Planet Labs PBC (PL): History, Ownership, Mission, How It Works & Makes Money

When you look at Planet Labs PBC, are you seeing a satellite operator or a data powerhouse that just delivered $244.4 million in fiscal year 2025 revenue, an 11% jump year-over-year? This company, with its mission to image the entire Earth daily, is defintely at a financial inflection point, having achieved its first-ever quarter of positive Adjusted EBITDA with a $2.4 million profit in Q4 FY2025, but its full-year GAAP net loss was still a substantial $123.2 million. You need to know how a Public Benefit Corporation (PBC) balances a massive satellite fleet and a 97% recurring Annual Contract Value (ACV) with that bottom-line reality, so how do you value a business that has a $230 million contract in the bag but is still navigating the path to full profitability?

Planet Labs PBC (PL) History

You're looking for the foundational story of Planet Labs PBC, and the direct takeaway is that this company wasn't born in a boardroom; it started with a radical idea from former NASA scientists to democratize Earth observation using small, cheap satellites. This vision, coupled with a commitment to a dual mission as a Public Benefit Corporation (PBC), is what drives their strategy today, especially as they pivot toward AI-enabled solutions.

Given Company's Founding Timeline

Year established

Planet Labs PBC was initially founded on December 29, 2010, under the name Cosmogia, Inc..

Original location

The company started in San Francisco, California, with the co-founders building the first CubeSat satellite in a California garage.

Founding team members

The company was founded by three former NASA scientists who worked together at NASA Ames Research Center.

• William Marshall (Will Marshall): Co-Founder, CEO, and Chairperson
• Robbie Schingler: Co-Founder and Chief Strategy Officer (CSO)
• Chris Boshuizen: Co-Founder

Initial capital/funding

While the very first seed capital isn't public, the co-founders leveraged their NASA experience and the Silicon Valley environment to raise significant capital early on. By May 2015, Planet Labs had raised a total of $183 million in venture capital financing. The truly transformative capital infusion came with their public listing.

Given Company's Evolution Milestones

Given Company's Transformative Moments

The company's trajectory wasn't a straight line; it was shaped by three key decisions that fundamentally changed its business model and operational scale. The shift from a pure data provider to a solutions-focused firm is the defintely most important near-term trend.

• The CubeSat Revolution: The initial, radical decision was to abandon traditional, large, and expensive satellites for small, mass-produced CubeSats, which they call 'Doves'. This allowed them to launch a constellation of over 200 active satellites to image the entire Earth daily-a feat impossible with the old model.
• The Dual Mission Commitment: Registering as a Public Benefit Corporation (PBC) in 2021 was a formal commitment to a dual mission: pursuing shareholder value while also creating a more sustainable, secure, and prosperous world. This structure attracts mission-aligned customers and investors, but also introduces the challenge of balancing profit with public good.
• The Pivot to AI-Enabled Solutions: In fiscal year 2025, Planet Labs made a clear strategic shift from selling raw satellite data to selling AI-enabled solutions targeted at specific market segments, especially in defense and intelligence. This is a higher-margin business, and it's why their full-year GAAP Gross Margin jumped to 57% from 51% in the prior year. Honestly, this pivot is what will drive the re-acceleration of their revenue growth in the years ahead.

This transformation is why they reported a record annual revenue of approximately $244.4 million for the full fiscal year 2025. Still, you need to understand the full picture, and you can get a deeper dive on the numbers in Breaking Down Planet Labs PBC (PL) Financial Health: Key Insights for Investors.

Planet Labs PBC (PL) Ownership Structure

Planet Labs PBC's (PL) ownership structure is typical for a growth-stage technology company that has gone public via a Special Purpose Acquisition Company (SPAC), characterized by a significant institutional presence but with a large retail float.

The company operates as a Public Benefit Corporation (PBC), which means its directors are legally obligated to consider the impact of their decisions on society and the environment, in addition to shareholder value. It is publicly traded on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE: PL). This dual structure-publicly traded and PBC-is a key governance point, ensuring a mission-driven approach is baked into the fiduciary duty of the board. Exploring Planet Labs PBC (PL) Investor Profile: Who's Buying and Why?

Given Company's Current Status

Planet Labs PBC is a publicly traded company on the NYSE, having completed its merger with a SPAC in late 2021. As of November 2025, the company has approximately 303.43 million total shares outstanding.

This public status demands high transparency, but the company's Public Benefit Corporation designation means its core mission-to image the world every day and make change visible-holds a formal place in its governance, which is defintely a factor for long-term investors to consider.

Given Company's Ownership Breakdown

The equity distribution as of late 2025 shows institutional investors holding a large, but not overwhelming, stake, with a sizable portion still held by the public and company insiders. This mix suggests a balance between professional money managers and the original founders/early employees. Institutional ownership levels are a key indicator of market confidence.

Given Company's Leadership

The leadership team is anchored by its co-founders, maintaining a vision-driven approach, but has also strategically brought in seasoned executives and board members with deep experience in defense and enterprise software to drive commercial growth.

For the fiscal year 2025, the company reported a GAAP net loss of ($123.2 million) on $244.4 million in revenue, so the leadership's primary near-term action is converting operational momentum into consistent GAAP profitability.

• Will Marshall: Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer (CEO). He is the driving force behind the mission and satellite technology. His total compensation for the fiscal year 2025 was approximately $4.75 million.
• Ashley Whitfield Johnson: President & Chief Financial Officer (CFO). A critical hire to scale the business financially, her 2025 total compensation was around $3.40 million.
• Robert Schingler: Co-Founder and Chief Strategy Officer. He focuses on long-term market positioning and government relations, with a 2025 compensation of roughly $2.21 million.
• Board Refresh: The board has recently expanded its expertise in 2025, adding General John W. 'Jay' Raymond (former Chief of Space Operations for the U.S. Space Force) and Scott Reese (CEO of Electrification Software at GE Vernova) to guide the company's defense and software platform strategy.

The average tenure of the management team is approximately 4.9 years, indicating a stable and experienced core group.

Planet Labs PBC (PL) Mission and Values

Planet Labs PBC operates with a dual mandate as a Public Benefit Corporation (PBC), legally committing the company to both generating shareholder value and pursuing a specific public benefit: helping create a more sustainable, secure, and prosperous world. This structure forces a long-term view, balancing profit with the mission to image the entire Earth daily and make that data useful.

Planet Labs PBC's Core Purpose

The company's cultural DNA is rooted in its founding by three NASA scientists in 2010, which explains its focus on continuous, global-scale Earth observation. This isn't just about selling pictures; it's about providing the foundational data layer for a range of critical global decisions. Honestly, that's a powerful value proposition.

For investors, this dual focus means you have to watch the trade-offs. For example, while the company's Q3 fiscal year 2026 revenue was strong at $73.39 million, up 20.1% year-over-year, its commitment to growth and its PBC status mean it's still aiming for profitability. Analysts anticipate a full-year fiscal year 2026 Earnings Per Share (EPS) of around -$0.37.

Official Mission Statement

Planet Labs PBC's formal mission statement is concise and action-oriented, reflecting its core technological capability and its ultimate goal for the data it collects.

• Image the world every day.
• Make change visible, accessible, and actionable.

Vision Statement

The vision extends the mission, establishing the company as the indispensable platform for global intelligence and insight, not just raw imagery. The goal is to be the primary data source for tracking anything valuable on the planet.

• Provide critical data and insights to address environmental, infrastructural, and societal challenges.
• Maintain and operate the largest Earth observation fleet, currently over 200 active satellites, to ensure daily global coverage.
• Transition from a raw imagery provider to an AI-enabled solutions provider, offering actionable intelligence for customers like the Defense & Intelligence sector.

You can see this strategy in their recent contract wins, like the multi-year, eight-figure annual value renewal with an international defense and intelligence customer. To get a deeper look at the money behind the mission, you should check out Exploring Planet Labs PBC (PL) Investor Profile: Who's Buying and Why?

Planet Labs PBC Slogan/Tagline

While the company doesn't use a single, short marketing slogan, the mission statement itself functions as the core tagline, encapsulating the value proposition in plain English.

• Make change visible, accessible, and actionable.

This is the defintely the most human way to describe their core value proposition: they show you what's changing, so you can do something about it.

Planet Labs PBC (PL) How It Works

Planet Labs PBC operates a massive, proprietary constellation of Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellites to capture daily, comprehensive imagery of the entire Earth, transforming that raw data into actionable, subscription-based geospatial intelligence for customers. The company's business model is essentially a data-as-a-service (DaaS) offering, generating an annual revenue of approximately $244.4 million for the fiscal year 2025, which ended January 31, 2025.

Planet Labs PBC's Product/Service Portfolio

Planet Labs PBC's Operational Framework

The company's operations are built around a vertically integrated, rapid-iteration model that drives down the cost of data acquisition and processing. Here's the quick math: the operational leverage helped the company achieve a Q4 FY2025 Adjusted EBITDA profit of $2.4 million, a huge psychological win.

• Agile Aerospace: Design, build, and launch satellites (like the SuperDove and Pelican constellations) in-house, using commercial off-the-shelf components to minimize costs and accelerate refresh cycles.
• Daily Global Capture: Maintain a fleet of over 200 satellites to image the entire Earth's landmass every day, ensuring data freshness and building an unparalleled historical record of change over time.
• Automated Data Pipeline: Downlink data to a global ground station network, process it automatically, and quickly upload it to the cloud for customer access via an Application Programming Interface (API) and web platform.
• AI-Enabled Insights: Apply Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) to the raw imagery to extract specific, high-value insights, like aircraft detection or deforestation monitoring, which accelerates customer time to value.
• Subscription Model: Revenue is primarily generated through subscription services and data licensing, which provides a stable, predictable base, with a strong recurring annual contract value percentage of 98%.

Planet Labs PBC's Strategic Advantages

Planet Labs PBC's market success hinges on a few clear, structural advantages that competitors struggle to replicate. You need to understand this core value proposition before you commit capital. The company's full-year net loss was still substantial at ($123.2 million) for FY2025, so the focus is defintely on long-term competitive moat.

• Unmatched Revisit Rate: The sheer size of the satellite constellation allows for daily, wall-to-wall coverage, which is a significant differentiator from competitors who rely on less frequent, targeted captures.
• Data Archive Moat: Decades of daily global imagery create a unique, proprietary time-series dataset that is essential for training advanced AI models and for customers needing historical context.
• Strategic Contract Backlog: Major, multi-year government and commercial contracts provide financial stability, including a massive $230 million multi-year agreement with SKY Perfect JSAT and a renewed $20.0 million per year contract with NASA.
• Vertical Integration: Controlling the entire stack-from satellite design to data delivery-allows for faster innovation, better quality control, and superior cost-effectiveness compared to companies that rely on third-party satellite manufacturers.

To see how these operational strengths translate into the company's financial standing, you should review Breaking Down Planet Labs PBC (PL) Financial Health: Key Insights for Investors. Finance: track the Q3 2026 earnings call scheduled for December 2025 to gauge the impact of the JSAT contract ramp-up.

Planet Labs PBC (PL) How It Makes Money

Planet Labs PBC primarily makes money by selling access to its proprietary, daily Earth data and analytics platform through high-margin, multi-year subscription contracts, which are increasingly being supplemented by large, customized, asset-heavy satellite services agreements for government and defense customers.

The core of the business is a data-as-a-service (DaaS) model, where customers pay an annual contract value (ACV) for continuous access to the Earth's daily imagery from the PlanetScope and SkySat constellations. This model is highly valuable because of its predictable, recurring revenue nature; 97% of the company's Annual Contract Value (ACV) was recurring at the end of fiscal year 2025.

Planet Labs PBC's Revenue Breakdown

While the company does not break out a precise percentage split between its core data subscriptions and newer satellite services in its public filings, we can segment the revenue based on the nature of the contracts, which reflects the company's strategic pivot toward high-value solutions.

The $244.4 million in total revenue for the full fiscal year 2025 was overwhelmingly driven by the subscription model, which gives customers access to the daily global scan. Still, the fastest growth is coming from the Satellite Services segment, which includes major deals like the $230 million multi-year contract with JSAT, a Japanese satellite operator, to build and operate a dedicated Pelican constellation. This acceleration is what drove the revenue growth rate from 11% in FY2025 to 20% year-over-year in the second quarter of fiscal year 2026.

Business Economics

The financial health of Planet Labs PBC hinges on a hybrid business model that combines the high-margin scalability of a software-as-a-service (SaaS) company with the capital-intensive nature of a space systems operator. It's a tricky balance, but the operating leverage is starting to show.

• High Recurring Revenue: The company's business is sticky; 98% of its ACV was recurring in Q2 FY2026, which provides strong revenue visibility. This high retention rate means less money is spent on re-acquiring customers.
• Gross Margin Expansion: The Non-GAAP Gross Margin for the full fiscal year 2025 was 60%, a solid jump from 54% in the prior year. This improvement shows their cost of revenue-mostly cloud infrastructure and satellite operations-is growing slower than their revenue, a key sign of scaling efficiency.
• Asset-Heavy Cost: The primary drag on GAAP profitability is the heavy investment in the satellite fleet itself, which results in significant depreciation expenses. This is why the GAAP Gross Margin of 57% in FY2025 is lower than the Non-GAAP figure, but it's the cost of building the moat.
• Massive Backlog: The business has secured a massive backlog of future revenue, which reached approximately $736.1 million in Q2 FY2026, up 245% year-over-year. This backlog provides a clear runway for future revenue recognition, especially from large, multi-year government and defense contracts, which are driving the shift to higher-value services.

Planet Labs PBC's Financial Performance

The direct takeaway is that Planet Labs PBC is rapidly moving toward full profitability, having already achieved a key operational milestone in fiscal year 2025.

• Revenue Growth: Full fiscal year 2025 revenue was $244.4 million, representing an 11% year-over-year increase. This growth accelerated in the most recent quarter, Q2 FY2026, to 20% year-over-year, hitting a record $73.4 million.
• Net Loss: For the full fiscal year 2025, the company reported a GAAP net loss of ($123.2 million). This is a classic growth-stock conundrum: you're losing money on the bottom line because you're pouring capital into building the space assets and the AI-enabled platform.
• EBITDA Milestone: The most significant operational achievement was reaching Adjusted EBITDA (Earnings Before Interest, Taxes, Depreciation, and Amortization) profitability for the first time in Q4 FY2025, with a $2.4 million profit. This shows their core operations, before the non-cash satellite depreciation, are finally generating cash. By Q2 FY2026, this profit had grown to $6.4 million.
• Cash Position: The company ended Q2 FY2026 with a strong balance sheet, holding approximately $271.5 million in cash, cash equivalents, and short-term investments, and still carries no debt. That gives them a defintely long runway to execute on their expansion plans.

If you want to dig deeper into the sustainability of these margins and the valuation implications of the massive backlog, you should check out Breaking Down Planet Labs PBC (PL) Financial Health: Key Insights for Investors.

Planet Labs PBC (PL) Market Position & Future Outlook

Planet Labs PBC is an essential, high-frequency data provider in the Earth Observation (EO) market, leveraging its massive satellite constellation to capture daily imagery that competitors cannot match. While the company is not yet GAAP profitable, its trajectory is clear: it is successfully translating its data advantage into high-value, long-term contracts, evidenced by a record full-year FY2025 revenue of $244.4 million and achieving its first-ever positive Adjusted EBITDA in the fourth quarter of that fiscal year, hitting $2.4 million. The market is defintely pricing in a future where its AI-driven data becomes critical infrastructure.

Competitive Landscape

The commercial satellite imagery market, valued at approximately $3.9 billion in 2025, is dominated by a few key players, but Planet Labs PBC holds a unique position. The company competes on cadence and scale, while its rivals focus on ultra-high resolution or specialized radar technology. Here's how the landscape stood in 2024, the most recent quantifiable data available.

Maxar Technologies and Airbus Defence and Space still command the largest share, largely due to their legacy contracts and focus on the highest-resolution, most expensive imagery. Planet Labs PBC is the disruptor, focusing on the high-frequency, 'change-detection' market, which is now growing faster. You can dive deeper into who is backing this growth by Exploring Planet Labs PBC (PL) Investor Profile: Who's Buying and Why?

Opportunities & Challenges

The company's future performance hinges on converting its vast data archive into high-margin, AI-driven Value-Added Services (VAS), while managing the inherent risks of a capital-intensive space business. The transition from raw data to actionable intelligence is the key to expanding margins from the FY2025 non-GAAP gross margin of 57%.

Industry Position

Planet Labs PBC is positioned as the market leader in high-cadence, medium-resolution Earth Observation data, a position secured by its operational fleet of over 200 satellites. This is its core strength. The company's subscription-based revenue model provides a strong foundation, with a recurring Annual Contract Value (ACV) of 97% in Q4 FY2025.

• Data Moat: The daily, global coverage creates a proprietary time-series data archive that is nearly impossible for new entrants to replicate.
• Platform Pivot: The launch of the Planet Insights Platform is a strategic move to pivot from a pure data provider to a solutions-focused platform, increasing stickiness and average revenue per user.
• Government Reliance: The company's strong performance in the government sector, with a 25% year-over-year revenue growth in Q1 FY2025, acts as a reliable revenue anchor against commercial market volatility.

What this estimate hides is the true value of the AI integration; if Planet can successfully monetize its data through AI-driven insights, it will shift the competitive dynamic from a satellite race to an analytics platform battle. That's the long game.