth. The outperformance in the quarter was driven primarily by delivering against our satellite services contracts, specifically with respect to the handover of our first Pelican for the Swedish Armed Forces. The space systems team did a fantastic job with rapid commissioning, exceeding our expectations, generating point-in-time revenue, and contributing to the Q2 beat. We were pleased to see growth across all of our market sectors in the quarter. Our defense and intelligence revenue grew more than 90% year-on-year, which includes our satellite services revenue. The commercial sector was up more than 15% year-on-year, and civil government revenue was up over 5%.

[Ashley Johnson, President and CFO at Planet Labs]

Similarly, turning to our regional revenue breakdown, growth continues to be distributed around the globe. During the quarter, year-on-year revenue growth was approximately 3% in Latin America, over 15% in Asia Pacific, approximately 25% in North America, and over 130% in EMEA. As our satellite services revenue grows, we will likely see an increase in revenue recognized as point in time versus over time. In Q2, point-in-time revenue was 12% of revenue versus 1% in the same period last year. While we scale our satellite services business, we expect to experience variability in this metric quarter to quarter. Before I turn to ACV metrics, I want to remind you that our ACV metrics exclude satellite services, which for the purposes of our financial reporting, we define as sovereign satellite ownership, direct access services, and managed operations.

[Ashley Johnson, President and CFO at Planet Labs]

Our ACV metrics do include dedicated capacity contracts as customers are not taking ownership of the hardware and revenue for these services is recognized ratably. Recurring ACV was 98% of our end-of-period ACV book of business, reflecting our continued focus on selling subscription data contracts and solutions as opposed to one-time professional or engineering services. Approximately 94% of our end-of-period ACV book of business consists of annual or multi-year contracts. Net dollar retention rate on ACV at the end of the second quarter was 109%, and net dollar retention rate with win backs was 110%. Our non-GAAP gross margin for the second quarter was 59% compared to 61% in the second quarter of fiscal 2026, reflecting investments in support of our satellite services contracts and AI-enabled partner solutions.

[Ashley Johnson, President and CFO at Planet Labs]

Our non-GAAP gross margins came in considerably better than expected, driven by the scalability of our business model and our revenue mix in the quarter. Adjusted EBITDA profit was $13.9 million for the second quarter, better than expected, driven by higher gross margins and the revenue outperformance. Capital expenditures in Q2, which include capitalized software development, were approximately $29 million. This was just above our guidance range based on the timing of certain Pelican procurements and capitalized software development to support AI-powered solutions. As Will mentioned, given the strong demand we are seeing for our solutions and satellite services, we are investing behind our largest growth opportunities. We expect CapEx to increase in future quarters as we lean into market demand, scale up our manufacturing capacity in San Francisco and Berlin, invest in supply chain resiliency, and build out our next-generation fleets.

[Ashley Johnson, President and CFO at Planet Labs]

Year to date, we generated approximately $68 million in net cash from operating activities, while year-to-date free cash flow was $21 million. Year-to-date adjusted free cash flow was $29 million, which excludes non-recurring payments related to litigation settlements. Turning to the balance sheet, we ended the quarter with approximately $865 million of cash equivalents, and short-term investments, an increase of over 200% year-on-year driven by our positive free cash flow and proceeds from our capital transactions over the last year. During Q2, we raised approximately $120 million from stock sales under our ATM program at an average net sales price of $31.96 per share after expenses. Given our strong balance sheet and cash flow positive operations, we remain focused on executing sales under the program in a disciplined manner, balancing market dynamics with our desire to minimize dilution as we add to our cash reserves.

[Ashley Johnson, President and CFO at Planet Labs]

At the end of Q2, our remaining performance obligations, or RPOs, were approximately $753 million, up approximately 9% year-over-year, of which approximately 46% apply to the next 12 months and 68% to the next 24 months. We estimate our backlog, which includes contracts with a termination for convenience clause, to be approximately $815 million, up approximately 11% year-over-year. Approximately 50% of our backlog applies to the next 12 months and 70% to the next 24 months. This implies that by executing on contracts already in our backlog, we could recognize over $400 million in revenue over the next four quarters, not including the impact of any new business or renewals closed during that period. This provides us with excellent visibility to near-term revenue, and combined with the strength of our pipeline, gives us confidence in our ability to sustain high growth rates in future years.

[Ashley Johnson, President and CFO at Planet Labs]

Let me now turn to our guidance for the third quarter and full fiscal year 2027. In Q3, we are expecting revenue to be between $101 million and $105 million, which represents approximately 27% year-on-year growth at the midpoint, supported by strong visibility from our backlog. As a reminder, our strong Q2 revenue outperformance was due in part to the timing of the handover of our commissioned satellite in Q2 rather than Q3, shifting revenue between the two quarters without changing our full year outlook. We expect non-GAAP gross margin for the quarter to be between 56% and 58%. Q3 adjusted EBITDA loss is expected to be between -$6 million and -$1 million, reflecting our focus on investing to drive sustained growth.

[Ashley Johnson, President and CFO at Planet Labs]

We are planning for CapEx of approximately $30 million-$37 million in the quarter, encompassing our facilities expansions and procurements for our next generation fleets in response to the strong demand that Will alluded to in his remarks. For the full fiscal year 2027, we are increasing the low end of our guidance range to reflect our improved visibility as we continue to move through the year. We now forecast revenue between $430 million and $441 million, reflecting year-over-year growth of 40% to 43%. Our non-GAAP gross margin for the year is projected to be between 55% and 57%, above the high end of our prior expectations, driven by the mix of business and scale achieved from optimization of our infrastructure and in-house analytics. We anticipate margins to continue to expand in subsequent years as we scale the business and realize returns on our growth investments.

[Ashley Johnson, President and CFO at Planet Labs]

We are similarly increasing the low end of our guidance range for adjusted EBITDA to reflect the improvement in margins with a current forecast between $3 million and $10 million, reflecting our resolve to drive adjusted EBITDA profitability on an annual basis as we capture market share through advancing our technology stack and expanding our global sales and marketing organization. We also aim to deliver rule of 40 for this fiscal year, calculated as our revenue growth rate plus adjusted EBITDA margin. We are planning for approximately $100 million-$115 million in CapEx for the year, reflecting the necessary investments in our manufacturing facilities and next generation satellites to meet surging market demand. CapEx can vary quarter to quarter based on the timing of our procurements, launches, and real estate build-outs.

[Ashley Johnson, President and CFO at Planet Labs]

We are managing the business to be adjusted free cash flow positive on an annual basis for the full fiscal year 2027, while we also focus on opportunities to accelerate growth. As a reminder, while free cash flow can vary quite significantly quarter to quarter based on the timing of cash collections and capital outlays for procurements, our focus remains on generating sustainable adjusted free cash flow on an annual basis through efficient growth in revenue across data solutions and satellite services. In closing, our Q2 results underscore the robust demand for our products and services. We remain focused on capturing share in a rapidly expanding market to drive top-line growth while also delivering profitability on both an adjusted EBITDA and free cash flow basis.

[Ashley Johnson, President and CFO at Planet Labs]

We have built a solid launching point to support our ambitious plans, underpinned by a strong balance sheet with over $850 million of cash and equivalents. We are well-positioned to execute on our growth initiatives and deliver for our customers, whose work is driving real-world security, economic, and ecological value. As always, Will and I are awed by the achievements of our global Planet team over an incredibly busy and exciting quarter and summer. Thank you all for all that you do. Operator, that concludes our comments. We can now take questions.

[Operator]

Thank you. We will now begin the question-and-answer session. Please limit yourself to one question and one follow-up. If you would like to ask a question, please press star one to raise your hand. To withdraw your question, press star one again. We ask that you pick up your handset while asking a question to allow for optimum sound quality. If you are muted locally, please remember to unmute your device. Please stand by while we compile the Q&A roster. Your first question comes from the line of Edison Yu with Deutsche Bank. Your line is open. Please go ahead.

[Edison Yu, Analyst at Deutsche Bank]

Great. Thank you for taking our questions. First of all, I want to ask about AI and maybe try to tie in some of the broader dynamics that is going on. There has obviously been a lot of attention paid to the fact that the gap between frontier and open source, open weight models has compressed a lot. Does this have any sort of impact on your efforts? If so, is that actually a positive tailwind for you?

[Will Marshall, CEO, Chairperson, and Co-Founder at Planet Labs]

Had not thought very much about it in that way, but look, what we are taking is the best models across the field to apply on top of our data. It does help us, of course, the proliferation of that, more models, more availability, and what we are trying to be is model agnostic on a lot of our applications. You heard about our AI app and that progressing to the open beta phase. That particular app, we allow people to choose their own models back in. So if you have a preference for a Gemini over Anthropic or what have you can choose. It is a good point about smaller models. Obviously, I think that we are going to turn to a situation where the system will choose the model that is most appropriate for the question at some point. I am sure that is where the big companies are going to go as well.

[Will Marshall, CEO, Chairperson, and Co-Founder at Planet Labs]

But yeah, in a sense, the commoditization of those models only accentuates the extra value that we have of our data. I often say to people, AI is all about the training data. Obviously, most generally to date, LLMs have trained off the text and other information on the internet. That means they are largely blind to real-world information. If you are a farmer trying to understand your farm field or a journalist trying to investigate a flood or someone in defense and security trying to investigate a threat around the horizon, you do not want theoretical knowledge about that. You want actual information around the corner, and that is where our data, our new daily scan with all of the archive really fits in well. I think the point you are making only accentuates the value of extra data sets like ours.

[Edison Yu, Analyst at Deutsche Bank]

Understood. Yeah, totally. Separate question as a follow-up. You cited the pipeline at, I believe, $4 billion, and I think over 25% or over $1 billion, I guess, is near term. Can you provide a little bit more context on how that number has been relative to in the past and also the size of the deals maybe—

[Will Marshall, CEO, Chairperson, and Co-Founder at Planet Labs]

Yeah.

[Edison Yu, Analyst at Deutsche Bank]

—in the pipeline relative to in Germany?

[Will Marshall, CEO, Chairperson, and Co-Founder at Planet Labs]

Yeah, it is really great. Yeah, well, we are very pleased with the German deal. That pipeline that you are talking about is referring to constellation services. So yeah, we have got about $4 billion of deals identified in our pipeline there. About $1 billion of which we have designated as near-term pipeline. Yeah, so we have seen both smaller deals when civil governments come in, like this German civil, but it is really exciting that there are civil governments now taking interest in dedicated capacity options, in particular of our constellation services options. I am pleased to say we are also seeing even bigger deals at the big end of this spectrum. Some of that is contributing to the sheer scale of near-term opportunity pipeline there. So yeah, I have never seen it as big as it is now.

[Will Marshall, CEO, Chairperson, and Co-Founder at Planet Labs]

It is maturing in all the way, but especially the maturation of the big deals is really impressive right now. We are pleased on all fronts with Constellation Services.

[Edison Yu, Analyst at Deutsche Bank]

Thank you.

[Operator]

Your next question comes from the line of John Godyn with Citi. Your line is open. Please go ahead.

[John Godyn, Analyst at Citi]

Hey, guys. Thanks for taking my question. A number of companies out there are planning to launch different types of large LEO constellations, and the launch players would generally describe the market for their services as very tight. You mentioned a recent partnership in Germany as an example of just diversifying access to launch. I was hoping you could offer a bit of a temperature check on the market for launch services as you see it, and do you have any concerns about getting access at reasonable prices?

[Will Marshall, CEO, Chairperson, and Co-Founder at Planet Labs]

Yeah, there is definitely a lot of demand, especially for the rideshare missions with SpaceX right now, and that is driving some challenges for some of the players, especially the smaller players. You have to remember, of course, in the big arc, prices have been coming down. When we first started out at Planet, the launch prices were about $20,000 a kilogram. Now they are significantly less than that. They have been going up a little bit as we are dealing with that, and we have been investing to secure access. I would also say that Planet's experience here is really critical. We have launched 688 Earth-imaging satellites on 42 rockets of 10 different varieties. It is not just SpaceX. It is SpaceX 16 times, the Indian PSLV rocket seven times, the Vega rocket, the H-II rocket, the Atlas rocket, the many others.

[Will Marshall, CEO, Chairperson, and Co-Founder at Planet Labs]

We are very experienced in putting our payloads up when we need, and we are very flexible and speedy. All those providers really like working with us because of how experienced we are in doing that. We always turn up with the payloads on time, integrate them quickly, and so on. They love working with us. We have got good plans. Of course, diversification is really great where new players, and we like investing in contracts with new players because it helps encourages them to get going. They want to show they have got real opportunities to their investors to get going, and that is great. It is synergistic with our satellite services with countries. In the case of that one with Isar Aerospace in Germany, yeah, that is really great because, of course, Germany would love to see satellites built in Germany and launched on German rockets.

[Will Marshall, CEO, Chairperson, and Co-Founder at Planet Labs]

It just plays into that game. We are an even stronger industrial player for that country in that example, and there are others around the world like that. Does that answer your question?

[John Godyn, Analyst at Citi]

That is great. If I could just follow up with broadening up that question a bit to the supply chain at large, kind of same idea, lot of activity, lot of growth in expected satellite launches. Is there anything deeper in the supply chain that is showing up as kind of a problem, a concern, access to some sort of raw material or technology that is tightening up lead times? Anything like that, a temperature check would be great. Thank you.

[Will Marshall, CEO, Chairperson, and Co-Founder at Planet Labs]

Yeah. We feel relatively good about our supply chains. We do think a lot about the supply chain risk, of course, and shoring that up, and we have made some investments to stockpile things that we really think are critical components. Most of that is relatively straightforward for us. We are relatively small numbers still on most of the global scales. Ashley, anything to add to that?

[Ashley Johnson, President and CFO at Planet Labs]

No, I obviously took up guidance on the year for CapEx, and part of that is, we want to make sure that we do not run into any of those constraints, so we are looking at longer lead time items, and making sure that we are making advanced procurements so that we can move at the pace of demand.

[John Godyn, Analyst at Citi]

Excellent. Thank you.

[Will Marshall, CEO, Chairperson, and Co-Founder at Planet Labs]

No problem.

[Operator]

Your next question comes from the line of Mike Latimore with Northland Capital Markets. Your line is open. Please go ahead.

[Mike Latimore, Analyst at Northland Capital Markets]

Great. Yeah. Thanks so much. On the Queryable Earth offering, I guess you call it, AI application now.

[Mike Latimore, Analyst at Northland Capital Markets]

When might you see this get to general availability, and then how are you thinking about monetizing it?

[Will Marshall, CEO, Chairperson, and Co-Founder at Planet Labs]

Yeah, great questions. Look, we're really pleased with the interest of folks into that application. Some of the emerging use cases that we're seeing are really incredible. We're really still in a learning journey. It's a beta mode for a reason. We're learning and really trying to hone the app into what is valuable for customers. Then we'll think about the marketing and go-to-market pieces of it. So we're more focused on that value creation first. But the general way in which it's helping is it's enabling people to get going really quickly. Like, what's the quick way of getting a rough idea? Does Planet have data that could be relevant for this, and what's the quick answer? The other piece of it is just lowering the barriers of entry for non-geospatial experts, such that they can get going again without any such team in the loop.

[Will Marshall, CEO, Chairperson, and Co-Founder at Planet Labs]

That means also that it opens up to all those organizations that do not have geospatial teams at all. Now, there are all sorts of caveats with it. We are learning. It is just early days. But I think Planet is in a unique position with one of the most fantastic data sets that could be combined with LLMs to make an incredible offering that is differentiated in the marketplace entirely. Again, all those LLM companies are focused on building real-world models, and to do that, they need real-world data. We have arguably the most incredible data set of real-world data to train up that. We are focused on doing that ourselves.

[Mike Latimore, Analyst at Northland Capital Markets]

Yeah, definitely. Great. On the pipeline, when you say 25% is near term, is near term like 12 months? Also, within that near term bucket, any color on regions that are more prominent?

[Will Marshall, CEO, Chairperson, and Co-Founder at Planet Labs]

Yeah. What we mean by near term is quarters, not years. What we mean by, in terms of geography, at least three geographies of import, EMEA, APAC, and North America, are all playing significantly into our pipeline. Yeah, we are very pleased to have about $1 billion in that near-term bucket.

[Mike Latimore, Analyst at Northland Capital Markets]

All right. Thanks, and impressive rule of 40 this quarter.

[Will Marshall, CEO, Chairperson, and Co-Founder at Planet Labs]

Yeah. Rule of 70. Woo-hoo.

[Operator]

Your next question comes from the line of Trevor Walsh with Citizens. Your line is open. Please go ahead.

[Trevor Walsh, Analyst at Citizens]

Great. Thanks all for taking the questions. Will, I wanted to maybe start with you around a comment you made for that $8 million deal with NGA. I think you had said that Planet was the only provider in the mix for that deal, which is impressive, not, I think, for any customer, but certainly for a U.S. government where that's not really the standard playbook. So I'm just, maybe from a broader competitive perspective, are you seeing that type of situation more where you guys are the only kind of game in town around certain deals or RFPs? If so, what do you think might be driving that? Is that the bread and butter kind of core ability of PlanetScope or other newer type of capabilities?

[Will Marshall, CEO, Chairperson, and Co-Founder at Planet Labs]

Well, yeah, it's because of our daily scan. We have seen it before, in the case of the U.S. Navy, that was also sole source awarded on the. Actually, they competed it the first time, but then once they realized what we had, they sole sourced it on the second time. So we have seen that on occasion. Obviously, governments do really prefer to have multiple vendors if they can. So this really means they've checked all the boxes and checked that there's no other options. Yeah, exactly. Underlying that is our daily scan, which there is simply no one else does that. You can look this up. Anyone can look this up. No one has a sufficient number of Earth imaging satellites in the right kind of plane and all this to do a daily scan.

[Will Marshall, CEO, Chairperson, and Co-Founder at Planet Labs]

If you want to monitor for new threats and monitor things consistently, we are the only game in town. That does not mean there is not other market opportunities for tasking and other things. Obviously, we are playing in that game as well. But in that particular area, which especially on the security front is about finding new threats, we are kind of the only game in town.

[Trevor Walsh, Analyst at Citizens]

Got it. Helpful. Ashley, maybe for you, but Will also feel free to chime in. I think as I just looked over the last few quarters, it looked like DNI is now, I think, at a higher watermark in terms of total revenue contribution to quarter, 70% this Q. At the same time, international is overtaking by a pretty good clip the North America business. Just wondering how much of that is really just a function of Germany and JSAT flowing, and maybe even the Swedish deal now flowing through the model, and that is just sort of a natural occurrence of those two metrics reaching those higher contribution levels. Or is that really more of what the story of Planet is in the future going forward at least? Is it more of an international DNI-focused type of opportunity, really, that you guys are chasing ultimately?

[Ashley Johnson, President and CFO at Planet Labs]

You hit on it at the beginning of your question. As we are realizing backlog into revenue and delivering against our satellite services contracts, that hits primarily international as well as defense and intelligence. Will talked about the fact that we just signed our first civil government satellite services deal in August. We do think that there is a meaningful opportunity for us in the civil government arena. We also see a lot of opportunity for growth in civil government and commercial generally with the daily scan plus AI. I highlighted the fact that we are seeing a lot of interest in data center monitoring across insurance, the energy sector, and financial services. I read a report recently that by 2030, the investment management sector alone is expected to be buying somewhere in the order of $23 billion worth of alternative data sets.

[Ashley Johnson, President and CFO at Planet Labs]

We think the type of data that we are providing fits really nicely into that type of space. The net of that is there is a lot of opportunity for us to grow in commercial as well as in civil government, and AI is really unlocking that by lowering the barrier to entry, not requiring GIS experts in order to derive value from the data.

[Trevor Walsh, Analyst at Citizens]

Great. Thanks both for the questions.

[Operator]

Your next question comes from the line of Ryan Koontz with Needham & Co. Your line is open. Please go ahead.

[Ryan Koontz, Analyst at Needham & Co]

Great, thanks for the question. And great quarter. Ashley, I wanted to ask you the dynamics that we're seeing in RPO here, just to simplify it for us here. We're seeing a step down in total, but a real healthy step up in current RPO. Is this primarily driven by progress on these SAT services deals, these big, large deals you were just speaking about? Or are there other trends at play here in terms of shorter duration contracts outside of those? Thank you.

[Ashley Johnson, President and CFO at Planet Labs]

Yeah, it's a really good question. Obviously, the current RPO and current backlog is directly attributable to the fact that we are making progress against some of these larger contracts. As we continue to execute, we absolutely expect to translate that from backlog into revenue. Then just generally speaking, we've talked about the fact that we're exploring new markets. So those are going to be more short-term pilot deals and pilot opportunities. As we transition those into program of record, we would expect those to turn into longer term deals. So I think there's a bit of some and some on that. But as Will said, there's also a lot of opportunity in our pipeline. As we convert that, we'd certainly expect to continue to see backlog to grow.

[Ashley Johnson, President and CFO at Planet Labs]

It's going to be a little inconsistent quarter to quarter other than the fact that we absolutely are executing against the backlog and transitioning that into revenue.

[Ryan Koontz, Analyst at Needham & Co]

Makes perfect sense. Thanks. Maybe another question on Maritime Domain Awareness. I know you guys have had a lot of success there. Are you seeing any changes in the competitive environment? I did see an announcement of one of your partners that's working with a competitor now. If you can share about the competitive environment in maritime domain.

[Will Marshall, CEO, Chairperson, and Co-Founder at Planet Labs]

Yeah, there are a number of companies out there doing some of the analytics on top of data. But in terms of the core data set that it depends upon, again, we're the only one doing a daily scan. We image tens of millions of square kilometers of ocean territory. I mentioned the U.S. Navy partnership just in the last question, and that one alone images 13 million square kilometers of ocean territory. Just to give you a sense, that's far more area coverage than any other, at least Western, company doing Earth imaging. That alone. It's bigger than the United States area of ocean territory that they are looking at. No one else is doing that. Yeah, the underlying data set is core to that application.

[Will Marshall, CEO, Chairperson, and Co-Founder at Planet Labs]

There's a number of players playing on the top of the analytics, like combining AIS data, SAR data, RF data, other sort of AI to predict ships and things like this. But they all need our data as far as I'm concerned.

[Ryan Koontz, Analyst at Needham & Co]

Got it. Thanks so much.

[Ashley Johnson, President and CFO at Planet Labs]

Thank you.

[Operator]

Your next question comes from the line of Michael Filatov with Berenberg. Your line is open. Please go ahead.

[Michael Filatov, Analyst at Berenberg]

Hi, Will, Ashley, Cleo. Just two questions from me. The first one, there's a view out there that some customers might ideally want a single provider across multiple sensing modalities.

[Michael Filatov, Analyst at Berenberg]

So, optical, SAR, RF, thermal, you name it, rather than integrating point solutions themselves. So you've got Tanager-1 hyperspectral, but the core of the business remains optical. Can you talk about how you think about the idea of broadening the sensor portfolio? If you agree with that idea, whether that's primarily an organic development path for Planet or whether M&A could play a role with the balance sheet you've got now? Then I'll follow up with one more.

[Will Marshall, CEO, Chairperson, and Co-Founder at Planet Labs]

Yeah, look, I think electro-optic is the mainstay biggest piece of the market when you look at that. Biggest areas of applications, biggest market across all the segments. I think especially in civil government and commercial, it'll be the biggest area of expansion as well. SAR is more expensive per shot. But there are synergies, to your point, in certain applications. Some of our customers have wanted both. I'll give you one example. In NATO, that customer did want both SAR and optical. We integrated into a solution for them, and others have done the same. We're willing to work with others and partner on that front. We feel that we're in a good position. Again, daily scan is hard on SAR because you would need a lot, and then there's a lot of power considerations and much more power-hungry.

[Will Marshall, CEO, Chairperson, and Co-Founder at Planet Labs]

The base change detection system, we still think is the right thing to focus on optical first. So we think that's the core of the market. We're focused on that. We have partnerships, and other things in the other areas.

[Michael Filatov, Analyst at Berenberg]

Sure. Just a follow-up. On the image archive as an AI asset, one thing I'd like to understand a bit better is data consistency across generations.

[Michael Filatov, Analyst at Berenberg]

I assume spectral calibration varies across Dove, SkySat—

[Will Marshall, CEO, Chairperson, and Co-Founder at Planet Labs]

Yeah.

[Michael Filatov, Analyst at Berenberg]

—Pelican fleets, and then archive spans multiple hardware iterations. How much sort of normalization work is required before that data is genuinely training ready for a given commercial model or for your customers to utilize?

[Will Marshall, CEO, Chairperson, and Co-Founder at Planet Labs]

Well, we essentially make our data backwards compatible. As we enhance it, we always make it such that you can get the subset of the previous iteration with it. So Dove, for example, had eight spectral bands, but they kept the four spectral bands of SuperDoves had eight. The Dove had four, but they kept the same four. We do a lot of calibration work. All of these fleets are calibrated to Landsat, Sentinel, MODIS. These are government missions that have high calibration accuracy that we calibrate our data to. So such that people can be assured that when they get an analytic feed from us in next generation, they always can continue that. That is a huge barrier to entry because this sort of calibration is really hard, and there's a huge archive involved there.

[Will Marshall, CEO, Chairperson, and Co-Founder at Planet Labs]

I think people often underestimate the value of our archive. It's central to all of the applications. GMS, for example, relies, that work with the NGA, relies on years of data that looks back at the patterns of life over many years and then determines whether the new image tells you something's changed that is significant. It's not just that it's changed, it's changed and it's significant. That's because of the archive. The AI applications, it's all about the archive. In MDA, you don't just want to know where a ship is now. You also want to know where did it all come from. Not only is our data unique in terms of the daily scan, it's unique because we have the archive.

[Will Marshall, CEO, Chairperson, and Co-Founder at Planet Labs]

Even if someone had a daily scan suddenly today, they wouldn't have the archive to go back and find all these things for several years. We've got quite a lead there.

[Ashley Johnson, President and CFO at Planet Labs]

Yeah, I think people often underestimate that exact point that you made, which is the calibration over time so that you have a very high signal-to-noise ratio. That has been a very significant investment that Planet has made over the years, and makes the change detection analytics that we do on top of the data valuable to our customers.

[Michael Filatov, Analyst at Berenberg]

Great. Thank you, guys.

[Operator]

Your next question comes from the line of Jeff Van Rhee with Craig-Hallum Capital Group. Your line is open. Please go ahead.

[Analyst at Craig-Hallum Capital Group]

Hey, guys, this is Daniel on for Jeff. Maybe Will, if we could just start on the pipeline, the $4 billion new sovereign deal pipeline number you gave, which is huge and real impressive. Maybe if you could just give us any other context you can around that in terms of how that's been trending quarter-over-quarter, year-over-year. Any call outs on the composition of that? Any concentrations, geography, otherwise? Just any other context around that number. Very interesting.

[Will Marshall, CEO, Chairperson, and Co-Founder at Planet Labs]

Yeah. It's been growing in number of deals, in total size. I think the key thing we were trying to point out with the $1 billion part of it, the 25% of it, is maturation. I also mentioned earlier we hope getting both smaller deals and bigger deals into the pot. So bigger than we had thought and smaller than we had thought. That's quite interesting. It's spreading out a little bit, and it's transitioned officially from just defense, into civil government. There is a few other deals like the German one that are in the mix as well, although it's still mainly defense and intelligence ones, which we always wanted, right? We want our solutions to transition to civil, government, and commercial, and we want our constellation services to transition.

[Will Marshall, CEO, Chairperson, and Co-Founder at Planet Labs]

We often think of DNI as our forward-leaning partner. Yeah, we're very pleased with that momentum. To geography, again, I said there's three geos that are really driving that, and it's pretty strong in all three of those. I wouldn't say there's one outstanding place amongst them.

[Analyst at Craig-Hallum Capital Group]

Helpful. Ashley, on the model, I take it the Q3 sequential revenue decline that's guided, that's probably due to the step-off in one-times in satellite services. So that makes sense. As we look to Q4 then, what's implied for Q4, looks like there's a real strong bounce back in the revenue. Is there anything you wanted to call out there? Is that just standard course, deals are ramping over time? Or anything in particular to call out in terms of lumpy rev rec? Any other rev rec events to call out in the balance of the year?

[Ashley Johnson, President and CFO at Planet Labs]

Yeah, I think you hit on it. Q2 was really about a step-up due to the point-in-time revenue. I expect there, as we continue to sign more satellite services deals, that will both increase the variability in the short term, but over the long term, probably normalize. In terms of the back half of this year, it is delivering against our backlog and really executing and, from there it will be landing and expanding with new business. Generally speaking, we feel very good about how business is trending.

[Will Marshall, CEO, Chairperson, and Co-Founder at Planet Labs]

I also wanted to point out you saw that the gross margin went up and is sustaining up, and that is really great as well.

[Analyst at Craig-Hallum Capital Group]

Thanks, Will. Thanks, Ashley.

[Ashley Johnson, President and CFO at Planet Labs]

Thank you. Operator, any further questions?

[Will Marshall, CEO, Chairperson, and Co-Founder at Planet Labs]

We lost the operator.

[Operator]

Operator present. Our next question comes from the line of Noah Poponak with Goldman Sachs. Your line is open, please go ahead.

[Noah Poponak, Analyst at Goldman Sachs]

Hello, everyone.

[Will Marshall, CEO, Chairperson, and Co-Founder at Planet Labs]

Hey.

[Ashley Johnson, President and CFO at Planet Labs]

Hi, Noah.

[Noah Poponak, Analyst at Goldman Sachs]

How's it going?

[Ashley Johnson, President and CFO at Planet Labs]

Good.

[Noah Poponak, Analyst at Goldman Sachs]

Maybe just following up on that discussion there on the outlook for the rest of the year and the margins. Recognize you raised the EBITDA, but it implies lower margins in the back half versus the first half. Can you talk us through where in the cost structure that's happening, why that's happening, and maybe how we should think about how that progresses into next year?

[Ashley Johnson, President and CFO at Planet Labs]

Not a significant change in margins, but you're right to call out that it is a modest decline in gross margins. That's simply just mix of business. We are continuing to drive scale overall in the business. That's the strength to our one-to-many business model. But again, satellite services are going to be different margin profile depending on where we are in delivery across those deals. That'll impact the mix of business, and so you'll see some variability quarter to quarter on gross margin. We were obviously really pleased this quarter to still deliver 59% non-GAAP gross margins, even with a meaningful step-up in delivery against our backlog.

[Noah Poponak, Analyst at Goldman Sachs]

Got it. Is there a way to think, Ashley, at this point about there was a long-term profitability framework provided when the company, several years back, earlier days. Is there a way to think about the revenue base now after a lot of changes in the business and in strategy that's required to achieve that long-term profitability model?

[Ashley Johnson, President and CFO at Planet Labs]

There's not necessarily a minimum revenue, if that's effectively what you're asking. We talked through last fall when we had our Investor Day, those same long-term financial targets and how we see them evolving over time. We still see this as a business that can deliver very healthy, adjusted EBITDA profitability, so 25%+, and with that healthy free cash flow dynamics. Gross margins, we amended that a bit to say north of 60%, because it really is going to depend on that mix of business. As we're demonstrating, even as we continue to fold more satellite services business into our revenue, we're maintaining high gross margins. Generally speaking—

[Noah Poponak, Analyst at Goldman Sachs]

Yeah.

[Ashley Johnson, President and CFO at Planet Labs]

—we are on track to continue to expand, and the main thing right now is we see so much market opportunity that we are leaning into that and investing across the board.

[Noah Poponak, Analyst at Goldman Sachs]

Okay, that's great. Then just lastly for me on the CapEx increase, could you just further detail a bit what's behind that? It's a pretty large increase to be happening in the middle of the year. What is that for?

[Ashley Johnson, President and CFO at Planet Labs]

Yeah. It's effectively, see it as investments in Pelican and Owl. As Will highlighted, its strength of pipeline. We do not know ultimately how those deals will shake out in terms of dedicated capacity versus sovereign. As we are stepping up investing and having that Pelican capacity, we operate under the assumption that those will be Planet satellites that could deliver dedicated capacity. Ultimately, if those turn into sovereign deals, those will flow differently through the P&L. The long and the short of it is there is a lot of demand out there, and we want to make sure that we can continue to be the one that can deliver the fastest. We are looking at long lead time items and making sure that we are in a good place on having the right inventory. Similarly, there is a lot of interest in Owl. We announced this last year.

[Ashley Johnson, President and CFO at Planet Labs]

We have been talking to our customers and understanding from them how 1 m class imagery could really enhance that daily scan relative to 3 m class imagery. Frankly, the question coming back to us is, how quickly can you have this available? We are leaning into that and doing some advanced procurements to make sure that as we get those tech demos live, we can be also in parallel scaling up for having the full fleet. That is really the nature of the CapEx increases, is just looking at that demand and deciding to pull forward some of those procurements.

[Noah Poponak, Analyst at Goldman Sachs]

Super helpful. Thank you so much.

[Ashley Johnson, President and CFO at Planet Labs]

Thank you.

[Operator]

In the interest of time, please limit yourself to one question as we continue our Q&A. Your next question comes from the line of Kristine Liwag with Morgan Stanley. Your line is open. Please go ahead.

[Kyle Benvenuto, Analyst at Morgan Stanley]

Hi, this is Kyle Benvenuto on for Kristine. Congrats on the quarter, and thank you for taking my question. One on the balance sheet for you. You raised $120 million through the ATM during the quarter, and you ended with roughly $865 million of cash and short-term investments while generating positive free cash flow. What changed in either the opportunity set or your investment requirements that made it attractive to increase the raise of equity here? Should we think of the capital as primarily supporting Owl and additional manufacturing capacity, such as the CapEx increase you just discussed, or for other strategic opportunities, or simply just adding balance sheet flexibility? Thank you.

[Ashley Johnson, President and CFO at Planet Labs]

Yeah, absolutely. I would really anchor it on the latter. It's that strategic balance sheet flexibility. Our target is on an annual basis to be free cash flow positive. So that means we're generating enough operating cash flow to support the CapEx investments in scaling up our next generation fleets. We are very diligent about how we are adding that capital to the balance sheet, making sure that we're sensitive to dilution, as we know our shareholders are. But at the same time, we want to be in a position to make strategic moves that can accelerate our market capture and make sure that we can deliver for the broadest customer base possible.

[Operator]

Your next question comes from the line of Greg Pendy with Clear Street. Your line is open. Please go ahead.

[Greg Pendy, Analyst at Clear Street]

Yeah, thanks a lot. You talked about the Owl upgrade cycle, and I think, Will, you mentioned that it's 10 times more data. I assume that you going from three to one and then the 2D area scaling—

[Will Marshall, CEO, Chairperson, and Co-Founder at Planet Labs]

Correct.

[Greg Pendy, Analyst at Clear Street]

—is how you're getting the 10 times increase. Just how should we then translate that as analysts? Does this mean that it's going to drive from a financial impact, more usage, or is there a pricing increase opportunity?

[Will Marshall, CEO, Chairperson, and Co-Founder at Planet Labs]

Yeah, definitely a price increase opportunity. This is considerably more information, so it opens up more applications. Again, think of things like vehicles, where a meter you can start telling more about the type or even ID vehicles. I'll give you a specific example in Maritime Domain Awareness. We can typically ID the vessel if it's over 30 m in size. At that point, we can actually say, "It's this vessel with this IMO number," which is really helpful. Smaller vessels we can see, but we can't ID them. If it's 1 m, you would expect that roughly to divide in three so that you can see a 10-m vessel. That's really important because there's a lot of fishing vessels and other things that are in that sort of 10 to 30-m class. So it's things like that.

[Will Marshall, CEO, Chairperson, and Co-Founder at Planet Labs]

It opens up more opportunities, different kinds of applications, in that case, from military ships to maybe commercial ships and fishing vessels and things like that. So it opens up other applications. So definitely, and we already have customers interested in that, and for sure they're expecting the prices to go up.

[Ashley Johnson, President and CFO at Planet Labs]

The other thing that Owl delivers, which Will highlighted, is that it is 10 times faster. We are incorporating into the satellite things like AI capabilities, being able to do that onboard detection and analysis, as well as satellite-to-satellite communication, which can enable the data to get back to our customers faster. It is on multiple vectors that this is much more valuable data to our customers. Yes, we would certainly expect that to be commensurate in terms of the price we can charge.

[Greg Pendy, Analyst at Clear Street]

Very exciting. Thanks a lot.

[Ashley Johnson, President and CFO at Planet Labs]

Thank you.

[Operator]

Your next question comes from the line of Gabriel Flouret with Cantor Fitzgerald. Your line is open. Please go ahead.

[Gabriel Flouret, Analyst at Cantor Fitzgerald]

Good afternoon. Thank you for the question. This is Gaby Flouret on for Colin. How does the team's balance of domestic opportunities range across The Pentagon's FY 2026 budget, FY 2027 CR, and FY 2027 request? To what extent can we see Planet programs pull left as program officers drive balance in commercial offerings?

[Will Marshall, CEO, Chairperson, and Co-Founder at Planet Labs]

Well, great question. This administration is really leaning into commercial solutions, and one of the interesting pieces also, especially ones where the company has already gone and invested and is building the system already, so the government gets to just benefit from that, and then they're really leaning in. We see it across the board. There's substantial programs that we have our eye on this coming year in their government FY 2027. That hasn't yet passed through United States Congress, so we'll be tracking all of that and how it results after reconciliation. Just know that there are meaningful expansion of commercial type operational budgets across the board. NGA, NRO for intelligence community, the department itself, so it's getting a lot of budgets for new space capabilities. They're recognizing that space is a critical thing. That's because they're learning that.

[Will Marshall, CEO, Chairperson, and Co-Founder at Planet Labs]

They're seeing what's happening in Ukraine, they're seeing what's happening in the Middle East, and they're learning that satellites are key to information advantage, which is really critical in these places. So yeah, a lot of interest across multiple years. I haven't got more specifics to give you on that or specific programs. A lot of that's very tight. But I assure you there's a lot of interest.

[Gabriel Flouret, Analyst at Cantor Fitzgerald]

Thank you.

[Operator]

Your next question comes from the line of Chris Quilty with Quilty Space. Your line is open. Please go ahead.

[Chris Quilty, Analyst at Quilty Space]

Thanks, everybody. I had a follow-up on the Gen 2. You have had the first satellite on orbit for a couple of months. It does not look like it has been lowered yet, but when will you have a good idea of the performance characteristics of that satellite, which I believe this is the first one targeting the 30 cm class. Does that satellite have an optical cross link for testing purposes, or will that come on the next set of satellites?

[Will Marshall, CEO, Chairperson, and Co-Founder at Planet Labs]

Yeah, great questions. Generally that mission has been doing really well. I would say we have got the results from it, and that is what has enabled us to pave the path, most importantly, towards the 30 cm class imagery. Yes. So yes, it roughly succeeded in all the major goals we set out for it. It was always set up as a tech demo mission, so it is all about the learnings, as opposed to intending to be an operational satellite. But all the things we set it out there for have been doing very well. It does have inter-satellite links. Not optical, though, it is RF inter-satellite links, and so lower bandwidth, but very flexible, and so it can enable last minute tasking as well as summary data to go back and even full images, but not that many of them. So it really gets us going in that field.

[Will Marshall, CEO, Chairperson, and Co-Founder at Planet Labs]

We are making more advances there, including on the optical side in later missions that are coming down the pipe. Yeah, it very much did all the things that we were hoping, and very proud of the team.

[Chris Quilty, Analyst at Quilty Space]

Got you. Just a specific on the optical, that has been the bane of every program out there, including SpaceX in the early days. I do not think you have announced a partner there. Is that an internal development effort? How confident are you in that system working as designed?

[Will Marshall, CEO, Chairperson, and Co-Founder at Planet Labs]

Very confident at this point. That is an internal project, and deliberately so. Several years of effort to bring that in-house because we wanted independent supply chain, and that is one of the key successes that we have made so that it is really very solid. We will be adding optical cross links later as well on those missions. Having that main telescope system in-house has been a really important advancement, and it is a success, I would say.

[Operator]

That is all the time we have for questions today. I will now turn the call back over to Will Marshall, CEO and Co-Founder, for closing remarks.

[Will Marshall, CEO, Chairperson, and Co-Founder at Planet Labs]

I will just say in closing that we feel it was a great quarter. Meaningful beat on the top line and on margins. This was all made possible because of a series of new deals. I want to call out a couple. The first operational program for GMS with NGA, our first satellite services deal for a federal civil government agency with Germany, our first countrywide contract with a civil government in Africa, with Rwanda, and we shared our first win with an AI hyperscaler for data center monitoring, which is also really cool. Each of these speak to the value that Planet is bringing to customers around the globe. I could not be more pleased also for how our satellite services business is maturing, as we have discussed here, with over $4 billion of opportunities identified and over $1 billion as qualified as near-term pipeline.

[Will Marshall, CEO, Chairperson, and Co-Founder at Planet Labs]

Stepping back, I believe today we hold a small growing share of an enormous market. Furthermore, Planet's daily scan, along with our AI, is opening entirely new applications and segments on top of that market. Planet's uniquely positioned to go after these opportunities. On the satellite services side, our ability to deliver in months, not years, is a huge differentiation. On the GMS side and MDA, it is all powered by a daily scan that no one else has, as we have also discussed on this call. Thanks as always to the incredible hard work of the Planet team around the globe that enables this, and thanks everyone for joining us today.

[Operator]

This concludes today's call. Thank you for attending. You may now disconnect.

Participants

Executives

• Ashley Johnson, President and CFO

Analysts

• Cleo Palmer-Poroner, Director of Investor Relations at Planet Labs
• Will Marshall, CEO, Chairperson, and Co-Founder at Planet Labs
• Edison Yu, Analyst at Deutsche Bank
• John Godyn, Analyst at Citi
• Mike Latimore, Analyst at Northland Capital Markets
• Trevor Walsh, Analyst at Citizens
• Ryan Koontz, Analyst at Needham & Co
• Michael Filatov, Analyst at Berenberg
• Analyst at Craig-Hallum Capital Group
• Noah Poponak, Analyst at Goldman Sachs
• Kyle Benvenuto, Analyst at Morgan Stanley
• Greg Pendy, Analyst at Clear Street
• Gabriel Flouret, Analyst at Cantor Fitzgerald
• Chris Quilty, Analyst at Quilty Space