Planet Labs CEO Will Marshall on imaging all of Earth daily, defending the Amazon, and a fresh capital raise

Speaker 2: And without further ado, let's bring in Will Marshall. Oh, new graphic?

Speaker 1: New graphic? What's thing?

Speaker 2: How you doing, Will? How are Good to see you.

Speaker 7: Great to see you too, guys.

Speaker 1: How's it It's

Speaker 2: been too long. I I feel like we barely got to talk when we met a couple weeks ago. But it's great to have you on the show. I'm a huge fan of the company and but I want to go so much deeper. But since this is your first time on the show, why don't you kick us off with a little bit of backstory on yourself and the company and then we can get up to speed with where Planet is going in the future.

Speaker 7: Yeah. Sure. Well, for those of you that are new to Planet, basically, we help make change visible, accessible, and actionable. Help people make smarter decisions around the planet by having a fleet of over 200 satellites, the largest satellite fleet doing earth imaging. They take pictures as they're going across the earth's surface. Yeah. We end up imaging the entire earth landmass every day at about three meter resolution. It's a huge amount of data, but we track everything across the planet. So we liken it to Google that indexed the internet to make it searchable. We're indexing the earth to make it searchable. With a combination of these satellites and AI on top, we're enabling people to make smarter decisions about what's going on on planet Earth.

Speaker 2: Walk me through the actual rollout of those 200 satellites. Obviously, you had partners on the launch side, but do you make your own cameras, your own lenses, satellite buses? Like the company has been in business long enough that you're sort of like pre space economy boom where there was a small startup for every piece of the stack. But what was it like actually rolling all of those rolling those satellites out?

Speaker 7: Yeah. Well, it's very we're very vertically integrated. So we build the radios. We build the computers and everything that works together. We buy chips, but all of our boards are custom. Our telescopes are custom. Our radios are custom. And, so basically, think of it a bit like assembling a smartphone. It's that sort of complexity, a spacecraft. We're not building millions of them like iPhones or what have you, but we're building dozens at a time. We tip we've launched on 40 rockets to get all of our satellites up to space. We've launched over 600 or 700 satellites at this point on 40 rockets. Typically, we're launching 20 or so per rocket. Most of the time, we're secondary payload on on on another a billion dollar satellite that's going to launch or a set of other satellites that's going out. Sure. A couple of times, I think three times, we bought our own rocket. But roughly speaking, we're hitchhiking at the launch site, trying to get a ride to orbit. It's a little bit more complicated than that, but not much. So the launch has become a little bit more routine now, especially with SpaceX, which is really cool. But all the complexity is in the integration of all these satellites, the satellites working together, having to put ground stations all around the world that collect all that data, send it back. And then we have a software company, if you like, that sits on top of all that data doing all the analysis to make it usable for all of our clients.

Speaker 2: Yeah. It's really crazy. As you say that stuff, I'm thinking of like Bridget Mendler's company that does ground now and there's so many different pieces that you could like subcontract out in the modern era, but you had to do it all with like grit and figure it out yourself, I'm sure. Yeah.

Speaker 7: And you can contract them out, but I mean, we have looked at those because we don't want to do ground stations. Only reason we're doing them is that we're far cheaper and it wasn't possible at all to But buy those even now, it's, you know, we're so much cheaper infrastructure than anything you can buy online Yeah. Or commercially.

Speaker 2: Talk about the decision for altitude and the orbit. What trade offs are there? Where do you sit? Why is that the sweet spot that you landed with?

Speaker 7: We basically try and go as low as possible where you don't reenter. Yeah. I mean, because you want the cameras as close to the Earth's surface so you can take high resolution pictures. I mean, what's amazing with our imagery, you look at our satellites, they're about this big. Mhmm. Some of them weigh seven kilograms. They're only the size of a loaf of bread, basically.

Speaker 2: Yeah.

Speaker 7: A bit heavier than that. And we can see from San Francisco to Los Angeles, we can see things three meters across. Yeah. 500 miles away, you know, we're seeing things. It's crazy, right? And with our bigger satellites, you can see things 30 centimeters across now. I mean, just imagine the the it's it's incredible the power of these telescopes that we put up there and all the camera systems that take all the imagery. And, of course, we take a gob gobs amount huge amounts of it. We take 4,000,047 megapixel images per day. So each satellite is taking eight pictures per second and there's 200 satellites. It's just huge What was it like finding that what

Speaker 1: was it like finding that sweet spot? Did you just one shot it? You never, you know

Speaker 2: Never burned out? Burned out. Never burned

Speaker 7: anything up. Exactly. Actually, recently, the sun's got angry for some reason at us, and it's got a little bit more bright. And the upper atmosphere went much denser. And a couple of satellite fleets lost half or more of their satellites because they got the calculus slightly wrong. So it's not it's not messing around, especially when you spent millions of dollars on the satellites.

Speaker 2: On the on the camera, do you have the ability to translate your specs into something that would feel like a consumer camera? Like, is it a 50 megapixel sensor with a 4,000 millimeter focal length or something like that? Is there

Speaker 7: if you have a really powerful telephoto lens Yeah. It's not so dissimilar from the a main power you for a telescope is the size of the optic. Yeah. So, the primary optic for our Dove satellites is about this big. Yeah. The primary optic for our bigger satellites is around 50 centimeters, so a little bit bigger like that. And, know, actually, the design of the telescopes is not that hard, but getting them to work through the launch, which is 15 g's shaking of the of the telescope, and then explosive bolts as the upper stage and the the lower stage separate, which sends a 200 g shot load through the satellite. Those are the things are really gnarly. So you have to design all of this to survive that launch environment. That's where the tricks come in for for space engineering.

Speaker 2: Can you

Speaker 1: talk about talk about what you guys have one of the the use cases when when we met, I guess it was maybe a month ago at this point, you talked about how you're able to track gas leaks ahead of time and help get them shut off. I I would love for you to talk about that because I thought it was fascinating.

Speaker 7: Yeah. I mean, we help people do all sorts of things around the world. I mean, even though we're having the satellites are all in space, all of our applications are in the real world here down on the Earth's surface. We are helping farmers. We're helping energy companies. We're helping civil governments. We're helping security. But you asked about methane and we track methane leaks using a special hyperspectral camera that we got on one of our satellites and we're launching a couple more of those this year. Basically, this gas, methane, absorbs in a particular spectral line. So if you have lots of color bands, lots of spectral bands, so this one has 400 spectral bands. So it's like we have three RGB in our eyes. This has 400. And with those narrow bands you can detect these absorption lines and we can tell actually the amount of methane in each leak as well. So we can then go along the gas pipelines of major oil and gas facilities, find leaks, tell them about it, and shut help them to shut them off. And no one, not the energy company, nor the environment, nor anything else, wants all these gas leaks. It's bad for business and it's bad for the planet. So we have detected thousands and thousands of these and often these companies just go out and fix them. Another example, we track deforestation across the whole Brazilian Amazon. 8,000,000 square kilometers every day. It's almost the size of The United States, a forest the size of The United States. And we look across the entire thing for any tree that has been cut down, illegal mining operation, illegal narcotics, and we send those alerts to GPS coordinates to the Brazil Federal Police, they go and stop the illegal action. And we've helped them to reduce deforestation rates 60% in the last three years because of that AI enabled satellite data work. And another example in Ukraine, we've been helping them track Russian movements in Asia. We've been helping with Indo Pacific Command, the commander of The US forces over in that region to monitor China, the South China Sea. We monitor huge areas, give them alerts because what what you want is to try and get advanced warning of anything rather than having to go into war. So we're trying to help them have the data that stops wars rather than getting there.

Speaker 2: Does the government not have spy satellites?

Speaker 7: They do. But their spy satellites are better and worse at the same time. They're much, much higher resolution, but much, much smaller coverage.

Speaker 2: Got it.

Speaker 7: So, they can they can see things that are much better. Reading number plates is the canonical thing. Whether or exactly they can do that is a classified matter. But what they can see is much smaller than what we can do, at least 10 times better. What they can't do is image all of China or all of Africa or all of Brazil every day because necessarily if you look more focused, you look at a smaller area. And so there's a trade off there. We're the only system that images the whole earth landmass every day.

Speaker 2: So what is the the pie chart of customers for your revenue? Is it I imagine you hear about like hedge funds. You mentioned a bunch of examples of the government and it seems like even nongovernmental organizations, nonprofits would be interesting. They probably pay different rates. But like where are the key drivers of the business? What are the different customers that are buying from you?

Speaker 7: Today, our biggest segment is defense and intelligence, so security. Countries that need to understand threats on their horizon, be warned of things. That's the US government. That's European countries, Japan, other countries like that. And we've just started a new program where if a country asks, we'll launch them dedicated satellites for that country. And these we've done three deals where a couple of $100,000,000 and we launch a set of satellites for them. They take over the joystick over their area of interest. And if you like, they get they ensure that it's just for them in that area. But most of our business is data sales. And I think the future is mainly commercial applications and civil government. So, floods and fires and helping people. You know, in the LA fires, we were not just the the first image, but we could e actually use AI on top that could analyze which house in the Palisades fire was damaged or not, and help the relief operators, the American Red Cross, go used our data to plan their operations in the aftermath of the fire and so on. But if we could get that data even sooner, that's even better. So we're working on trying to get the data ever sooner. But disaster response is an application, but most of all, all the commercial ones. So, yes, hedge funds, you mentioned. In principle, we have more alpha than any other company on the planet, I think, because we can track all those soy yields, of, you know, or any other type of crop. We can track output from all the mines of all the different major commodities around the planet, all the shipping networks, all the other transportation networks. We, if you like, have an overview of all the different economic activity going on around the globe. And so we do have some hedge fund clients that do stuff. They they shan't be named because they they want to keep it private. Yeah. Course. But, yeah, that's a then there's lots of other commercial applications, energy, infrastructure, agriculture. You know, we help out with a lot of we just announced last week that we're working with John Deere, helping them drive their tractors so they know when to slow down and speed up in the field based on the amount of crop in each three by three meter box. I mean, it's all terribly practical applications of our satellite data. So it sounds far away like going to space, but actually it's having an impact here on the ground.

Speaker 1: There are apparently some Koreans in our chat that that are that are investors, it sounds like, have some questions around the new new capital raise. Wanted to give you a chance to talk about that, why why you're pursuing it and what it means for the future. I can't their messages, but I'm just sort

Speaker 2: of guessing. Yeah. Well,

Speaker 7: we we just had our earnings last week and we have plenty of capital, over $700,000,000 on the balance sheet. And we're growing growing very nicely, 42% growth, which is the answer to life, universe and everything, if any hitchhikers guide the galaxy fans out there. So we felt very good about that. But, yeah, we did decide to raise some more capital, one of these ATM approaches, which basically enables us to raise at the market and when we want. And it it you know, it's good to have more capital. It's good to have a secure balance sheet. It's dry powder. If we wanted to do m and a later, we haven't got an immediate need for it, but it's good to do that. We think that maybe there's other datasets. Maybe there's other capabilities that we want, showing up our supply chain. There's all sorts of things in this crazy world it'd be good to do to reduce risks. So we're trying to use the moment of a lot of excitement about planet and space generally. Space is hot right now to to get capital that that can help us secure the long term.

Speaker 2: That makes sense.

Speaker 1: Last thing, any any insights on on what the the latest Blue Origin explosion will do to the launch market over the next, call it, two, three, four, five years is that, obviously, it's a disappointment for everyone, but, there's been some debate around just how much of a setback it'll be. I think every company like Planet wants more competition in the launch market. But how are you looking at it?

Speaker 7: Yeah. Well, I mean, firstly, it's a real tragic event for the industry and not just for Blue. And it set back some of the lunar plans that The US Government is I'm wearing my Artemis two pin. That was such an amazing mission, but some of the later missions that actually landing humans on the lunar surface are gonna need Blue Origin in their vehicle, actually. So it's a tricky situation. I was just messaging with the Mass Administrator about this, and I hope we can come together to still do those really critical missions that are some of the most hopeful things that we do as a society when we send humans on things like that mission. So but I think I think they'll get back to to business relatively straightforward. That, you know, by the end of this year, they've already said that they should be able to be back on the launch line. I think that timeline is about right. What we've seen historically, companies getting back to the launch pad. Yeah. It's not quite as damaged as people initially thought. So I I really wish them luck in doing that. And there is a booming array of other companies that are building launch capabilities. So I think competition really is coming over the next couple of years and it's exciting and obviously we're cheering it on. We're cheering all of those guys on.

Speaker 2: Yep. We are too.

Speaker 1: Makes sense.

Speaker 2: Well, we're cheering you

Speaker 1: on Thank as you so much for coming in. On anytime.

Speaker 2: We'll talk to

Speaker 1: you Great updates.

Speaker 7: Hey, Nice to see you.

Speaker 2: Good Before we bring in our next guest, let me tell you about the New York Stock Exchange. Wanna change the world, raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange. We are very fortunate to be joined by Dambisa Samuel. Hi. Welcome to the show.