Planet Labs

Planet Labs operates the largest commercial Earth-observation fleet — more than 200 Dove and SkySat satellites, plus next-generation Pelican and Tanager spacecraft — imaging the entire landmass of the planet every day. Founded in 2010 and headquartered in San Francisco, the company became public via a SPAC merger in December 2021.

Planet's core asset is its daily-refresh imagery archive; its Planet Insights Platform adds the AI and machine-learning analytics layer on top. Planetary Variables convert raw pixels into decision-ready layers such as biomass, land-surface temperature, soil water content, and crop growth — what the company frames as delivering answers, not pixels. A 2025 acquisition of Bedrock Research and onboard NVIDIA Jetson edge compute push the company toward what it calls Planetary Intelligence. Planet also builds spacecraft for others: it built the satellite for Google's Project Suncatcher, which launched on a SpaceX rideshare on October 1, 2026 to test whether Google's TPU chips can run AI models in orbit, and the two companies are planning a follow-up pair of purpose-built satellites for 2027.

Planet reached its first sustained adjusted-EBITDA profitability in late 2025 and reports roughly a 900 million dollar backlog. It holds significant government contracts, including the NRO Electro-Optical Commercial Layer, an NGA Luno B award, a roughly 240 million euro German government deal, and NATO agreements — a business that is increasingly dual-use, with a growing share of revenue from defense and intelligence customers.