Planet Labs CEO Will Marshall explains how the company’s AI-powered analysis and government contracts have fueled a massive rally.
Transcript:
Caroline Woods: Joining me now, Will Marshall, CEO of Planet. Will, thanks so much for joining me at the desk.
Will Marshall: Great to be here. Thanks.
Caroline Woods: So let’s talk a bit about Planet to kick things off, ticker symbol PL. It’s the largest Earth imaging fleet. You basically take pictures of Earth from space, and then those pictures help you do what?
Will Marshall: Well, first of all, most importantly, we take pictures of the entire Earth landmass once a day. That’s the unique thing that Planet does. We have a line scanner that scans the entire Earth landmass. It’s orders of magnitude more than any other player. With all that extra imagery, what do we do? We help real world problems around the world, from farmers to improving agricultural yields to security monitoring for the Navy in the South China Sea and everything in between.
Caroline Woods: Yeah, I saw natural disaster surveillance. You mentioned environmental monitoring, maritime surveillance. So — and then I understand you have new satellites called Owls, powered by NVIDIA chips that promise high-res images that are then analyzed within an hour. So tell me, or give me an example of a real world decision that can be made faster because of that.
Will Marshall: Absolutely. These Owl fleets — we call them Owls because they’ve got big eyes and they’re wise because they have all this compute on them, more compute on the edge. So they have bigger eyes so they can see more detailed things on the ground — 1 meter resolution rather than 3 meter resolution. So 10 times higher resolution on the ground. And then in addition, we’re getting the imagery back and analyzed within an hour. That’s using NVIDIA chips. What’s that useful for, you ask? Well, one use case would be disaster response. So you imagine after a fire — a fire like the one in L.A. — quickly, the responders want to know what is damaged, which building do they need to go to help evacuate people from, bring relief in some other way. And then the insurance companies want to be able to analyze what risks do they have in their properties and do assessments of that to help claims and adjustments. But time matters. And resolution matters to do that detailed assessment. So that’s the use case this can power.
Caroline Woods: When it comes to defense and intelligence operations, you know, we’ve certainly seen a rise in geopolitical tensions and defense spending. So how do you balance between domestic business and international?
Will Marshall: Well, we’re obviously a naturally global capability. We image the whole world. So we provide to users all around the world. Just here today at our investor day, I was talking to one of our customers, the former Minister of Defense, Oleksii Reznikov from Ukraine, because we’ve been helping them since the beginning of the war to help them assess threats outside their borders and help them monitor to try and get ahead of that. So it’s critical for finding new threats around the world. We do a lot of stuff in sustainability — tracking deforestation across the entire Brazilian Amazon every day. If you’re tracking for new roads, or as I said, the Navy is tracking ships in the South China Sea. We’re useful across sustainability, security, and our mission is broadly to help bring that transparency and information that helps bring accountability, whether that’s in sustainability or security around the whole planet every day.
Caroline Woods: How much of your business is commercial versus government contract?
Will Marshall: It’s about a third commercial and a third — just about 20% of commercial, about 30% civil government, and about 40% and 50% now defense and intelligence.
Caroline Woods: And how do you set yourself apart from some of your competitors?
Will Marshall: Well, we don’t really have any competitors doing the daily scan, which is the most essential thing. What’s useful about that is that it opens up all these use cases like agriculture. All the other players are tasked systems, so they take a picture. If you say, “Hey, I want a picture here,” they’ll take a picture here. But we’ve already collected the whole Earth, so we have about two orders of magnitude more coverage. We cover the whole Earth every day, whereas they only cover a spot or two. That opens up these new applications — agriculture, forestry, disaster response, maritime domain awareness, and so on. And I think the perhaps biggest implication of that is actually in AI also, because we image the whole Earth every day, and we’ve done that for eight years now.
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