The Earth, visible as it changes.

A place changes before anyone goes back to look

Planet starts from a gap in how people watch the physical world. A forest, a port or a border area can change long before a field team returns, and the sharpest satellites see only a small patch at a time. Planet's defense writing calls this the soda straw problem: detailed spy satellite photos cover a tiny area and are usually sent to look only after another source has raised an alarm. The CEO, Will Marshall, made the same point in March 2026 about the satellite layer in map apps, which he said was three or five years old. Planet's stated mission answers that gap: to use space to help life on Earth, by imaging the world every day and making global change visible, accessible and actionable.

a daily scan of the Earth

Will Marshall · Co-founder and CEO · Curious Worldview podcast, episode 224 (machine transcript) · 2026-03-25

The belief behind the company is that a complete daily record is worth more than a single sharp photo, and two choices made that record affordable. The first was size. Marshall describes taking satellites the size of a double-deck bus and shrinking them with the electronics that sit in a phone. The second was how to sell. Planet's annual report describes a one-to-many subscription: an image can be sold and used for analysis an unlimited number of times, unlike older providers that sell an image to one customer exclusively. The result is scale. Planet says it has built and deployed 450 satellites, operates at least 200 and collects over 350M sq km of imagery a day, and its archive holds about 3,000 images of an average point on land.

Cheap satellites, AI in orbit and governments that want their own eyes

Three changes made this the moment. The hardware got small and cheap enough to fly in large numbers, and Planet built a working habit around it that it calls agile aerospace: release early and often, then improve, as software teams do. Computing moved closer to the camera: Planet's newest Pelican satellites carry NVIDIA Jetson processors so that some analysis happens in orbit, and the executives' January 2026 essay argues that AI trained on internet text still cannot see the physical world as it changes. And the buyers changed. A dated Korean report traces the jump in large government orders to the start of the war in Ukraine in February 2022, and in the quarter to July 2026 Planet's defense and intelligence revenue grew more than 90% from a year earlier.

transparency drives accountability, accountability drives better decisions and action.

Will Marshall · Co-founder and CEO · Essay "Planetary Intelligence", republished on Planet's blog · 2026-05-27

Winning, in the company's words, is an Earth that can be searched like the web. Marshall wrote in May 2026 that Google indexed the internet and Planet is indexing the Earth, a line he first used at a 2018 TED talk, and that Planet is building an AI app that makes its archive queryable in natural language. In September 2026 he gave the near term version in one sentence: pair AI-enabled analytics with sovereign satellite services, meaning satellites that a government owns or reserves, built and run by Planet.

One question, followed from scan to decision

Take an illustrative case: an analyst at a coastal agency wants to know whether anything changed along a stretch of shoreline. First the analyst sets the area and the question. Then the daily scan, near-daily 3.7 m imagery of all of Earth's landmass, shows where something looks different from the day before. Planet calls the next step tip and cue: an unusual signature in the daily scan tips the sharper SkySat or Pelican satellites to look at that exact place, and Planet says a tasked 50 cm image can reach the customer less than four hours after capture. Finally the images flow into the tools the analyst already uses, through APIs and GIS connections. The Korean customer success posting names the kinds of work this feeds: border security, disaster response and urban planning.

A person still makes the call. The daily picture shows that a place changed; the reason still has to come from an analyst, and the sharper tasked image adds evidence, not certainty. What Planet sells a government is a faster and wider first look that leaves the judgement with its own people. For a Korea hire, the useful question in every meeting is what that first look adds beyond what the customer's own satellites and aircraft already show.

Three ways to buy a view of the Earth

Planet Monitoring is the daily scan sold as a subscription. Customers get near-daily 3.7 m imagery of all of Earth's landmass through APIs, a web application and GIS integrations, sized to the area and analysis they need. Its historical imagery supports comparisons through time. Because one image can be sold many times, a single pass can in principle serve a forestry agency, a crop analyst and a defense ministry. Buyers range from national agencies to companies such as BASF, which Planet says uses analytics from its near-daily imagery to help growers keep yields while using crop protection products more efficiently. Monitoring stands in for site visits and aircraft when the area is wide.

Planet Tasking is the close look on request. SkySat and Pelican satellites photograph a chosen place at 50 cm, and Planet says images and insights arrive less than four hours after capture. Customers either order through the Planet Select portal and pay as they go, or use a Tasking Dashboard with tasking credits for steady, integrated work. The Tasking page also describes access to an Earth-data archive of approximately 50 PB. Pelican is the new generation: it entered general availability for eligible customers in December 2025, carries six multispectral bands and an NVIDIA Jetson processor, and ten high resolution Pelicans were on orbit after a July 2026 launch. A 30 cm class second generation is planned. The January 2026 operational review describes 50 cm class imagery; the current product page lists 30 to 50 cm class capability. Applicants should distinguish those descriptions and the planned second-generation capability.

Planet Insights Platform is where both kinds of data live, a cloud platform for daily Earth data and analytics. On top of it sit analytics for defense buyers, such as automated vessel recognition and tracking at sea and monitoring of military installations and critical infrastructure, and a new agentic AI app that was free while in beta in August 2026. The AI app is the product form of what Marshall calls a queryable Earth: a user asks a question in plain language and the archive answers.

The fourth product is a satellite a country owns

Since January 2025 Planet has also sold its factory. In satellite services a government or partner funds a set of Pelican satellites that Planet builds and runs, with capacity reserved for that customer and operating services on top. The first was the largest contract in the company's history, $230M over several years with a long standing Asia Pacific partner, Japan's SKY Perfect JSAT. Germany followed in July 2025 with a EUR 240M multi-year agreement funded by its government for dedicated capacity and direct downlink over European regions, and Sweden in December 2025 with a low nine-figure deal under which its armed forces own the satellites. Planet counts more than $500M signed across the three in about twelve months, and pitches the model as a cheaper, lower risk and faster route to space capability than a nation building its own system.

Europe needs its own eyes

Will Marshall · Co-founder and CEO · Planet release on the Sweden agreement, as reported by trade press · 2026-01-14

What one customer measured, and what others bought

The clearest before and after comes from Uzbekistan. Uzcosmos used to watch reservoirs with field inspections, staff gauges, scattered reports and paper records. It then fed near-daily 3 m PlanetScope imagery into its own GIS platform to build virtual gauges over more than 50 reservoirs at once. Checked against a ground sensor from July 2024 to April 2025, the satellite water level stayed within about 10 cm under validation conditions. Planet reports the result in a September 2026 case study, with one reservoir used for the comparison.

This significantly increased confidence in using satellite intelligence for national-scale water management.

Mukhiddin Ibragimov · Deputy Director, Uzcosmos (customer) · Planet case study · 2026-09-30

Most other named customers are governments buying access for many users. In Germany, the federal mapping agency BKG gives more than 400 federal institutions access to Planet data, a partnership renewed and expanded in the quarter to January 2026. Rwanda's space agency launched a national program in June 2026 that feeds Planet imagery to ministries, public universities and selected startups for farming, forest and urban planning work. The US National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency awarded $8M in August 2026 to deploy Planet's Global Monitoring Service, and Marshall says the US Navy uses Planet to monitor developments in the South China Sea.

The government examples show different kinds of evidence. Uzcosmos reports a comparison against a ground sensor at one validation reservoir; German and Rwandan announcements describe access, contract scope and intended uses. Signet reads that distinction as useful preparation for Korea: an adoption or renewal case should state what the agency actually measured, which users adopted the workflow and what mission result was observed. The customer-success posting makes leadership-visible KPIs a core responsibility.