Planet Labs PBC

Planet Labs PBC was founded in 2010 by three ex-NASA scientists, Will Marshall, Robbie Schingler, and Chris Boshuizen. The trio’s initial ambition was to create a constellation of microsatellites to provide Earth-imaging services to anyone who wanted them. With the mission of making access to Earth’s data more available, the team set out to create a unique platform for data collection and access.

Planet Labs PBC designs, produces and launches nanosatellite constellations to provide high-resolution Earth imagery, data, and analytic solutions from space to a wide range of customers, from scientists and researchers to governments and businesses. Their constellation, nicknamed ‘Flock’, consists of almost 300 Dove satellites. The Doves are CubeSats, which are small, modular spacecraft that are launched into low Earth orbits. Each Dove satellite is about the size of a loaf of bread and weighs just over 5 kg, but they are built with powerful cameras and sensors that can capture high-quality images and data of Earth.

The company has developed their own custom cloud-native technology, Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC), which enables customers to process images quickly, harmonize timeseries data, and access to easily integrated analytics. The OGC platform can compile data from multiple sources and generate insights that are invaluable to customers in industries such as agriculture, forestry, mapping, and finance and insurance.

Planet Labs PBC has a mission to make space-based data and imagery accessible to everyone. In order to make this possible, the company has expanded its capabilities in the past few years. To that end, they have invested heavily in ground station networks, launch capabilities, and innovative software tools.

The company has launched over 500 satellites to-date, and its flagship product, PlanetScope, is a subscription-based service which provides customers access to high-resolution images and other geospatial data. The company also recently acquired Google Timelapse, a time-lapse imagery platform of our planet that offers users a unique perspective of the past three decades.

Planet Labs PBC has offices located in various cities around the world, including San Francisco, Berlin, Beijing, Tokyo, and Cape Town. The company has over 600 employees and has raised over $750 million in venture capital financing. They have also signed agreements with several space agencies, including the European Space Agency and the United Kingdom’s Digital Economy Agency.