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Thank you for joining us, and welcome to the Planet Labs PBC Second Quarter of Fiscal Year 2027 Earnings Call. [Operator Instructions]

I will now hand the conference over to Cleo Palmer-Poroner, Director of Investor Relations.

Thanks, operator, and hello, everyone. I'm joined by Will Marshall and Ashley Johnson, who will provide a recap of our results and discuss our current outlook. We encourage everyone to please reference the earnings press release and earnings update presentation for today's call, which are available on our Investor Relations website.

Before we begin, we'd like to remind everyone that we will make forward-looking statements related to future events or our financial outlook. Any forward-looking statements are based on management's current outlook, plans, estimates, expectations, and projections. The inclusion of such forward-looking information should not be regarded as a representation by Planet that future plans, estimates, or expectations will be achieved. Such forward-looking statements are subject to various risks and uncertainties and assumptions as detailed in our SEC filings, which can be found at www.sec.gov.

Our actual results or performance may differ materially from those indicated by such forward-looking statements, and we undertake no responsibility to update such forward-looking statements to reflect events or circumstances after the date on which the statement is made or to reflect the occurrence of unanticipated events. During the call, we will also discuss historic and forward-looking non-GAAP financial measures. We use these non-GAAP financial measures for financial and operational decision-making and as a means to evaluate period-to-period comparisons.

We believe that these measures provide useful information about operating results, enhance the overall understanding of past financial performance and future prospects, and allow for greater transparency with respect to key metrics used by management in its financial and operational decision-making. For more information on the non-GAAP financial measures, please see the reconciliation tables provided in our press release issued earlier today, which is available on our website at investors.planet.com.

Further, throughout this call, we will provide a number of key performance indicators used by management and often used by competitors in our industry. These and other key performance indicators are discussed in more detail in our press release and our earnings update presentation, which are intended to accompany our prepared remarks.

At this point, I'd now like to turn the call over to Will Marshall, Planet's CEO, Chairperson and Co-Founder. Over to you, Will.

Thanks, Cleo, and welcome, everyone, joining us today. Planet had another outstanding quarter, delivering a record $116 million in revenue, representing approximately 58% year-over-year growth. Non-GAAP gross margin was 59% for the quarter, better than expected, demonstrating the ongoing scalability of our business model. For the fourth sequential quarter, we achieved and, in fact, well exceeded the Rule of 40, which is our revenue growth rate plus adjusted EBITDA margin.

Our revenue growth rate was driven by strong execution across our satellite services deals as well as continued momentum in our Data and Solutions business. We completed commissioning and handed over the first sovereign Earth observation satellite for the Swedish Armed Forces and successfully launched our next-generation Pelican tech demo. And this week, we shipped our second Tanager and 18 SuperDove satellites for launch. Both at home and abroad, Planet's data, AI-enabled solutions, and sovereign satellite capabilities are proving critical to the challenges and opportunities governments and companies across all industries face every day, from disaster response to resource management to national security.

Defense and Intelligence was once again an area of strength for us, with over 90% revenue growth year-on-year. I want to highlight 2 recent wins in this sector for our Data and Solutions business, both of which landed in August and therefore, are not included in our financial metrics for the quarter. We were awarded a new $8 million contract with the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, NGA, to deploy Planet's Global Monitoring Service, GMS, in support of national defense priorities with options to expand and extend this work. Planet was the only vendor considered as our solutions are truly unique.

We've created a deep archive of thousands of images for every point on Earth's landmass, enabling a peripheral vision, which with AI-powered pattern recognition on top, provides customers with the strategic indication and warning capability to proactively recognize patterns and identify emerging threats. This program grew out of a successful pilot with the Defense Innovation Unit in support of INDOPACOM, and we're incredibly proud to see GMS graduate to an operational program. We were also awarded a 7-figure 1-year agreement with a European defense and intelligence customer to supply high-resolution global Mosaics and support operational planning.

Turning to satellite services. Our team's execution against our backlog for our satellite services customers contributed to the strength in our defense and intelligence results. As we discussed last quarter, in May, we launched our first satellite for the Swedish Armed Forces just 4 months after the satellite services contract with them was signed. The Space Systems team's rapid commissioning of that satellite enabled us to officially hand over to the customer, which contributed to the Q2 revenue outperformance. In August, the German government announced that we were awarded a tender for dedicated capacity satellite services. The tender award includes options and has a maximum possible value of EUR 25 million over 5 years.

Overall, our satellite services pipeline progress has been extraordinary. In particular, we're very pleased with the maturation of this pipeline. Today, we have over $4 billion of identified opportunities for satellite services, over 25% of which is qualified as near-term pipeline. Planet is extremely differentiated here due to the strength of our operational history as we've launched more Earth imaging satellites than any other company on the globe and due to our speed of delivery.

For our 2 most recent satellite services partnerships, we've delivered a first satellite in orbit within 2 and 4 months of the contract award, respectively, compared to many years for the space industry historically. We are also increasingly finding that our customers and prospects want both AI-enabled solutions and satellite services. This bundling creates synergies and is even more differentiated. Governments are articulating an urgent imperative to secure sovereign access to space, understand threats in and around their region, modernize their defense capabilities, prepare their infrastructure for natural disasters and other catastrophic events and maintain their strategic edge.

More broadly across the civil government sector, second quarter revenue grew over 5% year-over-year, and we continue to see encouraging momentum both in the U.S. and abroad. To share some recent highlights, during the quarter, Planet signed a new contract with the Rwanda Space Agency to provide national high-resolution data and analytics for government ministries, departments and agencies as well as public universities. The satellite imagery data will be used in policy and decision support on agriculture, urban management, spatial planning, disaster response, amongst other applications. This deal marks Planet's first national program of its kind in Africa.

Also in the quarter, Planet signed a renewal with the New Mexico State Land Office. Since 2019, this long-standing partnership has evolved into a sophisticated multiproduct strategy that enables that land office to monitor, protect and manage over 9 million acres of public trust land.

Shifting to the commercial sector. Revenue grew over 15% year-on-year, reflecting the continued focus from our teams on landing and expanding in large opportunities and leveraging AI-enabled solutions. To highlight a few interesting use cases in the sector, last month, we signed a 6-figure expanded renewal with a hyperscaler AI developer for global monitoring of data centers and semiconductor manufacturing facility construction. Planet's Pelican high-resolution data is used to track construction milestones for those facilities, which are strong indicators of the supply chain health and computing capacity.

We're currently seeing meaningful demand from our customers in the AI and financial services industries to use Planet's data to track the pace of infrastructure expansion across the AI value chain. Planet partnered with FarmQA to develop and commercialize AI-powered agronomic intelligence tools for enterprise agriculture. The first application of the collaboration is already in the field, an AI-driven sugar beet yield estimation model, currently being piloted with multiple sugar beet cooperatives during the 2026 growing season.

Finally, Planet partnered with Braga Technologies to integrate Planet's high-frequency satellite data into their spatial intelligence platform, enabling automated change detection and near real-time analytics for natural resource management and civil government applications.

Stepping back, AI is enabling us to move up the market into high-value, higher-growth segments. We believe we currently have under 5% market share of today's overall Earth observation market, which excludes satellite services. And with the innovations we are making across solutions, real-time insights and next-generation monitoring, we believe we are poised to rapidly expand our market share.

Perhaps more importantly, we believe that AI is expanding the potential market for these capabilities by enabling users without geospatial expertise to leverage this critical data into their daily operations and expand to further applications and segments. Planet is uniquely positioned to capture this expansion as our daily scan mission is core to those expanded applications and most ready and relevant for AI utilization.

Turning to technology and operational updates. In July, we successfully launched our next-generation Pelican tech demo, which included several technology advancements across payload, on-orbit compute and satellite-to-satellite communications. This satellite follows our path towards delivering 30-centimeter class resolution imagery. As a reminder, this satellite is a tech demo and is not expected to serve customers.

Just this week, we shipped our second Tanager hyperspectral satellite to the launch site along with 18 SuperDoves. They're slated for launch this fall aboard SpaceX's Transporter-18 mission. We're very excited to be growing our fleet in support of our partner, Carbon Mapper, and doubling our capacity for methane and CO2 detections and enabling higher revisit rates. Overall, we're investing in launch, both to diversify our supply chain and in response to synergies with our key satellite services government partners.

To that end, in July, we announced a launch partnership with Isar Aerospace. Under this agreement, Isar is scheduled to launch a Pelican next year, which we plan to build in our new German satellite manufacturing facility. With both the satellite and the Isar launch vehicle, Spectrum, being built in Germany, this would be a national first for the country, demonstrating the value of commercial space in rapid advancements in German sovereign space capabilities.

Relatedly, I wanted to provide an update on the German manufacturing facility, which is expected to roughly double our manufacturing capacity. This project is progressing at pace with the facility setup and clean room fit-out scheduled for September and plans to begin building in the facility this year. There has been considerable interest from the German and European governments in this new facility, and we believe it positions us well to serve critical needs of customers and prospects in the region. Over the summer, we also opened a new office in London as we scale our European presence and establish a hub for our customers and partner relationships in the region.

Finally, our AI app has progressed to the open beta phase. This pioneering tool is focused on making Planet's massive global data archive queryable through natural language. By leveraging Planet's proprietary 10-year archive of daily data and integrating LLMs, it can help lower the barriers of entry for nontechnical users across all markets, allowing teams without geospatial expertise to accelerate their adoption of Planet's products.

Given our momentum with our AI-powered solutions, I wanted to take a moment to discuss our upcoming next-generation monitoring satellite, Owl, and our excitement over that program. We are already seeing significant traction with GMS and MDA among our most critical partners and customers and feedback indicates that Owl program will unlock massive value for them. They would like to see us accelerate that program, which we are beginning to do.

This program will upgrade the data underpinning the solutions from 3-meter to 1-meter class resolution, enabling the detection of smaller objects such as smaller vehicles as well as reduce the latency to as little as an hour in key areas, enabling faster response. Owl represents, in that sense, a massive leap forward. To put it in perspective, it will deliver roughly 10x more data and do so about 10x faster. We expect Owl to reinforce our leadership position in broad area monitoring and analytics with greater resolution and lower latency, which puts us in a position to capture market share from the high-resolution market and power downstream solutions with higher fidelity insights.

In closing then, our strong performance this quarter demonstrates clear execution across the business. We delivered robust revenue growth, disciplined execution and major strategic wins with our large government customers while growing our pipeline across all of our offerings. By expanding our international footprint, advancing our next-generation constellations and lowering technical barriers with AI, we are positioning Planet to capture a rapidly expanding Earth observation market and building a foundation for sustained long-term growth.

With that, I'll turn it over to Ashley to discuss our financials. Over to you, Ash.

Thanks, Will. It was indeed a strong quarter, supported by outstanding execution from our teams and exciting technology developments.

Turning to our financial results. Revenue for the second quarter came in at a record $116 million, representing approximately 58% year-over-year growth. The outperformance in the quarter was driven primarily by delivering against our satellite services contracts, specifically with respect to the handover of our first Pelican for the Swedish Armed Forces. The Space Systems team did a fantastic job with rapid commissioning, exceeding our expectations, generating point-in-time revenue and contributing to the Q2 beat.

We were pleased to see growth across all of our market sectors in the quarter. Our Defense and Intelligence revenue grew more than 90% year-on-year, which includes our satellite services revenue. The commercial sector was up more than 15% year-on-year and civil government revenue was up over 5%.

Similarly, turning to our regional revenue breakdown, growth continues to be distributed around the globe. During the quarter, year-on-year revenue growth was approximately 3% in Latin America, over 15% in Asia Pacific, approximately 25% in North America and over 130% in EMEA.

As our satellite services revenue grows, we will likely see an increase in revenue recognized as point-in-time versus over-time. In Q2, point-in-time revenue was 12% of revenue versus 1% in the same period last year. While we scale our satellite services business, we expect to experience variability in this metric quarter-to-quarter.

Before I turn to ACV metrics, I want to remind you that our ACV metrics exclude satellite services, which for the purposes of our financial reporting, we define as sovereign satellite ownership, direct access services and managed operations. Our ACV metrics do include dedicated capacity contracts as customers are not taking ownership of the hardware and revenue for these services is recognized ratably.

Recurring ACV was 98% of our end-of-period ACV book of business, reflecting our continued focus on selling subscription data contracts and solutions as opposed to onetime professional or engineering services. Approximately 94% of our end-of-period ACV book of business consists of annual or multiyear contracts. Net dollar retention rate on ACV at the end of the second quarter was 109% and net dollar retention rate with Winbacks was 110%.

Our non-GAAP gross margin for the second quarter was 59% compared to 61% in the second quarter of fiscal '26, reflecting investments in support of our satellite services contracts and AI-enabled partner solutions. Our non-GAAP gross margins came in considerably better than expected, driven by the scalability of our business model and our revenue mix in the quarter.

Adjusted EBITDA profit was $13.9 million for the second quarter, better than expected, driven by higher gross margins and the revenue outperformance.

Capital expenditures in Q2, which include capitalized software development, were approximately $29 million. This was just above our guidance range based on the timing of certain Pelican procurements and capitalized software development to support AI-powered solutions. As Will mentioned, given the strong demand we're seeing for our solutions and satellite services, we're investing behind our largest growth opportunities. We expect CapEx to increase in future quarters as we lean into market demand, scale up our manufacturing capacity in San Francisco and Berlin, invest in supply chain resiliency and build out our next-generation fleets.

Year-to-date, we generated approximately $68 million in net cash from operating activities, while year-to-date free cash flow was $21 million. Year-to-date adjusted free cash flow was $29 million, which excludes nonrecurring payments related to litigation settlements.

Turning to the balance sheet. We ended the quarter with approximately $865 million of cash, cash equivalents and short-term investments, an increase of over 200% year-on-year, driven by our positive free cash flow and proceeds from our capital transactions over the last year. During Q2, we raised approximately $120 million from stock sales under our ATM program at an average net sales price of $31.96 per share after expenses. Given our strong balance sheet and cash flow positive operations, we remain focused on executing sales under the program in a disciplined manner, balancing market dynamics with our desire to minimize dilution as we add to our cash reserves.

At the end of Q2, our remaining performance obligations, or RPOs, were approximately $753 million, up approximately 9% year-over-year, of which approximately 46% applied to the next 12 months and 68% to the next 24 months. We estimate our backlog, which includes contracts with the termination for convenience clause to be approximately $815 million, up approximately 11% year-over-year. Approximately 50% of our backlog applies to the next 12 months and 70% to the next 24 months.

This implies that by executing on contracts already in our backlog, we could recognize over $400 million in revenue over the next 4 quarters, not including the impact of any new business or renewals closed during that period. This provides us with excellent visibility to near-term revenue and combined with the strength of our pipeline gives us confidence in our ability to sustain high growth rates in future years.

Let me now turn to our guidance for the third quarter and full fiscal year 2027. In Q3, we're expecting revenue to be between $101 million and $105 million, which represents approximately 27% year-on-year growth at the midpoint, supported by strong visibility from our backlog. As a reminder, our strong Q2 revenue outperformance was due in part to the timing of the handover of our commissioned satellite in Q2 rather than Q3, shifting revenue between the 2 quarters without changing our full year outlook.

We expect non-GAAP gross margin for the quarter to be between 56% and 58%. Q3 adjusted EBITDA loss is expected to be between minus $6 million and minus $1 million, reflecting our focus on investing to drive sustained growth. We are planning for capital expenditures of approximately $30 million to $37 million in the quarter, encompassing our facilities expansions and procurements for our next-generation fleets in response to the strong demand that Will alluded to in his remarks.

For the full fiscal year 2027, we are increasing the low end of our guidance range to reflect our improved visibility as we continue to move through the year. We now forecast revenue between $430 million and $441 million, reflecting year-over-year growth of 40% to 43%. Our non-GAAP gross margin for the year is projected to be between 55% and 57%, above the high end of our prior expectations, driven by the mix of business and scale achieved from optimization of our infrastructure and in-house analytics. We anticipate margins to continue to expand in subsequent years as we scale the business and realize returns on our growth investments.

We are similarly increasing the low end of our guidance range for adjusted EBITDA to reflect the improvement in margins with a current forecast between $3 million and $10 million, reflecting our resolve to drive adjusted EBITDA profitability on an annual basis as we capture market share through advancing our technology stack and expanding our global sales and marketing organization. We also aim to deliver Rule of 40 for this fiscal year, calculated as our revenue growth rate plus adjusted EBITDA margin.

We are planning for approximately $100 million to $115 million in capital expenditures for the year, reflecting the necessary investments in our manufacturing facilities and next-generation satellites to meet surging market demand. CapEx can vary quarter-to-quarter based on the timing of our procurements, launches and real estate build-outs. We are managing the business to be adjusted free cash flow positive on an annual basis for the full fiscal year 2027, while we also focus on opportunities to accelerate growth.

As a reminder, while free cash flow can vary quite significantly quarter-to-quarter based on the timing of cash collections and capital outlays for procurements, our focus remains on generating sustainable adjusted free cash flow on an annual basis through efficient growth in revenue across data solutions and satellite services.

In closing, our Q2 results underscore the robust demand for our products and services. We remain focused on capturing share in a rapidly expanding market to drive top line growth while also delivering profitability on both an adjusted EBITDA and free cash flow basis. We have built a solid launching point to support our ambitious plans, underpinned by a strong balance sheet with over $850 million of cash and equivalents. We are well positioned to execute on our growth initiatives and deliver for our customers whose work is driving real-world security, economic and ecological value. As always, Will and I are awed by the achievements of our Global Planet team over an incredibly busy and exciting quarter and summer. Thank you all for all that you do.

Operator, that concludes our comments. We can now take questions.

[Operator Instructions] Your first question comes from the line of Edison Yu with Deutsche Bank.

First of all, I want to ask about AI and maybe try to tie in some of the broader dynamics going on. There's obviously been a lot of attention paid to the fact that the gap between frontier and open source open models has compressed a lot. Does this have any sort of impact on sort of your efforts? And if so, is that actually a positive tailwind for you?

I thought very much about it in that way. But look, what we're taking is the best models across the field to apply on top of our data. It does help us, of course, the proliferation of that, more models, more availability and what we're trying to be is model agnostic on a lot of our applications. You heard about our AI app and that progressing to the open beta phase. And in that particular app, we allow people to choose their own models back end. So if you have a preference for Gemini over Anthropic or what have you, you can choose. It's a good point about smaller models. Obviously, I think that we're going to turn to a situation where the system will choose the model that's most appropriate for the question at some point. I'm sure that's where the big companies are going to go as well.

But yes, I mean, in the sense that commoditization of those models only accentuates the extra value that we have of our data. And I often say to people, AI is all about the training data. Obviously, most generally to date, LLMs have trained off the text and other information on the Internet. That means they're largely blind to real-world information. And so if you're a farmer trying to understand your farm field or journalist trying to investigate a flood or someone in defense and security trying to investigate a threat around the horizon, you don't want a theoretical knowledge info about that. You want actual information around the corner. And that's where our data, our new daily scan with all of the archive really fits in well. So I think it just -- with the point you're making, only accentuates the value of extra data sets like ours.

Understood. Understood. And then -- yes, yes, totally. Separate question as a follow-up. You cited the pipeline at, I believe, $4 billion, and I think over 25% or $1 billion, I guess, is near term. Can you provide a little bit more context on how that number has been relative to in the past and also kind of the size of the deals maybe in the pipeline relative to -- in Germany?

Yes, it's really great. Yes, we're very pleased with the German deal. That pipeline that you're talking about is referring to Constellation Services. So yes, we've got about $4 billion of deals identified in our pipeline there, about $1 billion of which we have designated as near-term pipeline.

And yes, so we've seen both smaller deals when civil governments come in like this German civil, but it's really exciting that there are civil governments now taking interest in dedicated capacity options, in particular of our Constellation Services options. And I'm pleased to say we're also seeing even bigger deals at the big end of this spectrum. And some of that's contributing to the sheer scale of near-term opportunity pipeline there.

So yes, I mean, I've never seen it as big as it is now. So it's maturing in all the way, but especially the maturation of the big deals is really impressive right now. So we're pleased on all fronts with Constellation Services.

Your next question comes from the line of John Godyn with Citi.

A number of companies out there planning to launch different types of large LEO constellations and the launch players would generally describe the market for their services as very tight. You mentioned a recent partnership in Germany as an example of just diversifying access to launch. I was hoping you could offer a bit of a temperature check on the market for launch services as you see it? And do you have any concerns about getting access at reasonable prices?

Yes. I mean there is definitely a lot of demand for, especially for the rideshare missions with SpaceX right now, and that is driving some challenges for some of the players, especially the smaller players. You have to remember, of course, in the big arc, prices have been coming down. When we first started out at Planet, the launch prices were about $20,000 a kilogram. Now they're significantly less than that. They have been going up a little bit as we're dealing with that, and we've been investing to secure access.

But I would also say that Planet's experience here is really critical. I mean we've launched 688 Earth imaging satellites on 42 rockets of 10 different varieties. So it's not just SpaceX, SpaceX 16 times, the Indian PSLV rocket 7 times, the Vega rocket, the H-II rocket, the Atlas rocket, there are many others. And so we're very experienced in putting our payloads up when we need. And we're very flexible and speedy. So all those providers really like working with us because of how experienced we are in doing that.

So we always turn up with the payloads on time, integrate them quickly and so on. And so they love working with us. So we've got good plans. Of course, diversification is really great when new players, and we like investing contracts with new players because it helps encourage them to get going. They want to show they've got real opportunities to their investors to get going, and that's great. And it's synergistic with our satellite services with countries.

I mean, in the case of that one with Isar Aerospace in Germany, yes, that's really great because, of course, Germany would love to see satellites built in Germany and launched on German rockets. So it just plays into that game. So we're an even stronger industrial player for that country in that example. And there's others around the world like that.

That's great. And if I could just follow-up with a broadening up that question a bit to the supply chain at large, kind of same idea, a lot of activity, a lot of growth in expected satellite launches. Is there anything deeper in the supply chain that's showing up as kind of a problem, a concern, access to some sort of raw material or technology that's tightening up lead times? Anything like that, a temperature check would be great.

Yes. No, we feel relatively good about our supply chains. We do think a lot about the supply chain risk, of course, and shoring that up, and we have made some investments to stockpile things that we really think are critical components. Most of that is relatively straightforward for us. I mean we're relatively small numbers still on most of the global scales.

So Ashley, anything to add to that?

No. I mean I obviously took up guidance on the year for CapEx, and part of that is we want to make sure that we don't run into any of those constraints. So we're looking at longer lead time items and making sure that we're making advanced procurements so that we can move at the pace of demand.

Your next question comes from the line of Mike Latimore with Northland Capital Markets.

Great. On the queryable Earth offering, I guess you call it AI application, what -- when might we see this get to general availability? And then how are you thinking about monetizing it?

Yes. Great questions. I mean, look, we're really pleased with how that, the interest of folks into that application, some of the emerging use cases that we're seeing really incredible. We're really still in a learning journey. It's a beta mode for a reason. We're learning what, and really trying to hone the app into what is valuable for customers. And then we'll think about the marketing and go-to-market pieces of it. So we're more focused on that value creation first. But the general way in which it's helping is it's enabling people to get going really quickly. Like what's the quick way of getting a rough idea? Does Planet have data that could be relevant for this? And what's the quick answer?

And then the other piece of it is just lowering the barriers of entry for non-geospatial experts such that they can get going again without any such team in the loop. And that means also that it opens up to all those organizations that don't have geospatial teams at all. Now there's all sorts of caveats with it. We're learning. It's just early days. So, but I think Planet is in a unique position with one of the most fantastic data sets that could be combined with LLMs to make an incredible offering that is differentiated in the marketplace entirely. I mean, again, all those LLM companies are focused on building real-world models. And to do that, they need real-world data. And we have arguably the most incredible data set of real-world data to train up that. And so we're focusing on doing that ourselves.

Yes, definitely great. And then on the pipeline, when you say 25% is near term, is near term like 12 months? And then also within that near-term bucket, any color on regions that are more prominent?

Yes. What we mean by near term is quarters, not years. And what we mean by -- I mean, in terms of geography, I mean, at least 3 geographies of import, EMEA, APAC and North America are all playing significantly into our pipeline. And yes, I mean, we're very pleased to have about $1 billion in that near-term bucket.

All right. And impressive Rule of 40 this quarter.

Yes. Rule of 70.

Your next question comes from the line of Trevor Walsh with Citizens.

Will, I wanted to maybe start with you around a comment you made for that $8 million deal with NGA. I think you had said that Planet was the only provider kind of in the mix for that deal, which is impressive, not, I think, for any customer, but certainly for a U.S. government where that's not really the standard playbook.

So I'm just maybe from like a broader competitive perspective, are you seeing that type of situation more where you guys are the only kind of game in town around certain deals or RFPs? And if so, kind of what do you think might be driving that? Is that the bread and butter kind of core ability of kind of PlanetScope or other newer type of capabilities?

Well, yes, it's because of our daily scan. And we have seen it before. In the case of the U.S. Navy, that was also sole source awarded and, actually, they competed it the first time. But then once they realize what we had, they sole source it on the second time. So we have seen that on occasion. Obviously, governments do really prefer to have multiple vendors if they can. So this really means they've checked all the boxes and check that there's no other options.

And yes, yes, exactly. Underlying that is our daily scan, which there is simply no one else does that. I mean you can look this up, anyone can look this up. No one has a sufficient number of Earth imaging satellites in the right kind of plane and all that to do a daily scan. And so if you want to monitor for new threats and monitor things consistently, we're the only game in town. Now that doesn't mean there's not other market opportunities for tasking and other things. Obviously, we're playing in that game as well. But in that particular area, which especially on the security front is about finding new threats, we're kind of the only game in town.

Got it. Helpful. Ashley, maybe for you, but Will also feel free to chime in. I think kind of as I just looked over the last few quarters, it looked like D&I is now, I think, at a higher watermark in terms of total revenue contribution in the quarter, 70% this Q. And then at the same time, international is kind of overtaking by a pretty good clip, the North America business.

So just wondering how much of that is really just a function of Germany and JSAT flowing and maybe even the Swedish deal now flowing through the model, and that's just sort of a natural occurrence of those 2 metrics reaching those kind of higher contribution levels? Or if, or is that really more of like what the story of Planet is kind of in the future kind of going forward at least? Is it more of an international D&I-focused type of opportunity really that you guys are chasing ultimately?

So you hit on it at the beginning of your question, as we are realizing backlog into revenue and delivering against our satellite services contracts, that hits primarily international as well as Defense and Intelligence. Now Will talked about the fact that we just signed our first civil government satellite services deal in August. And we do think that there is a meaningful opportunity for us in the civil government arena. And we also see a lot of opportunity for growth in civil government and commercial generally with the daily scan plus AI. I highlighted the fact that we're seeing a lot of interest in data center monitoring across insurance, the energy sector and financial services.

I read a report recently that by 2030, the investment management sector alone is expected to be buying somewhere in the order of $23 billion worth of alternative data sets. And we think the type of data that we're providing fits really nicely into that type of space. So the net of that is there's a lot of opportunity for us to grow in commercial as well as in civil government and AI is really unlocking that by lowering the barrier to entry and not requiring GIS experts in order to derive value from the data.

Your next question comes from the line of Ryan Koontz with Needham & Co.

Great quarter. I actually, I wanted to ask kind of the dynamics that we're seeing in RPO here, just to simplify it for us here. We've seen a step down in total, but a real healthy step-up in current RPO. Is this primarily driven by kind of progress on the sat services deals, these big large deals you're just speaking about? Or are there other trends at play here in terms of shorter duration contracts outside of those?

Yes, it's a really good question. Obviously, the current RPO and current backlog is directly attributable to the fact that we are making progress against some of these larger contracts. And as we continue to execute, we absolutely expect to translate that from backlog into revenue. And then just generally speaking, we've talked about the fact that we're exploring new markets. So those are going to be more short-term pilot deals and pilot opportunities. As we transition those into program of record, we would expect those to turn into longer-term deals. So I think there's a bit of some and some on that.

But as Will said, there's also a lot of opportunity in our pipeline. And as we convert that, we'd certainly expect to continue to see backlog to grow. So it's going to be a little inconsistent quarter-to-quarter other than the fact that we absolutely are executing against the backlog and transitioning that into revenue.

Makes perfect sense. And another question on Maritime Domain Awareness. You guys have had a lot of success there. Are you seeing any changes in the competitive environment? I did see an announcement of one of your partners that's working with a competitor now. Anything you can share about the competitive environment in Maritime Domain?

Yes. I mean there are a number of companies out there doing the, some of the analytics on top of data. But I mean, in terms of the core data set that it depends upon, again, we're the only one doing a daily scan. I mean, we image tens of millions of square kilometers of ocean territory. I mentioned the U.S. Navy partnership just in the last question. And that one alone images 13 million square kilometers of ocean territory. Just to give you a sense, that's far more area coverage than any other at least Western company doing Earth imaging, that alone. It's bigger than the United States area of ocean territory that they are looking at.

And so no one else is doing that. And so yes, so the underlying data set is core to that application. So there's a number of players playing on the top of the analytics, like combining AIS data, SAR data, RF data, other sort of AI to predict ships and things like this, but they all need our data as far as I'm concerned.

Your next question comes from the line Michael Filatov with Berenberg.

So just 2 questions for me. The first one, there's a view out there that some customers might ideally want a single provider across multiple sensing modalities, so optical, SAR, RF, thermal, you name it, rather than integrating point solutions themselves. So you've got Tanager hyperspectral, but the core of the business remains optical.

Can you talk about how you think about the idea of broadening the sensor portfolio? And if you agree with that idea, whether that's primarily an organic development path for Planet or whether M&A could play a role with the balance sheet you've got now? And then I'll follow-up with one more.

Yes. I mean, look, I think electro-optic is the mainstay biggest piece of the market when you look at that, biggest area of applications, biggest market across all the segments. I think especially in civil government and commercial, it will be the biggest area of expansion as well. SAR is more expensive for sure. But there are synergies, to your point, in certain applications. Some of our customers have wanted both. I'll give you one example in NATO. That customer did want both SAR and optical. We integrated into a solution for them and others have done the same.

And so -- and we're willing to work with others and partner on that front. And so we feel that we're in a good position. Again, daily scan is hard on SAR because you would need a lot and there's a lot of power considerations and much more power hungry. And so the base change detection system, we still think is the right thing to focus on optical first. So we think that's the core of the market. We're focused on that. We have partnerships and other things in the other areas.

Sure. And just a follow-up. On the image archive as an AI asset, one thing I'd like to understand a bit better is data consistency across generations. I assume spectral calibration varies across Dove, SkySat, Pelican fleets and then archive spans multiple hardware iterations. So how much sort of normalization work is required before that data is genuinely training ready for a given commercial model or for your customers to utilize?

Yes. Well, I mean, we essentially make our data backwards compatible. So as we enhance it, we always make it such that you can get the subset of the previous iteration with it. So Doves, for example, had 8 spectral bands, but they kept the 4 spectral bands of -- sorry, SuperDoves had 8 -- the Doves had 4, but they kept the same 4 and we do a lot of calibration work. All of these fleets are calibrated to Landsat, Sentinel, MODIS. These are government missions that have high calibration accuracy that we calibrate our data to. So such that people can be assured that when they get an analytic feed from us in the next generation, they always can continue that.

By the way, that is a huge barrier to entry because this sort of calibration is really hard and there's a huge archive involved. I think people often underestimate the value of our archive, but it's central to all of their applications, GMS, for example, relies that work with NGA relies on years of data that looks back at the patterns of life over many years and then determines whether the new image tells you something changed that is significant. It's not just that it's changed, it's changed and it's significant. And that's because of the archive. And the AI applications is all about the archive.

And MDA, you don't just want to know where a ship is now. You also want to know where did it come from. And so not only is our data unique in terms of the daily scan, it's unique because we have the archive. So even if someone had a daily scan suddenly today, they wouldn't have the archive to go back and find all these things for several years. So we've got quite a lead there.

Yes. I think people often underestimate that exact point that you made, which is the calibration over time so that you have a very high signal-to-noise ratio. That has been a very significant investment that Planet has made over the years and makes the change detection analytics that we do on top of the data valuable to our customers.

Your next question comes from the line of Jeff Van Rhee with Craig-Hallum Capital Group.

This is Daniel on for Jeff. Maybe, Will, if we could just start on the pipeline, the $4 billion new sovereign deal pipeline number you gave, which is huge and real impressive. Maybe if you could just give us any other context you can around that in terms of how that's been trending quarter-over-quarter, year-over-year? Any call-outs on the composition of that? Any like concentration, geography, otherwise? Just any other context around that number, very interesting.

Yes. I mean -- so it's been growing in number of deals, in total size. And I think the key thing we were trying to point out with the $1 billion part of it, the 25% of it, is maturation. I also mentioned earlier, we are getting both smaller deals and bigger deals into the pipe. So bigger than we had thought and smaller than we had thought. So that's quite interesting. It's spreading out a little bit, and it's transitioned officially from just defense into civil government.

There's a few other deals like the German one that are in the mix as well, although it's still mainly Defense and Intelligence ones, which we always wanted, right? We want our solutions to transition to civil government and commercial, and we want our Constellation Services to transition. We often think of D&I as our forward-leaning partner. And so -- yes, we're very pleased with that momentum. And to geography, again, I said, there's 3 geos that are really driving that. And it's pretty strong in all 3 of those. I wouldn't say there's one like outstanding place amongst them.

Helpful. And then Ashley, on the model, and I take it the Q3 sequential revenue decline that's guided, that's probably due to the step-up in onetimes in satellite services. So that makes sense. As we look to Q4, then what's implied for Q4, it looks like there's a real strong bounce back in the revenue. Just anything you wanted to call out there? Is that just sort of standard course deals are ramping over time? Or anything in particular to call out in terms of lumpy rev rec, any other rev rec events to call out in the balance of the year?

Yes. No, I think you hit on it. Q2 was really about a step-up due to the point-in-time revenue. And I expect that as we continue to sign more satellite services deals that will both increase the variability in the short term, but over the long-term, probably normalize. In terms of the back half of this year, it's delivering against our backlog and really executing. And from -- from there, it will be landing and expanding with new business. So generally speaking, we feel very good about how the business is trending.

And I also wanted to point out that you saw that the gross margin went up and it is sustaining up, and that's really great as well.

Operator, any further questions?

We lost the operator.

Operator present. Our next question comes from the line of Noah Poponak with Goldman Sachs.

Maybe just following up on that discussion there on the outlook for the rest of the year and the margins. The -- recognize you raised the EBITDA, but it implies lower margins in the back half versus the first half. Can you talk us through where in the cost structure that's happening, why that's happening and maybe how we should think about how that progresses into next year?

So not a significant change in margins, but you're right to call out that it is a modest decline in gross margins. And that's simply just mix of business. So we are continuing to drive scale overall in the business. That's the strength to our one-to-many business model.

But again, satellite services are going to be a different margin profile depending on where we are in delivery across those deals that will impact the mix of business. And so you'll see some variability quarter-to-quarter on gross margin. We were obviously really pleased this quarter to still deliver 59% non-GAAP gross margins even with a meaningful step-up in delivery against our backlog.

Got it. Is there a way to think, Ashley, at this point about you had -- there was a long-term profitability framework provided in the company several years back, earlier days. Is there a way to think about the revenue base now after a lot of changes in the business and in strategy that's required to achieve that long-term profitability model?

There's not necessarily a minimum revenue if that's effectively what you're asking. We talked through last fall when we had our Investor Day, those same long-term financial targets and kind of how we see them evolving over time. We still see this as a business that can deliver very healthy adjusted EBITDA profitability to 25% plus and with that healthy free cash flow dynamics.

And gross margins, we amended that a bit to say north of 60% because it really is going to depend on that mix of business. But as we're demonstrating, even as we continue to fold more satellite services business into our revenue, we're maintaining high gross margins. So generally speaking, we are on track to continue to expand. And the main thing right now is we see so much market opportunity that we are leaning into that and investing across the board.

Okay. That's great. And then just lastly for me on the CapEx increase. Could you just further detail a bit what's behind that? It's a pretty large increase and to kind of be happening in the middle of the year. What is that for?

Yes. It's effectively -- see it as investments in Pelican and Owl. So as Will highlighted, it's strength of pipeline. We don't know ultimately how those deals will shake out in terms of dedicated capacity versus sovereign. So as we are stepping up investing and having that Pelican capacity, we operate under the assumption that those will be Planet satellites that could deliver dedicated capacity. Ultimately, if those turn into sovereign deals, those will flow differently through the P&L. But the long and the short of it is there's a lot of demand out there, and we want to make sure that we can continue to be the one that can deliver the fastest. So we're looking at long lead time items and making sure that we're in a good place on having the right inventory.

Similarly, there is a lot of interest in Owl. So we announced this last year. We've been talking to our customers and understanding from them how 3-meter -- or 1-meter class imagery could really enhance that daily scan relative to 3-meter class imagery. And frankly, the question coming back to us is how quickly can you have this available. And so we're leaning into that and doing some advanced procurements to make sure that as we get those tech demos live, we can be also in parallel scaling up for having the full suite. So that's really the nature of the CapEx increases is just looking at that demand and deciding to pull forward some of those procurements.

[Operator Instructions] Your next question comes from the line of Kristine Liwag with Morgan Stanley.

This is Kyle Benvenuto on for Kristine. Congrats on the quarter. One on the balance sheet for you. You raised $120 million through the ATM during the quarter and ended with roughly $865 million of cash and short-term investments while generating positive free cash flow. What changed in either the opportunity set or your investment requirements that made it attractive to increase the raise of equity here? And should we think of the capital as primarily supporting Owl and additional manufacturing capacity such as the CapEx increase you just discussed or for other strategic opportunities or simply just adding balance sheet flexibility?

Yes, absolutely. I would really anchor it on the latter. It's that strategic balance sheet flexibility. Our target is on an annual basis to be free cash flow positive. So that means we're generating enough operating cash flow to support the CapEx investments in scaling up our next-generation fleet.

So we are very diligent about how we are adding that capital to the balance sheet, making sure that we're sensitive to dilution as we know our shareholders are. But at the same time, we want to be in a position to make strategic moves that can accelerate our market capture and make sure that we can deliver for the broadest customer base possible.

Your next question comes from the line of Greg Pendy with Clear Street.

So you've talked about the Owl upgrade cycle. And I think, Will, you mentioned that it's 10x more data. I assume that going from 3 to 1 and then the 2D area scaling is how you're getting the 10x increase. But just how should we then translate that as analysts? I mean, does this mean that it's going to drive from a financial impact more usage? Or is it just -- is there a pricing increase opportunity?

Yes, definitely a price increase opportunity. I mean this is considerably more information. And so it opens up more applications. Again, think of things like vehicles where a meter, you can start telling more about the type or even ID vehicles. I'll give you a specific example in Maritime Domain Awareness. We can typically ID the vessel if it's under -- if it's over 30 meters in size. At that point, we can actually say it's this vessel with this IMO number, which is really helpful.

Smaller vessels we can see, but we can't ID them. If it's 1-meter, you would expect that roughly to divide in 3 so that you can see a 10-meter vessel. That's really important because there's a lot of fishing vessels and other things that are in that sort of 10- to 30-meter class. So it's things like that opens up more opportunities, different kinds of applications in that case, from military ships to maybe commercial ships and fishing vessels and things like that. So it opens up other applications. So definitely -- and we already have customers interested in that. And for sure, they're expecting the prices to go up.

The other thing that Owl delivers, which Will highlighted is that it's 10x faster. So we're incorporating into the satellite things like AI capabilities being able to do that onboard detection and analysis as well as satellite to satellite communication, which can enable the data to get back to our customers faster. So it's on multiple vectors that this is much more valuable data to our customers. And so yes, we would certainly expect that to be commensurate in terms of the price we can charge.

Your next question comes from the line of Gabriel Flouret with Cantor Fitzgerald.

This is Gabriel Flouret on for Colin. How does the team's balance of domestic opportunities range across the Pentagon's FY '26 budget, FY '27 CR and FY '27 request? To what extent can we see Planet programs to lift as program officers drive balance in commercial offerings?

Well, great question. This administration is really leaning into commercial solutions. And one of the interesting pieces also, especially ones that -- where the company has already gone and invested and is building the system already, so the government gets to just benefit from that. And then they're really leaning in. So -- and we see it across the board. There's substantial programs that we have our eye on this year -- this coming year and the government FY '27. And that hasn't yet passed through Congress. So we're tracking all of that and how it results after reconciliation.

But just know that there are meaningful expansion of commercial type operational budgets across the board, NGA, NRO for the intelligence community, the department itself. So it's getting a lot of budgets for new space capabilities. They're recognizing that space is a critical thing. That's because they're learning that. They're seeing what's happening in Ukraine. They're seeing what's happening in the Middle East, and they're learning that info -- satellites are key to information advantage, which is really critical in these places. So yes, a lot of interest across multiple years. I haven't got more specifics to give you on that or specific programs. A lot of that's very tight, but I assure you there's a lot of interest.

Your next question comes from the line of Chris Quilty with Quilty Space.

I had a follow-up on the Gen 2. You've had the first satellite on orbit for a couple of months. It doesn't look like it's been lowered yet. But when will you have a good idea of the performance characteristics of that satellite, which I believe this is the first one targeting the 30-centimeter class. And does that satellite have an optical crosslink for testing purposes? Or will that come on the next set of satellites?

Yes, great question. So generally, that mission has been doing really well. So I'd say it's -- we have got the results from it, and that's what has enabled us to pave the path most importantly towards the 30-centimeter class imagery. So yes, I mean, roughly succeeded in all the major goals we set out for it. It was always set up as a tech demo mission. So it's all about the learnings as opposed to intending to be an operational satellite. But all the things we set out there for have been doing very well.

It does have inter-satellite links, not optical, though, it's RF inter-satellite links. And so lower bandwidth, but very flexible. And so it can enable last-minute tasking as well as summary data to go back and even full images, but not that many of them. So it really gets us going in that field. We're making more advances there, including on the optical side in later missions coming down the pipe. So yes, I mean, very much did all the things that we were hoping and I'm very proud of the team.

Got you. And just specific on the optical, I mean, that's been the bane of every program out there, including SpaceX in the early days. I don't think you have announced a partner there. Is that an internal development effort? And how confident are you in that system working as designed?

Very confident at this point. That is an internal project and deliberately so, several years of effort to bring that in-house because we wanted independent supply chain, and that's one of the key successes that we've made so that it's really very solid, and we will be adding optical crosslink's later as well on those missions. So that -- yes, having that main telescope system in-house has been a really important advancement. And yes, so it's a success, I would say.

That's all the time we have for questions today. I will now turn the call back over to Will Marshall, CEO and Co-Founder, for closing remarks.

Yes. I'd just say in closing that we feel it was a great quarter, meaningful beat on the top line and on margins. This is all made possible because of a series of new deals. I want to call out a couple of the first operational program for GMS with NGA, our first satellite services deal with a federal civil government agency with Germany, our first countrywide contract with the civil government in Africa with Rwanda. And we shared our first win with an AI hyperscaler for data center monitoring, which is also really cool. Each of these speaks to the value that Planet is bringing to customers around the globe. I couldn't be more pleased also for how our satellite services business is maturing, as we've discussed here, with over $4 billion of opportunities identified and over $1 billion as -- qualified as near-term pipeline.

Stepping back, I believe today, we hold a small growing share of an enormous market. And furthermore, Planet's daily scan, along with our AI is opening entirely new applications and segments on top of that market. So Planet is uniquely positioned to go after these opportunities. On the satellite services side, our ability to deliver in months, not years, is a huge differentiation. And on the GMS side and MDA, it's all powered by a daily scan that no one else has, as we've also discussed on this call. So thanks always to the incredible hard work of the Planet team around the globe that enables this, and thanks, everyone, for joining us today.

This concludes today's call. Thank you for attending. You may now disconnect.

Thank you for joining us, and welcome to the Planet Labs PBC First Quarter of Fiscal 2027 Earnings Call. [Operator Instructions]

I will now hand the conference over to Cleo Palmer-Poroner, Director of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Thanks, operator, and hello, everyone. Welcome to Planet's First Quarter of Fiscal Year 2027 Earnings Call. I'm joined by Will Marshall and Ashley Johnson, who will provide a recap of our results and discuss our current outlook. We encourage everyone to please reference the earnings press release and earnings update presentation for today's call, which are available on our Investor Relations website.

Before we begin, we'd like to remind everyone that we will make forward-looking statements related to future events or our financial outlook. Any forward-looking statements are based on management's current outlook plans, estimates, expectations and projections. The inclusion of such forward-looking information should not be regarded as a representation by plan that future plans, estimates or expectations will be achieved. Such forward-looking statements are subject to various risks and uncertainties and assumptions as detailed in our SEC filings, which can be found at www.sec.gov.

Our actual results or performance may differ materially from those indicated by such forward-looking statements, and we undertake no responsibility to update such forward-looking statements to reflect events or circumstances after the date on which the statement is made or to reflect the occurrence of unanticipated events.

During the call, we will also discuss historic and forward-looking non-GAAP financial measures. We use these non-GAAP financial measures for financial and operational decision-making and as a means to evaluate period-to-period comparisons. We believe that these measures provide you mention about operating results, enhance the overall understanding of past financial performance and future prospects and allow for greater transparency with respect to key metrics used by management in its financial and operational decision-making.

For more information on the non-GAAP financial measures, please see the reconciliation tables provided in our press release issued earlier today, which is available on our website at investors.pae.com. Further, throughout this call, we provide a number of key performance indicators used by management and often used by competitors in our industry. These and other key performance indicators are discussed in more detail in our press release and earnings update presentation, which are intended to accompany our prepared remarks.

At this point, I'd now like to turn the call over to Will Marshall, Planet's CEO, Chairperson and Co-Founder. Over to you, Will.

Thanks, Cleo, and welcome, everyone, joining us today. Planet had another excellent quarter, delivering record revenue and signing an 8-figure deal with an international customer. We also successfully launched 3 additional Pelican satellites, including 1 for Sweden, their first sovereign reconnaissance satellites just 4 months after contract signing.

To briefly summarize the results. We generated a record $94 million in revenue, representing approximately 42% year-over-year growth. Non-GAAP gross margin was 56% for the quarter. For the third sequential quarter, we achieved Rule of 40, which is our revenue growth rate plus adjusted EBITDA margin. End-of-period backlog was approximately $906 million, equating to approximately 72% growth year-on-year. Defense & Intelligence continues to be an area of strength for us, underpinned by the geopolitical backdrop. First quarter D&I revenue grew over 65% year-on-year, driven by strong performance in our data subscription solutions and satellite services.

I'd like to highlight a few recent customer wins with the U.S. government. We were awarded a 6-month $7.5 million contract renewal by the U.S. Navy for vessel detection and monitoring over key areas of interest throughout the Pacific. As we announced earlier today, the U.S. National Geospatial Intelligence Agency, the NGA, awarded Planet a $21.9 million 1-year contract extension for maritime surveillance under the Luno B IDIQ for advanced analytics for maritime operations and connivance. We also received a new award from the NGA for our global monitoring service to support crisis response.

These awards reinforce the U.S. government's commitment to integrating commercial AI-enabled geospatial intelligence into its natural security architectures. They underscore our position as a vital partner for customers seeking persistent monitoring to accelerate critical decision-making in a complex arena. We're very proud to have received these awards and eager to deliver for this critical customer.

We also continue to see robust international government demand driven by the aforementioned geopolitics. Nations are articulating an urgent imperative to secure sovereign access to space, understand threats in their region modernize their defense capabilities and maintain their strategic edge. For example, we signed a new dedicated capacity deal with an international defense and intelligence customer. This 8-figure 1-year contract will give the customer immediate access to dedicated capacity from our satellites in orbit as well as advanced analytical solutions integrated across our Pelican, SkySat and PlanetScope constellations.

And also, we're making excellent progress executing against our previously announced satellite services deals. To highlight 1 prominent example, last month, we successfully launched the first Pelican for the Swedish Armed Forces. Critically, the launch occurred just 4 months after we were awarded the contract. Members of the Swedish delegation attended the launch of Vandenberg, and they expressed their excitement and National prior in launching Sweden's first-ever suberin reconnaissance satellite. We're incredibly proud to have delivered it for them and look forward to what we hope is a long and fruitful partnership.

We're continuing to focus on execution and delivery for our international customers across the board. We believe our ability to ramp them quickly and address their most urgent needs, whether immediate dedicated capacity or speedy launch to orbit continues to be a key differentiator for us. With our reliable track record and agile aerospace approach, we're able to deliver a suite of solutions that meet our customers' critical needs.

Tenant to the civil government sector, where first quarter revenue was roughly flat year-over-year, primarily due to the reduction in our contract with NASA. In spite of that headwind, we've seen some strong momentum with our customers in Europe to share some recent highlights. We were awarded a 2-year 7-figure agreement with the Greek government in support of the country's national satellite space project. Signed to the European Space Agency on behalf of the Hellenic Ministry of Digital Governance and the Hellenic Space Center, this contract will support historical change analysis, trend detection rapid response during critical events and the integration of that data into national monitoring workflows.

We won a 2-year 7-figure contract to provide satellite imagery and AI-powered analytics to the State Agricultural Intervention Fund of the Czech Republic. This deal will support the country-wide agricultural payments and monitoring system, serving approximately 25,000 agricultural holdings across the Czech Republic. Last but not least, we onboard Scottish Agriculture and Rural Economy Director with our partner, Computer Center following a 7-figure award closed at the end of Q4 for PlanetScope data and advanced analytics to support the agricultural reform route map. Planet's deep archive of data and AI analysis will aid in the country's agricultural transition by rewarding farmers who focus on sustainable food production, biodiversity and Net Zero emissions.

Shifting to the commercial sector, where revenue grew over 20% year-on-year, reflecting the focus from our teams on landing and expanding in large opportunities and leveraging AI-enabled solutions. We saw positive trends in the agricultural sector, reflecting our shift in the sector to align our business model with that of our customers focused on improving yields and decreases in costs. We also had our first maritime domain awareness solution sale in the energy sector.

To highlight a few specific wins in the commercial sector then, in April, plan that was awarded a John Deere Supplier Sustainability Award. This award highlighted the value of our data empowering next-generation precision agricultural technologies, helping to improve on farm efficiency and positive environmental impact for John Deere.

We renewed our customer Nave analytics. Since 2022, we have partnered with Nave to incorporate our planetary variables, such as our surface soil moisture and biomass proxy into their data fusion framework. Nave's products provide farmers and their trusted advisers with near real-time streams covering all components of the field, water balance, planting and irrigation decision risks and operational sustainability impacts.

We recently signed Watch duty as a new customer. Watch Duty is a nonprofit public safety platform that provides real-time wildfire tracking, mapping and emergency alerts, particularly in remote regions of the U.S. where satellite imagery fills critical gaps in radio traffic and on-the-ground reporting. Watch Duty has begun integrating our imagery and data into their platform for a mutual lighthouse customer in the energy sector. We're excited about this new integration and look forward to building on this foundation.

Finally, supported by funding from the Bezos Earth Fund, Planet's Tropical Forest Observatory Program is providing 15 environmental and research institutions with 12 months of monthly Mosaics and Planet Scope data. These broad area monitoring products are utilized to track changes across the Amazon biome empowering those institutions to help hold and reverse tropical forest loss.

Turning to product updates. Firstly, in AI, one of our key focus areas for the year. We recently started early customer access to a private beta testing phase of our new AI app, a pioneering tool aimed at making Planet's massive global data archive acquirable through natural language. By leveraging Planet's daily data and integrating large language models, it can help nontechnical users to search the data through space and time conduct complex time series analysis, generate answers and produce automatic insights and even analytic reports at speed and scale. Although the app is still in early testing, we're excited about how it can help accelerate the expansion of our business into new markets, and it has the potential to significantly lower the barrier to entry for new nonexpert users to answer previously unanswerable questions about the world as well as provide the foundations to build bespoke solutions.

We also launched a new feature called SuperRes, an AI-powered technology to improve the resolution of our plan scope data into a 2-meter class resolution visual product, providing clarity for human-in-the-loop analysis with speed and frequency. We are constantly improving our data products to be best-in-class and deliver better results for our customers. Just last year, we leveraged sharpening technology to take the resolution of our daily scan from 3.7-meter to 3-meter class product. This year, we introduced SuperRes. And as previously announced, our planned our constellation will be designed to upgrade our daily monitoring data to a 1-meter class resolution product.

We recently announced our agreement with our partners, Carbon Mapper and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory to design a specialized short-wave infrared only iteration of the Tanager spacecraft. This design would expand the swath width of the instrument approximately fivefold, enabling more imagery area per collect. This new satellite is aimed at accelerating and building upon the existing Tanager satellite mission by enhancing atmospheric gas detection and supporting commercial use cases like fire fuel monitoring.

Earlier this week, Planet announced that the Pelican 11 satellite was shipped to Vanderberg space force base in California ahead of its launch aboard the upcoming Transporter-17 mission with SpaceX. This technology demonstration is the first of the Gen 2 Pelican satellites, which are expected to progress to providing up to 30-centimeter class imagery.

In summary, this quarter, we delivered strong revenue growth and our third consecutive quarter achieving Rule of 40. Our strong performance in Defense & Intelligence demonstrates the mission-critical nature of our data in a complex geopolitical landscape. We launched 3 more Pelican satellites, including our first for Sweden, and we have many additional launches on deck, including our first Gen 2 Pelican tech demo. Last but not least, our investments in AI and position Planet at the forefront of the industry, making planetary scale, insights accessible and actionable to more users than ever before.

With that, I'll turn it over to Ashley to discuss our financials. Over to you, Ash.

Thanks, Will. The year is indeed off to a strong start, and it's exciting to see the acceleration across the business. Before I dive into the financials, I want to take a brief moment to reflect on my recent trip to Panama for our Planet on the Road Customer Conference. It is hard not to start with one of our most impactful programs the work we've been doing with our long-term partner, [ SC CON ] and the Brazilian government to fight illegal deforestation. This program began in September 2020 and has grown to support over 133,000 registered users and 730 institutions. According to the updated figures provided by SC CON, as of April 2026, the government's investment of $59 million into the program has generated an estimated USD 5.3 billion in total impact from fines, seizures and asset freezes, while reducing the amount of illegal deforestation in the Amazon, from over 19,000 square kilometers in 2022 to under 7,500 square kilometers in 2025, a decrease of over 60% in 3 years.

At our event, we also recognize the Panamanian Ministry of the Environment with Planet's Social Impact Award for its pioneering work in protecting the [ Daryan Gap ]. Utilizing Planet's proactive early warning systems the ministry now monitors over 50,000 hectares nationwide, transitioning from reactive monitoring to a near real-time model and successfully improving response times for fires and deforestation from weeks to mere days. Overall, it was a very successful event with over 150 attendees from industry-spanning civil government to finance, logistics, airlines and education and research. Attendees held from 20 different countries, providing a fantastic opportunity to connect directly with our customers and partners, the people who are leveraging our data to help solve some of the planet's most pressing challenges.

Now turning to our financial results. Revenue for the first quarter came in at a record $94 million, representing approximately 42% year-over-year growth. The outperformance in the quarter was driven primarily by new wins. During the first quarter, our Defense & Intelligence sector revenue grew more than 65% year-on-year. The commercial sector was up more than 20% year-on-year, and civil government revenue was approximately flat.

Turning to our regional revenue breakdown. Growth continues to be distributed around the globe. During the quarter, revenue growth was approximately 25% year-over-year in Asia Pacific and North America, 86% in EMEA and 7% in Latin America.

Before I turn to our ACV metrics, I want to remind you that our ACV metric excludes Satellite Services, which, for the purposes of our financial reporting, we define as sovereign satellite ownership, direct access services and managed operations. Our ACV metrics do include dedicated capacity contracts as they are delivered using Planet-owned satellites and infrastructure and revenue for these services is recognized ratably.

Recurring ACV was 99% of our end-of-period ACV book of business, reflecting our continued focus on selling subscription data contracts and solutions as opposed to onetime professional or engineering services. Approximately 92% of our end-of-period ACV book of business consists of annual or multiyear contracts. Net dollar retention rate at the end of the first quarter was 113%, and net dollar retention rate with win backs was 114%.

Our non-GAAP gross margin for the first quarter was 56% compared to 59% in the first quarter of fiscal 2016, reflecting investments in support of our satellite services contracts, new satellite launches and our AI-enabled partner solutions. Our gross margins came in better than expected, driven by the strong bookings and our revenue mix in the quarter.

Adjusted EBITDA loss was $1 million for the first quarter better than expected as the revenue outperformance largely dropped to the bottom line. Capital expenditures in Q1, which include our capitalized software development were approximately $18 million. This was on the lower end of our guidance range based on timing of procurements. We expect CapEx to increase in future quarters as we lean into market demand, scale up our manufacturing capacity in San Francisco and Berlin and build out our next-generation fleets.

Turning to the balance sheet. We ended the quarter with approximately $731 million of cash, cash equivalents and short-term investments, an increase of over $500 million year-on-year, driven by our issuance of convertible debt positive trailing 12 months free cash flow and approximately $108 million in proceeds from exercises of our public warrants. During the quarter, we generated approximately $15 million in net cash from operating activities while free cash flow was a negative $2.5 million.

At the end of Q1, our remaining performance obligations or RPOs were approximately $816 million, up over 80% year-over-year, of which approximately 35% apply to the next 12 months and 66% to the next 24 months. We estimate our backlog, which includes contracts with the termination for convenience clause to be approximately $906 million, up approximately 72% year-over-year. Approximately 40% of our backlog applies to the next 12 months and 69% to the next 24 months.

Let me now turn to our guidance for the second quarter and full fiscal year 2027. In Q2, we're expecting revenue to be between $102 million and $107 million, which represents approximately 42% year-on-year growth at the midpoint, driven by strong bookings growth and delivery on our backlog. We expect non-GAAP gross margin for the quarter to be between 52% and 55%, a modest step down from Q1 as a result of our satellite services execution, the mix of deals with AI-enabled partner solutions and increased depreciation from the recent launches of our Pelicans.

Q2 adjusted EBITDA profit is expected to be between breakeven and $5 million, reflecting our investments to drive sustained growth. We are planning for capital expenditures of approximately $21 million to $27 million in the quarter.

For the full fiscal year 2027, we are raising our revenue expectations to be between $425 million and $441 million, representing approximately 41% growth at the midpoint. We believe our Q1 performance and backlog provide us with excellent visibility to our revenue projections. The visibility enables us to shore up our growth expectations for the year and provides us with the confidence to invest behind initiatives to sustain high growth in the future years.

Our non-GAAP gross margin for the year is expected to be between 52% and 54%, better than our prior expectations. We anticipate margins will expand in subsequent years as we realize returns on our growth investments. We are maintaining our prior expectations for fiscal year '27 adjusted EBITDA profit to be between breakeven and $10 million, reflecting our desire to drive EBITDA profitability on an annual basis even as we continue to invest in our Space Systems capabilities, AI-powered solutions and our global sales and marketing organization.

We also aim to deliver a Rule of 40 for this fiscal year, where Rule of 40 is calculated as our revenue growth rate plus adjusted EBITDA margin. We are planning for approximately $80 million to $95 million in capital expenditures for the year, reflecting the necessary investments in our next-generation satellites to meet accelerating market demand. CapEx recognition can vary quarter-to-quarter based on the timing of our procurements, launches and real estate build-outs. Even with these operating and capital expenditures, we expect to be free cash flow positive on an annual basis again in fiscal year '27.

As a reminder, while free cash flow can vary quite significantly quarter-to-quarter based on the timing of cash collections and capital outlays for procurement, our focus remains on generating sustainable annual free cash flow through efficient growth in revenue from our Data Solutions and satellite services.

In closing, the incredible start to the year is a testament to the growing global demand for high-impact geospatial data and sovereign space capabilities with record first quarter revenue and a 42% revenue growth rate, we are demonstrating the ability to scale the business and expand our market while maintaining financial discipline as evidenced by our Rule of 40 performance and improved full year guidance.

From Brazil to Sweden and around the globe, our work is yielding tangible ROI for both our customers and our planet. As we lean into a strategic investment cycle for our next-generation satellites and pioneering Geospatial AI solutions, we remain steadfast in our commitment to turning daily global change into actionable intelligence. We are well positioned for a year of delivering durable revenue growth and sustainable annual free cash flow, building our momentum as the indispensable data layer for a changing world.

Will and I are once again blown away by the excellent performance and constant innovation of the Global Planet team. Thank you for all that you do. Operator, that concludes our comments. We can now take questions.

[Operator Instructions] Your first question comes from the line of Colin Canfield from Cantor.

Maybe if you could talk about the remaining opportunities like all within the context of -- if you go back to September's Investor Day slides and call it, roughly $3 billion to $4 billion pipeline, can you maybe rank order the remaining opportunities among intelligence customers and maybe split that out between international and the U.S.? And then if you can provide any color on kind of how you think about maybe near-term award opportunities and how it splits within that matrix?

Do you want to take this one?

I mean, obviously, Colin, we're not going to give too much color on the specifics of our pipeline. What we say is it continues to be robust. We updated last quarter that it had increased our Analyst Day, and we continue to be very well positioned just with the proof points that we actually already have. As you recall, when we signed the opportunity with the funded by the government last summer, we were able to get them there for satellite on the next rocket launch. And with Sweden, we similarly just announced that the first satellite for their contract went up on our most recent launch of 3 Pelicans.

So we are very well positioned on the basis that we've got great solutions. We can get these customers up and running on our data and AI-based solutions very quickly, while we also rapidly move them through our pipeline of production or a production line to get their first sovereign satellites into orbit. So strong pipeline continues to be very healthy. It is balanced geographically and then I think Planet's well positioned. Anything you'd add, Will?

No. I mean I think it's just -- we're seeing really robust demand here. And we said last time how that had increased at least it way and both in size and in a number of deals. And Ashley is pointing out, I mean, what we have here is that we can execute really fast. Countries really like that. They can get them access to a satellite they're in orbit for both the data and the AI-enabled solutions and quickly get sovereign satellites up in space and the 1 with Sweden, I was to point out is a great example. They got immediate data services from our satellites and then within 4 months the first sovereign satellite in orbit.

I mean, basically, we're the only ones that can do that, it's really unheard of traditional aerospace industry would take years, normally decades to do that sort of capability. And here, we are offering that just 4 months after signing a contract. So that's unprecedented in the sector, it speaks to our differentiation and that's why governments are coming to Planet for that kind of solution.

That's great. No, I appreciate the color. And then maybe pivoting over to data centers. If you could talk about kind of any color on initial discussions that you and Google are having with the chip suppliers? And then maybe talk about kind of what do you think are the key engineering signposts that investors should look for as Planet on-ramps for orbital compute?

Yes. Well, it's a very exciting area. Obviously, what we're doing with Google is an early tech demo. And on the chip side, it's all leveraging their TPU architecture, testing those working space, which is one of the questions, I'm pretty confident about that side of it. But we're also testing things like inter-satellite links because we will be formation flying these sort of satellites together and other technologies, radiation the radiators for the power, and that's one of the other core technologies that we have to develop a little bit here.

I mean, well, stepping back a little bit, what I'd say is that it's very clear to me that the -- this is going to make sense fiscally and from an engineering standpoint, within 10 years, it will definitely be cheaper to do it in space than on the ground as to exactly how fast we can do it between now and then. I think that depends on some of these engineering questions that we'll be tackling in these early tech demos.

So again, early days, but a really exciting field and you see there's a lot of players going into it, and we think Planet is well positioned because of our history of doing hundreds of satellites before 1 of the few players that have done that. We've already put fast computers, GPUs and video GPUs in space. We already do a lot of stuff with AI, as you're all aware. And so we're well positioned for this sector.

Your next question comes from the line of Edison Yu from Deutsche Bank..

Great. I wanted to first follow up on the orbital data center. In your kind of early work around the engineering, do you have a sense on what kind of compute density is realistic in the next couple of years? And I think the framework has been through around kilowatts per tonne. And so any sense on what you guys are seeing there? Is it realistic would be like 80 or 100? I'll stop there for now.

Thanks for the question, Edison. I mean I'm not getting those sort of technical specific to this stage. I mean, remember, this is really, as Google put it, a moonshot at the present time, it's going to be an iterative project that we iterate the capabilities in space. But I will point out that there's several interrelated challenges to do with compute radiators and the interconnect between all the different satellites as well as their computers on board any one satellite, and then will be model.

And that complex trade space, I think a lot of people are focused just on the launch costs, but it is a lot to do with the efficiency of your chips and because the excess energy you have to give up in here, you have to radiate out. And so efficiency of chip space is a really important part as well as the networking of those together and the firmware to optimize all of it. So it's a very complex trade space. And one of the things Planet is really good at is that sort of thing and doing really good systems engineering to bring down costs for that sort of space gas system. So again, early days, but those are the kind of problems we're tackling.

Understood. And then I wanted to ask you about the [ SAs ] you put out very, very recently.

Yes. From Planetary intelligence, yes.

Yes. And obviously, I think very profound and I think thought-provoking ideas. I guess in a more kind of operational sense, what do you think is kind of the next, call it, 2 to 3 years, how do we see that sort of manifest either in the business or industry? Like what are some paths you could envision to see that benefit more on like commercial or operational basis?

Well, I mean, that's very much the first part of what I was talking to in that Planetary Intelligence SA, which is the merger of Earth imaging data with AI and the large language models really asking the value latent in earth imaging data in new ways and lowering the barriers to entry. And I think that's what is most exciting, it doesn't depend on the future phases of compute in space or something. I think that, that sort of super chases this when we get to that phase, like it's natural that sensing for -- at the planetary level of that space. We've done that for years, the compute is going to follow, and they will lead to this sort of new Planet intelligence era.

But way before that, right now, earth imaging data and other sort of space data sets and AI enabling us to do more real-world models, more real-world models open up real-world applications on the ground today in farming, in energy, in insurance and so on. Most of the entities that we serve today are big governments, big enterprise commercial players and this book can enable that to be lower, right? And I think that's the most exciting thing now. And so that's what we're mostly focused on. But it's cool to do the tech overs for computing base as well because of the long term that could be very exciting too.

Your next question comes from the line of Jeff Van Rhee from Craig-Hallum Capital Group.

Will, on the AI side, interesting exceeding you've got the beta program now up with the natural language query. Can you just talk about the scope of the trial? How many participants, thoughts on when that goes GA? And I'd love to hear is kind of maybe your mind, what are a couple of more compelling use cases you're seeing people playing with right now?

Well, firstly, it's very early days. So let me just say -- I mean we're in a beta testing mode, as I mentioned in the prepared remarks. And again, just like the answer to the prior question, this is about unlocking the latent value in our data more easily and more simply. -- especially expanding the number of users that could get value out of that really fast speed, scale and simplicity basically, all in one. And -- but it's early days in the testing. So I'm not going to get civic numbers, but we have a cohort of beta-testers just so that we can find where the best value use cases we could dive into and how do we improve that product so that is better able to serve those use cases.

So very early days, but what's tantalizing about it is the Planet historically has faced the solution gap that is that our data in principle can answer a lot of questions. In practice, it's difficult. You have to build these solutions. We've been focused on these AI-powered solutions, especially with defense intelligence, MDA, GMS. In principle, this direction can help a lot of others by enabling people to be able to build bespoke solutions on top of our data leveraging this kind of technology, which can unlock that for a lot more players. And we know that that value is there. and AI is ready to help us tie that quicker, I think.

So that's the exciting thing, and it's also where Planet is so uniquely positioned because all of this is because of our daily scan. Our daily scan is really so unique because no one in the Earth Observation sector really is doing that sort of daily scan, at least not commercially. And that is the basis for all these applications have got to wider areas where you don't have the task a satellite, but it already covers all the land you're interested, whether for agriculture, energy and so on. And that's really great for these AI models.

Yes. I mean, I think it certainly has the potential to break up the commercial and civil TAMs. Maybe one last quick one. On the Pelican 1s up and up and ramping nicely 50 centers, -- you talked about the tech demo Pelican 2 going to 30 centimeters. Just any crude swags on kind of based on prior experience, how long you would expect to tech demo for and broad brush sort of strokes on when you think those Pelican 2 to start going up commercially?

I don't comment on that specifically, but we have got a bunch more launches this year. We are ramped and at pace on the Pelican gen 1, as you're aware. We already launched 3 of those earlier this year, including that first one for Sweden. And we're excited about that gen 2, but it is a tech demo at this stage. So a couple of technologies that it has on it is got a bit of a bigger telescope to enable it to get to that 30 centimeters, and it also has a satellite to sell like communications as well as the NVIDIA chips that we're flying with the other ones.

In combination is what enables the more real-time insights going from hours, latency for getting analysis of after you take a picture to minutes. And so that's the biggest improvement. It's even more important, I would say, than the resolution improvement, although both are important. But we'll get back to you once we get that in albeit start seeing how it performs but we're ready to scale that week, too, and excited about the program.

Yes. I think it's important just to highlight that across our satellite fleet. As you know, we tend to repurpose a lot of the components. So there's a lot of commonalities even as we iterate on various aspects, whether that's improving latency, improving the payload for resolution. So that enables us to have a much faster pace of iteration than you might typically see in hardware iterations, especially in space. So I would say, stage in, there's a lot of fun stuff coming.

Your next question comes from Mike Latimore from Northland Capital Markets.

All right. Great. Yes. Congrats on the quarter. Over the last several quarters, we've highlighted Europe as being an area of urgency and increasing demand, I guess, is it still kind of the most hot spot within the pipeline? Or is the pipeline still broadening?

I'd say it's very global. I mean we have strong interest in Asia, U.S. as well. North America is strong. But I think you're right. Europe is probably our strongest area. EMEA is strong, as you saw in the breakdown very strong growth in that region. And obviously, all of the global interest is driven by a lot of the geopolitical trends. It's driving demand because of political uncertainty. And in this uncertainty, people want their own sovereign space capabilities, the access to information, about threats in their neighborhood and we can provide that relatively quickly and affordably.

So countries are coming to us, Europe is perhaps most stressed by that kind of situation. So obviously, that is driving strong demand there. And of course, we also have a very strong European base. We have hundreds of employees in Europe and a lot of facilities, mission control center in Berlin. And as you're aware, we're now opening a manufacturing site for our Pelican most advanced Pelican spacecraft in Berlin as well. approximately doubling our manufacturing capacity. So we're really leaning into that market opportunity, plan is well positioned there as well.

Great. And then on the commercial side, nice change in the trajectory there this quarter. Are the drivers of that change sustainable? Or was there some one-offs in this quarter? How should we think about commercial?

I think it's very sustainable. And one of the things about our cultural partnerships that we mentioned is that we've really turned it around to a point where we really align that business model with the agricultural partners that we're doing with like the John Deere piece that we announced. As they do well, we do well. And that -- so we took a reset in that area, but now we're growing it. And so we feel good. I'm very happy about that growth as well. Ashley, anything to add?

Yes. I would just say the comments that we made earlier, both around the AI solutions that we have, like things like GMS, our MDA as well as this beta of a new natural language-based interface is really enabling us to engage with customers that haven't historically really thought about how they might integrate GIS into GIS data sets into their modeling and analysis. So even in financial services sector, when you think about what things like GMS or MDA can do really unlocking kind of a view into changes in global supply chains and patterns and understanding when a change in pattern could lead to some type of economic indicator of change or market impact.

So we're excited. We are early days in -- certainly in the AI application but also even in exploring how the solutions that we've initially explored primarily in defense and intelligence, are unlocking opportunities for us in the commercial sector. So we remain very optimistic about how the commercial sector can be a major growth vector for us in the years to come.

Your next question comes from the line of Kristine Liwag from Morgan Stanley. .

This is Gabby Knafelman on for Kristine. Congratulations on the quarter. since last quarter, Planet moved from a 14-day delay in Middle East imagery access to an indefinite restriction for imagery in the conflict region. Have you seen any change in customer behavior as a result? And since the news came out in early April and with the recent ceasefire talks, is there any anticipated time line or framework for restoring satellite imagery access in the Middle East?

Yes. Thanks for the question, Kristine. When there are conflict amount where we always have to balance operational security needs for civilians or military person in the area with public interest. And I just noticed something that's, I think, been confused a little bit in the media reporting on this is that all of our core customers continue to have access in that area straight away. It's really about publication that could lead to operational security challenges that folks are worried about legitimately and we're putting a delay in phase for.

So most of our core customers continue to have data access. So -- and of course, the intent is to unwind that as the conflict results. And so our stakeholders, obviously, around the board care about this, and we do too. And I think that the strong demand we've seen in the region is excellent despite that. And just so you're aware, we do have a managed access program for media clients as well. It's just moved to a push model, which is rather more similar to other folks in the earth observation sector, where we provide imagery on an as-needed basis. we can and where it's not going to hurt security operations in the region. And that means that others continue to happen in the press as well.

Got it. That's super helpful color. And a quick follow-up. Defense & Intelligence is clearly becoming a larger portion of revenue and has been the fastest grower for quite some time now. We also highlighted some nice civil government and commercial wins during the quarter. I think as we look ahead, how should we think about the size and growth of Civil and Commercial relative to Defense & Intelligence?

Well, I think that's a question. And the way I view it is long term, I believe the civil and commercial sectors will be bigger than Defense & Intelligence. We're obviously leaning into Defense & Intelligence right now because there is such strong demand, and it makes sense for us to lean in there. We're very needed. But as we just talked about AI, that helps us unlock these other areas. I think that's the right way to think about it. It helps us to accelerate that. And yes, I mean does the breadth of use cases in commercial all the sectors we talked about before, we believe that's many tens of billion dollars of TAM to go after in commercial and civil. And so we're going to go after those. But I think for the immediate focus, Defense & Intelligence is the best place to focus because there's such strong demand.

And also a very sophisticated customer that provides us with feedback that helps make our solutions even stronger, and we think ultimately much more broadly applicable. .

[Operator Instructions] Your next question comes from the line of John Godyn from Citi.

This is [ Jeremy Jason ] on for John Godyn. I just kind of wanted to ask what are the upcoming milestones for the key programs that you're looking forward to? Just for clarity's sake and can you provide any color on like the time line for those?

Which key programs are you referring to? .

Involvement in, for example, Al, you guys mentioned that in the prepared remarks?

Like the tech demos? Yes. So there, we're building our first demo spacecraft scheduled for the end of this year. It's a lot of synergy with the Suncatcher, so we're using the same bus. So as the Suncatcher, that's the project with Google for computing space. same bus, different payloads, just like we did with Tanager and Pelican, same bus different payload, and so we're building that. And we're very pleased with how that's progressing. It's still being built right now. It's early days. So we'll let you know when there's updates.

Your next question comes from the line of Trevor Walsh from Citizens.

Great. Well, maybe ask you a few want to add as well. There was a smaller competitor, but a competitor that announced a win in late April kind of end of your quarter. of their own satellite sovereign deal, much smaller than I think you guys have booked, but I was just curious if you're seeing just based on your own success and that being pretty widely known and policies if you're seeing more competition specifically in that space kind of working for government agencies, international, et cetera? And then kind of relatedly, is there a minimum deal size that you all would entertain as far as structuring more where the sovereign or the entity owns the actual satellite, so something more of an JSAT kind of realm?

Yes. Good question. So I mean, look, I don't think competitive landscape has changed very much. I don't know which deal you're referring to, but obviously, there are other players that can build imaging satellites for countries. But really our differentiator, as I mentioned, is proven track record, having launched hundreds of satellites doing earth imaging before and the speed of delivery, the speed of delivery in months rather than years, sometimes decades for these systems.

And also cost performance that I would add, having had that long track record, we've got the cost down of our satellite a large -- sometimes these things are radically lower cost. We might be launching 10 at lights at the same cost as people were before or companies were before launching just 1 or more. And so that is -- all those differentiators make us strong in the market. And we haven't had too many cases where we see others competing with us, we feel pretty strong.

And I would just add, we're able to compete on all of the points that Will just made in terms of speed and performance and cost effectiveness. We also are the only ones that can enable customers to get up and running immediately on the network of satellites that we have combination of the daily scan and the analytics on top, which help inform them where to look and how to best optimize the sovereign capabilities as they're building them out. including how they want those in orbit so that they can get the best performance ultimately out of the fleet that we would build for them.

And we can very cost effectively get them up and running through a dedicated capacity is or tasking credits so that they immediately are getting the eyes that they need to understand what's going on around them. So it's not just the ability to be best-in-class in delivering satellites, which obviously, we are but it's also the fact that we have the network of satellites and capabilities, the daily scan and the analytics solutions on top of it that bring value on day 1.

Your next question comes from the line of Ryan Koontz from Needham & Co.

A question for Ashley on gross margins, surprised to get the upside here. Can you maybe give a bridge or unpack what the upside was on mix? Obviously, satellite services deals, are those lower margins not contributing as much? Maybe help unpack the mix a little bit for us.

Yes. It's my favorite kind of upside. It's sales performance. As you know, we typically for the purposes of our own planning, assume pretty back-half-weighted sales execution that just gives us headroom on that front. And when they bring in something like an 8-figure international deal early and that drives data and solutions revenue, that's very high margin upside in the quarter. So I really attribute this to the excellent performance of our sales team and the delivery teams that get those customers up and running so that we're going from contract to revenue very, very, very quickly.

So the business model that we have where delivering data comes at relatively low marginal cost means that when we drive upside on revenue, you see that fall to the bottom line and in this case, it definitely stopped by gross margin along the way and drove up all the way.

And actually, that was for your deal you signed in this quarter? .

Correct.

Your next question comes from the line of [ Stephen Varhaftik ] from Wedbush Securities. Your line is now open.

Congrats on the quarter, everybody. So actually, just a question for you because it seems like there's a lot of different focus is for capital investments. You thinking about the R&D for new AI enable solutions, you're thinking about FX ramp. I mean, you really do have a strong balance sheet. So what would you say is the priority from a capital allocation perspective? And then if I can add just one more on to that. Is the company still looking at M&A opportunities? I know that you haven't shy away from it, but I want to get a little more color on that opportunity.

Yes. Thank you for the question. We're obviously very proud of our balance sheet, and it's a great asset, especially when we're delivering such a mission-critical service to really important customers there it gives them a lot of comfort to see that we have both a strong business and a strong balance sheet to go with it. When we think about capital allocation, as you might imagine, we are a very innovative company, and we are never short on ideas. But we always have the customer at the center of what we do and our understanding what customers need that can really unlock market opportunity for us.

So I'd say the investments that we're making are really prioritizing growth and market capture. So how can we sustain or even expand our growth rates and then continue to drive high margins. And we gave the Rule of 40 framework, revenue growth rate plus EBITDA margin as one way that we think about making sure that we're balancing, making these investments, but also running a good business that generates profits that generates free cash flow and always has an eye to how we scale our profit margins and free cash flow margins can expand. So a lot of exciting things, incredibly innovative teams, but also really doing it in service of market capture and delivering value to the customers.

And on the M&A side that you brought up, we're mainly focused on executing and have most of what we need. We will do things like the Bedrock acquisition that we did that enhances our powered solutions in really good ways, and that team is working really well, by the way, and very integrated into our AI-powered solutions, especially in the defense and intelligence space. We'll continue to look out for things that could be accretive, especially to the core business product or business synergies. But again, I think we have most of what we need. And so we are many heads down focused on executing on the deals we have.

Your next question comes from the line of Greg Pendy from Clear Street.

Just a real quick one. As you have so many things that's going on, especially later in this year with the first hole and then subsequent launches to fall in 2027. Are there any stress areas in either the supply chain or launch that could move things around?

Yes, we're seeing launch being -- be a little bit more competitive than it used to be. But Planet is used to working with a lot of different players. We've launched 40 rockets, I think on 10 different launch vehicles. And so we know how to do that, and we have a long history and relationship with various launch providers. And I would also say, despite a little bit of extra competition for the space right now, there's a lot of new players coming onto the for right now. And so we're excited about them, we're excited about what they can offer as well and increased competitiveness in the launch sector.

As for supply chain, nothing material to point out, but we -- but one of the things we looked, of course, look at is buying down risk in supply chain by buying components. And that's one of the reasons that we're focused more on growth than profitability where we need to do that to show up risk. Anything to add to that?

No, I'd just say in some of our prior quarters, we've talked about the fact that we've taken up our CapEx, capital expenditures specifically to make sure we're looking at those areas where we can buy in advance to derisk any supply chain but also get better pricing by buying more upfront. So it is something that we keep an eye on and manage, I think, quite successfully. And generally speaking, the team has a very resilient supply chain.

Thank you. That's all the time we have for questions today. I will now turn the call back to Will Marshall, CEO and Co-Founder, for closing remarks.

Thanks, everyone. Well, we feel like we had an excellent start to the year, really good momentum. Obviously, on the financial side, it was great that we got the 42% growth, hitting Rule of 40 the third consecutive quarter, $900 million in plug. We feel very excited about the financials. And obviously, it was great in Space side, which to have our first launch to send our first Gen 2 tech demo to the launch site, launched Sweden's first, a submarine. So lots of progress on the space side.

And on the AI side, and other pieces of the product. We did a super resolution, the beta of our app and missing in AI is unlocking a lot of value late in our data. So I'm really proud of the work done in this quarter that led us to all these results. And so thank you to the incredible team and all the efforts that they do to enable us today. Thanks a lot for tuning in.

This concludes today's call. Thank you for attending. You may now disconnect.

Thank you for joining us, and welcome to Planet Labs PBC Fiscal Fourth Quarter and Full Year 2026 Earnings Call. After today's prepared remarks, we will host a question-and-answer session. [Operator Instructions].

I will now hand the conference over to Cleo Palmer-Poroner, Director of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Thanks, operator, and hello, everyone. Welcome to Planet's Fiscal Fourth Quarter and Full Year 2026 Earnings Call. I'm joined by Will Marshall and Ashley Johnson, who will provide a recap of our results and discuss our current outlook. We encourage everyone to please reference the earnings press release and earnings update presentation for today's call, which are available on our Investor Relations website. Before we begin, we'd like to remind everyone that we will make forward-looking statements related to future events or our financial outlook.

Any forward-looking statements are based on management's current outlook plans, estimates, expectations and projections. The inclusion of such forward-looking information should not be regarded as a representation by plan that future plans, estimates or expectations will be achieved. Such forward-looking statements are subject to various risks and uncertainties and assumptions as detailed in our SEC filings, which can be found at www.sec.gov.

Our actual results or performance may differ materially from those indicated by such forward-looking statements, and we undertake no responsibility to update forward-looking statements to reflect events or circumstances after the date on which the statement is made or to reflect the occurrence of unanticipated events.

During the call, we will also discuss historic and forward-looking non-GAAP financial measures. We use these non-GAAP financial measures for financial and operational decision-making and as a means to evaluate period-to-period comparisons. We believe that these measures provide useful information about operating results, enhance the overall understanding of past financial performance and future prospects and allow for greater transparency with respect to key metrics used by management in its financial and operational decision-making.

For more information on the non-GAAP financial measures, please see the reconciliation tables provided in our press release issued earlier today, which is available on our website at investors.planet.com. Further, throughout this call, we will provide a number of key performance indicators used by management and often used by competitors in our industry. These and other key performance indicators are discussed in more detail in our press release and our earnings update presentation, which are intended to accompany our prepared remarks.

At this point, I'd now like to turn the call over to Will Marshall, Planet's CEO, Chairperson and Co-Founder. Over to you, Will.

Thanks, Cleo, and welcome, everyone, joining us today. Last year was transformational for Planet, and I'm proud of everything that our team accomplished. We made incredible progress in the satellite services market, signing a $240 million agreement funded by Germany and a 9-figure deal with Sweden, capping off 3 such deals in 12 months. We launched 4 satellites, including 4 of our high-resolution Pelican satellites, invested strongly in AI and announced a cutting-edge partnership with Google to demonstrate satellites for compute and space.

We delivered record annual revenue, adjusted EBITDA profitability, positive free cash flow and accelerated our revenue growth. And we laid out a strong foundation for the year ahead, enabling us to continue that growth acceleration. So let's dive in.

To briefly summarize the full year results. We generated a record $308 million in revenue, representing approximately 26% year-over-year growth. Non-GAAP gross margin was 59% for the year. Adjusted EBITDA profit came in at $15.5 million and free cash flow was $53 million, representing our first full fiscal year of non-GAAP profitability and excellent milestone for the team as we strike a balance between profit and growth.

Q4 was also a record for revenue, representing 41% year-over-year growth and our fifth consecutive quarter of adjusted EBITDA profitability. For the second sequential quarter, we achieved Rule of 40, which is revenue growth plus adjusted EBITDA margin. And on an annual basis, we achieved a rule of 30 in a full year earlier than we anticipated. End-of-period backlog was over $900 million, approximately 79% growth year-on-year, providing us with excellent visibility to accelerating our revenue growth for the coming fiscal year.

Defense & Intelligence was a major area of strength for us in FY '26, underpinned by global dynamics. Full year D&I revenue grew over 50% year-on-year, driven by strong performance in our data subscriptions, solutions and satellite services.

To recap our role here, Planet Labs was founded on a core mission of making information about our world visible, accessible and actable to help both sustainability and security globally. As the geopolitical landscape shifts, security is an urgent mandate for governments worldwide, and our customers face mission-critical decisions in an increasingly complex and chaotic world, and this mission is critical to them.

We view security as inextricably linked to sustainability. Resource scarcity and climate disasters are not just environmental issues. They are direct threat multipliers or even triggers for conflict. The Defense and Intelligence sector is essential to realizing our mission. Our customers rely on us to help identify unknown unknowns, detect changes and warning signals that they didn't know to look for before they escalate into crisis is a critical part of our public.

To highlight a few recent customer wins in this area. During the quarter, we received 2 awards from the U.S. Defense Innovation Unit. We were awarded a 7-figure extension of our pilot in support of Indo Pacific Command to deliver vital indications and warnings. The short-term contract demonstrates how customers can leverage planet data and AI-powered analytics to monitor sites of strategic interest for critical changes and threats.

DI also exercised an option under the existing hybrid space architecture pilot with Planet for just under $1 million to demonstrate the cutting-edge capabilities for our high-resolution Pelican set lines. During the quarter, NATO's Allied Command transformation also extended its agreement with Planet to deliver persistent space-based surveillance and enhanced indications and warning capabilities.

The Board underscores Planet's position as a trusted and essential partner for customers seeking strategic indications and warnings across broad domains. Finally, last month, the U.S. Defense Agency selected Planet as a prime contractor for the Shield IDIQ contract vehicle. Planet will now compete for awards under that program.

Turning to the civil government sector, where full year revenue was flat year-over-year to share some recent highlights. During the quarter, Planet was awarded a 7-figure renewal and expansion by the German Federal Agency for cartography and Geodis or BKG. Under the 1-year renewal, BKG will continue its countrywide partnership through which employees have more than 400 German federal institutions gain access to plant data and solutions for a wide variety of uses.

As an example, this expansion will allow BKG to track permafrost thawing across the Arctic. In January, we announced an enterprise scale agreement with Slovenia's surveying and mapping authority, to provide comprehensive satellite data and high-resolution task and capabilities across the country's civil public administration in support of agriculture, urban planning and disaster management.

Shifting to the commercial sector, where annual revenue was down year-on-year. While this trend was expected, given our increased focus on large government customers and the headwinds in agriculture, we remain confident in the commercial sector as a significant market opportunity for Planet, especially as we continue to advance our AI-enabled solutions.

To share a few customer highlights from the quarter, specifically around our work in energy. We were awarded a renewal by San Diego Gas & Electric, which utilizes planet data and analytics to monitor vegetation health and conditions within their service areas to manage risk of wildfires during the dry season.

We also signed a strategic partnership with AI DASH establishing Planet as the preferred provider of daily and weekly fuel monitoring data for utility wildfire risk mitigation across North America. Through the partnership, leading investor-owned utilities are already using planet data to identify where and when to deploy fuel treatment resources. Reducing ignition risk and targeting high-priority clearance with Precision that was not previously possible.

Turning to our Satellite Services business. In January, we announced a 9-figure multiyear deal with the Swedish arm forces to rapidly deliver a suite of satellites, space-based data and solutions to support Sweden's peace and security operations.

In terms of our existing contracts for satellite services, our teams are continuing to execute well. We are progressing with the builds for our contract with JSAT and beginning to serve dedicated capacity under the German funded contract. We're continuing to find that our satellite services contracts are a win-win-win. The customer guarantees their sovereign space capabilities in their desired area of interest.

Our other clients will benefit from increased capacity and revisit rates in the rest of the world and Planet receives capital to forward fund our fleet build-outs. They also bolster our data and solutions offerings as countries want both speed and scale of our data solutions and the sovereignty of our satellite services technology. Through our AI-enabled solutions, we accelerate time to value, become more deeply embedded in our customer operations and gain more direct visibility to our customers' operational needs.

We're leaning into these synergies across our product offerings. We're continuing to see robust demand from around the world for satellite services, driven by the current geopolitical landscape and the demand for sovereign space systems.

Our competitive edge here is twofold. Firstly, our proven track record, having launched over 650 Earth imaging satellites by far the most of any commercial company. Our second is speed. We are able to launch the first satellites within a few months of contract signing, as shown with the partnership funded by Germany, far faster than traditional aerospace. The demand is significant and reflected in our pipeline, which has grown appreciably in both number of deals and average deal size since we spoke about this at our Investor Day in October.

We're leaning into this demand by expanding our manufacturing capacity in San Francisco and building out our second manufacturing location in Berlin.

On the solutions side, I'm pleased to report that our integration of Bedrock Research is going very well. The team is helping us scale rapidly and deliver AI-based solutions, notably standing up 600 new monitoring sites within 3 hours compared to a week long process when we first launched the service. This deep domain area expertise paired with our ongoing advancements in AI, have allowed us to expand the number of sites we're monitoring around the world, drastically reduce the time needed to implement and enable our customers to scale across broader geographic areas.

During the quarter, Plant expanded its technology collaboration with NVIDIA on multiple fronts. With Planet's proprietary data set and NVIDIAs compute, we can enable significant new capabilities. This includes exploring the use of NVIDIA's accelerated GPU-based computing platform for planet data processing, enabling faster, more efficient processing for all of our customers. testing NVIDIA's new though processor for in-space use, enhancing super resolution and other AI processing capabilities and more.

As announced earlier this week, we're collaborating to build the world's first scaled GPU native AI engine for satellite data and drive huge advances in efficiency and latency. More generally, we anticipate that AI will be transformational to our business this year.

Let me give a bit of broader context. While LLM offer users the incredible ability to have conversations with the text of the Internet, they know very little about the physical world. Real-world models need real-world data and planet has it. Our deep data archive of averaging over 3,000 collections for every point in the [ Elanders ] represents a treasure trove of indexing the physical world and training next-generation models.

As Wikipedia was the foundation data set for LLM, we believe that Planet's Daily scan is foundational to real-world models. Furthermore, AI itself is commoditizing software development, making data the key differentiation in AI. And why does this matter? Because it has the potential to unlock a huge market. While Planet is currently seeing tremendous traction for AI-based solutions in defense and intelligence, these developments are making broader area monitoring scalable and accessible for other applications and sectors.

Ultimately, we believe this will result in generic applications, democratizing access to Earth Intelligence and unlocking markets far faster. Specifically, we think that more generic AI solutions will soon empower nontechnical users to go from a concept to a bespoke application in under an hour.

We expect expanding these capabilities will benefit our current customers and drive new opportunities in markets such as agriculture, insurance, energy, supply chain and finance. For the year ahead, our top priorities are executing against our current contracts across both data and solutions and satellite services and scaling up to capture the massive opportunity before us.

We see strong demand, so investing into our growth, including the technology road map. We're doubling our satellite manufacturing capacity. We're scaling our Pelican fleet with multiple launches scheduled this year. We're launching demos of our hour and Sun catcher spacecraft, and we're investing in AI for existing solutions and the aforementioned more generic capabilities.

In sum, last year, we saw the start of returns on our investments into satellite services. This year, we expect to see the start of returns into our investments in AI. We sit uniquely at the intersection of space and AI revolutions, and Planet is the first space and AI company.

By year's end, we believe Planet's Earth Intelligence platform will deliver transformational global impact as our customers leverage space and AI to transform data into action. We're leaning in to meet the moment and we're playing to win. With that, I'll turn it over to Ashley to discuss our financials. Over to you, Ash.

Thanks, Will. It was indeed a fantastic year, underpinned by strong execution and key wins in Satellite Services. I'd like now to cover the results in more detail. Revenue for the fourth quarter came in at a record $86.8 million, representing approximately 41% year-over-year growth.

Full year revenue was $307.7 million representing approximately 26% year-over-year growth. The outperformance in the quarter was driven primarily by strong usage from our Defense and Intelligence and civil government customers as well as new wins that came in during the quarter. During fiscal 2026, our Defense and Intelligence sector revenue grew more than 50% year-on-year.

The commercial sector was down modestly year-on-year, and the civil government revenue was flat, driven in large part by the end of our contract with Norway for their NCI program.

Turning to our regional revenue breakdown. Growth was distributed across the globe in fiscal '21. with approximate revenue growth of 41% year-over-year in Asia Pacific, 48% in EMEA; 11% in North America and down about 2% in Latin America. As of the end of fiscal year '26, our end-of-period customer count was 897 customers, slightly down on a sequential basis, reflecting our direct sales team's intentional shift to focus on large customer opportunities and leveraging our self-serve platform to provide access to our data for other customers.

As a reminder, Planet Insight Platform customers are not included in our end-of-period customer count. Given our focus on larger customers and the shift to a self-service model for the long tail of the market, we believe this metric has become less useful for investors and is not proactively monitored by management.

We believe our retention rates on ACV are far more constructive measures of our business health and opportunity. Therefore, we plan to discontinue this metric beginning with the first quarter of fiscal year '27. We continue to see strong revenue growth and thus a solid increase in average revenue per customer as a positive indicator that our sales team's focus on landing and expanding high-value accounts is yielding results.

As we shift to some of our ACV metrics, I want to remind you that our satellite services contracts are not included in ACV, although they are included in our RPOs and backlog, which we will discuss in a moment.

Recurring ACV was 98% of our end-of-period ACV book of business, reflecting our continued focus on selling subscription data contracts and solutions as opposed to onetime professional or engineering services. Approximately 85% of our end-of-period ACV book of business consists of annual or multiyear contracts, lower than prior periods as we have seen a higher proportion of large shorter-term government contracts signed in recent quarters.

Net dollar retention rate at the end of fiscal year '26 was 116% and net dollar retention rate with win backs was 118%. Our non-GAAP gross margin for fiscal year '26 was 59% compared to 60% in fiscal year 2025. For Q4, our non-GAAP gross margin was 57% and compared to 65% in Q4 of fiscal year '25, reflecting investments in support of our satellite services contracts and the mix of contracts including AI-enabled partner solutions.

Our gross margins came in better than expected for the quarter and the year, primarily driven by the revenue outperformance in the quarter. Adjusted EBITDA profit was $15.5 million for fiscal year 2026 and better than expected, primarily driven by revenue outperformance and disciplined OpEx spend. Fiscal year '26 marks our first year of delivering adjusted EBITDA profitability on an annual basis a milestone we're incredibly proud of.

Adjusted EBITDA profit for Q4 was $2.3 million, also better than expected, marking our fifth sequential quarter of adjusted EBITDA profitability. Capital expenditures in FY '26, which include our capitalized software development were approximately $81.5 million. Capital expenditures in Q4 were approximately $23 million.

To echo Will's remarks, we're currently in a growth CapEx investment cycle as we lean into market demand, scale up our manufacturing capacity in Berlin and build out our next-generation fleets.

Turning to the balance sheet. We ended the year with approximately $640 million of cash, cash equivalents and short-term investments, an increase of approximately $418 million year-on-year, driven by our issuance of convertible debt and free cash flow profitability. In fiscal year 2026, we generated approximately $134.4 million in net cash from operating activities and $52.9 million in free cash flow, representing our first year of achieving positive free cash flow on an annual basis.

Our focus remains on managing the business to enable sustainable cash flow generation through efficient growth across our data solutions and Satellite Services revenue streams. At the end of FY '26, our remaining performance obligations or RPOs were approximately $852.4 million, up about 106% year-over-year, of which approximately 34% apply to the next 12 months and 65% to the next 24 months.

We estimate our backlog, which includes contracts with the termination for convenience clause, to be approximately $900 million, up approximately 79% year-over-year. Approximately 37% of our backlog applies to the next 12 months and 67% to the next 24 months.

Let me now turn to our guidance for the first quarter and full fiscal year 2027. In Q1, we're expecting revenue to be between $87 million and $91 million, which represents approximately 34% year-on-year growth at the midpoint. We expect non-GAAP gross margin for the quarter to be between 49% and 51%. The step-down is driven by our satellite services contracts, the mix of deals with AI-enabled partner solutions and investments in our next-generation fleets.

Our range for adjusted EBITDA in the quarter is expected to be between minus $6 million and minus $3 million, reflecting our investments to drive sustained growth. We are planning for capital expenditures of approximately $17 million to $23 million in the quarter. For the full fiscal year 2027, we expect revenue to be between $415 million and $440 million representing approximately 39% growth at the midpoint.

We believe our backlog provides us with strong visibility to our revenue projections, which is enabling us to raise our growth expectations for the year. Our non-GAAP gross margin for the year is projected to be between 50% and 52%, in line with our prior expectations and driven by the forecasted mix of business.

We anticipate margins will expand as we realize returns on our growth investments in subsequent years. We are targeting adjusted EBITDA profit for fiscal 2027 of between breakeven and $10 million reflecting our desire to maintain EBITDA profitability on an annual basis even as we continue to invest in our Space Systems capabilities, AI-powered solutions and our global sales and marketing organization. We also aim to deliver a Rule of 40 for this fiscal year, where Rule of 40 is our revenue growth rate plus adjusted EBITDA margin.

We are planning for approximately $80 million to $95 million in capital expenditures for the year. reflecting the necessary investments in our next-generation satellites to meet accelerating market demand. Even with these operating and capital expenditures, we expect to be free cash flow positive on an annual basis again in fiscal year '27 with a focus on sustaining and expanding free cash flow generation into the future.

As a reminder, while cash flow can vary quite significantly quarter-to-quarter based on the timing of cash collections and capital outlays for procurements, our ultimate objective is generating sustainable annual positive cash flow.

To close, the incredible momentum we generated in fiscal year 2026 provides us with a strong foundation for the future. Given the strength of our backlog and our robust pipeline, we have significant visibility into our continued revenue growth and as our revenue scales, we anticipate non-GAAP gross margin expansion as well as rule of 40 for fiscal year 2028 and beyond. This gives us the confidence to invest into the massive market opportunity unfolding in front of us and as Will mentioned, we are leaning into these trends and playing to win.

As always, Will and I are incredibly grateful for the outstanding execution, dedication and teamwork of our Planet around the globe. Fiscal 2026 was a standout year because of you, and we're excited for the year ahead. Operator, that concludes our comments. We can now take questions.

[Operator Instructions]. Your first question comes from the line of Colin Canfield from Cantor.

Can you perhaps update us on the timing and the scaling of both the Sun Catcher opportunity as well as what sounds like a pretty nascent due intelligence platform with NVIDIA. And then if you could maybe talk about how much of that was included in the set of opportunities from the Investor Day.

Well, both are very exciting opportunities and in a way, both involve both a space component and an AI component. Let me talk to the Google one first since you brought that up. SunCapture,'s going well. It's early days. Just to recap that project. This is about putting their CPUs into space. It's an early tech demo that is what we're doing right this second for them. It's a lot of interest in that space that you've seen in recent months. It's very exciting. It's heating up. But we're focused on executing towards those research goals, and there's a big potential market there long term.

As [ Sun capture ] put it, I think within 10 years, he expects most compute spending to go into orbit. That's a big amount of money. That's a huge, huge market to go after, but we're very early days. So it's exciting. We're staying focused on executing on those early missions. And then to NVIDIA, yes, that's also exciting. It's great to announce that extension of our partnership. It's also a research partnership at this stage. You all know about the fact that we've been putting those NVIDIA GPUs into orbit on our Pelican spacecraft, which is pretty cool.

This is actually more focused on the compute on the ground, how we leverage their GPUs, in particular, to speed up our data processing pipeline in an increasingly fast-changing world, people want those answers really quickly. And GPUs have the potential to really speed things up, and we've seen some early results that are very promising where big speed ups like 100x on certain parts of our coding base, getting answers to our clients faster is really important. So research collaboration, they're leaning in, and we are leaning into too. It's very exciting. But as to the revenue implications, I don't know if you wanted to touch on that, Ashley.

I mean I would just remind you that the SunCapture partnership is structured as an R&D partnership. So it's recognized as contra revenue. And with respect to the NVIDIA partnership, that's really just a research collaboration.

Got it. Got it. And then as we think about imputing working capital tailwinds for 2027, is the right framework to think about it maybe as like a percentage of the backlog increase or kind of high level, kind of what are the building box on working capital that we should consider?

First of all, I just want to correct myself. I made a misstatement on my prior answer. It's not contra revenue. It's contra R&D expense. Thanks for letting me clarify that.

As for your second question in terms of the building blocks for working capital, obviously, as I said, the -- as we are acquiring investments to execute on our backlog, so that includes all of the capital expenditures we need to make to build out the Pelicans for our customers that obviously will weigh into the procurement quarter-to-quarter. The nice thing about the way these contracts are structured as they typically provide us upfront capital to match the timing of those expenses, at least on an annual basis, there may be differentials quarter-to-quarter as to when we make procurements and when we receive milestone payments.

So as I said in the prepared remarks, cash flow is expected to vary quarter-to-quarter, but on an annualized basis, these contracts really enable us to operate the business in a free cash flow positive way.

Your next question comes from the line of Ryan Koontz from Needham & Co.

Congrats on a great quarter and outlook. Starting with maybe some of the segment, what your real strength you saw in Europe in the quarter. I wonder if you can maybe unpack that for us? What were some of the drivers behind that? Obviously, a lot of defense work there, but any kind of color you can give us on the European market and how that's been progressing so well for you?

Yes, maybe I can just kick it off. I spent quite a big fraction of the quarter in Europe going through a number of capital speaking to a lot of our customers there. The demand is off the charts. We are leaning into it as best we can, both for our data and AI solutions and Constellation services. We talked about the interest in that going up.

Yes. I mean it's back to the geopolitical dynamics, right? That's what's underneath this and driving a lot of this demand. They need to own sovereign systems. They need it quickly. They need speed and sovereignty. And we can offer both of those things, speed, immediate access to our present satellites, sovereignty building satellites dedicated for them. And even that we can do very swiftly compared with anyone else in our history of having launched under the satellite really puts us in a great position to do that.

So that's the sort of demand signal, Ashley, towards the breakdown. I don't know if you want to comment at all on that.

We provide the breakdown in the materials, I would just say, we have historically had a very strong presence in Europe. And have a strong team in Berlin foundationally, and we've built on that with acquisitions that have given us presence in the Netherlands as well as in Slovenia. And that really helps us -- and when we're engaging with governments across both their civil and defense and intelligence needs.

And if I could just add one final thing. Of course, commitment to building satellites there in Berlin. -- adds to that interest, I mean, we both needed it for expanded manufacturing for Pelicans and it lent into the European demand because, of course, that helps connect the dots there.

Sure. That's great. And just any comments around supply chain right now? Is it getting more difficult to acquire the types of kind of key components you need on the supply chain side?

Not really. No. We're not seeing anything material.

Obviously, it's something that we carefully our teams are always seeking to diversify our supply chain sources.

Your next question comes from the line of Edison Yu from Dutch Bank.

Congratulations on the quarter. wanted to come back to the AI element. You talked a little about OM. What's the latest, I guess, status on the entropic partnership? And have we kind of progressed further from kind of just testing or early testing the models of the training?

Yes. I mean, AI, in general, as I said, we're moving from this world of LLM that couldn't tell you about things about the tech of the Internet to how models are increasingly trying to move towards real-world models and real-world models needing real-world data has this stack, if that's necessary. We're doing these research collaborations that we've mentioned and they're very exciting. What they're really building a foundation towards is -- we've been building these bespoke solutions, these what we call AI-enabled solutions for our board area, Planet Daily scan.

So the Maritime Domain Aware Solution, the global monitoring solution and the area monitoring solution for civil government. And those are really good and they're starting to take up, and that's what's driving a lot of the great growth that you're seeing in the numbers. But AI has the potential of making that more generic, that is that anyone can turn up, build their own bespoke application of equivalent fidelity in short order, like maybe within an hour and in a completely bespoke way for their needs.

That is just on the horizon. And so what we're focused on with those research collaborations is how we can build towards that capability. And that is what -- I mean, what's so exciting about that is the ability to unlock all the potential of our data, especially for commercial and several government markets where we've been less focused of late because of the strong interest on the Defense and Intelligence side, but are huge markets for planner. So basically, that's the direction and leaning of those partnerships is enabling us to build out that capability to expand the TAM.

Absolutely. Just a follow-up on that. Yes. Just a follow-up on that. to -- so I guess, get there, what do you see as the biggest, I don't know if you want to say a bottleneck or thing we should look out for? Is it a question of just any more compute? Is it a question of just takes time more trading? Like how do you think about like the path there and bottlenecks.

It's complex and evolving in that -- the space is changing so fast. I mean, literally, we are seeing capabilities that just a couple of months ago, we weren't able to do because of the advances in -- especially coding. Like that makes it now that you can even build whole applications very quickly. So we are just seeing that potentially take off much faster than we thought there's nothing really standing in the way per se.

We have the data. That's the critical ingredient, and it's the differentiating ingredient for AI. And as I said briefly, like I mean, in many ways, AI, it's making commoditizing more the software layer, that's making the AI piece -- the data piece most useful for AI. And so that's very differentiating that we have this unique data set coming into it.

So there's nothing holding us back there and it's moving very fast. And that's why I was saying that I think you're going to start to see this come to fruition this year. And so watch this space.

Your next question comes from the line of Kristine Liwag from Morgan Stanley.

This is Gaby on for Kristine. Congratulations. Given your recent decision to extend the satellite imagery delay in the Middle East to 14 days as a result of the ongoing conflict -- have you seen any changes in customer behavior? And are there any potential contractual implications that we should maybe be aware of?

Yes. I mean the short answer is nothing material. Look, -- what we're focused on there is helping our critical customers in the region to the things they need, which is get critical answers fast and trying to help them through that. We're focused and mainly heads down on supporting those customers in this critical time as best we can.

The delay is a lot to do with the balance of thinking about those operational needs and making sure we don't put people in harm's way and it's very genuine needs. At the same time, our transparency and accountability mission that we care about and ensuring all of our actors get access eventually. So it's a carefully thoughtful decision, and we're just trying to do our best to help the people that need it.

Great. Super helpful color. And if I could ask a quick follow-up. I mean, you announced the satellite services agreement with Sweden in January. Can you just talk about how you're seeing the pipeline for similar deals progressing relative to what you had laid out at the Investor Day? And what are you seeing in terms of conversion time lines and potential scale of upcoming opportunities?

Yes. I mean, as I've mentioned in my prepared remarks, since that October Investor Day, both the number and the average size of those deals has been increasing. And so I mean just to give you a sense, it is a strong market demand right now, even stronger than we had said then and it's a bit too early to talk about sort of average deal length because it's just -- these are very few in number, right? So I haven't got any comments to that effect. But overall, the demand is very strong.

Your next question comes from the line of Jeff Van Rhee from Craig-Hallum Capital Group.

Congrats, a lot here to love. Let me start first with Civil commercial, about 40%, a little less than that as a percent of revenues. What do you think when you look at those markets, obviously, D&I is killing it. You've got a lot of sovereign deals flowing through and it makes sense to be pursuing those deals. I'm wondering how you think about civil and commercial and what dynamics have to play out for those markets to reaccelerate.

Well, as I said, see earlier answer to Edison about the AI piece because that unlocks these things and enable it. And we're just on the precipice of that. And so yes, I see that beginning to come this year. And just to be clear, in my opinion, the biggest markets are those 2 segments, not defense and intelligence. And we think that is a long and sustaining and really great market. And -- but the civil government market is huge. The commercial market is huge. There's so many -- but it's been lacking those critical solutions.

Here, we have a generic way of crossing that CASM to the full solution that enables us to unlock that market. And so we know those capabilities that those answers are latent in our data and this gives the bridge to the actual solution that the customers need. So I mean it's back to my earlier point, AI is going to enable it. And I think we're going to see the beginnings of that really take off this year.

Yes. And over to the sovereign deals for a second. I mean, obviously, what 3 mega deals here roughly trailing 12 months, give or take. It sounds like the pipeline has expanded. It sounds like you're thinking deal count should improve. I mean just any other observations on those sovereign deals on the magnitude of the growth in the pipeline? It sounds like it really accelerated even further potentially in the last 90 days?

No, I didn't want to quantify that, but just to give you a sense that it is really growing and it's very strong. And yes, that's it.

And the only other thing that I would add, Jeff, which I think is an important point is that when we are selling these sovereign capabilities, we are coupling with that our data and solutions. And it actually is the synergies across that, that is a competitive differentiator because we can drive value to these customers out of the gate.

We can give them visibility and intelligence that they didn't have before as we work with them over the longer-term contract to build out what their sovereign capabilities will ultimately be. And so it's worth pointing out that actually a lot of our backlog growth is in data and solutions. In fact, that part of the backlog has almost doubled year-over-year.

That's great color. Last one, if I could, just on the Owls. Any updates there that you could share?

Yes. I mean we're building that tech demo as we announced last year towards that improved daily scan capability -- the team is working hard on it. It's going well. It's quite an incredible capability that we're obviously building there. Just remind everyone that we're moving towards 1-meter scan rate than 3 meters, and that's roughly 10x more data per unit area of the ground. And roughly 10x improvement in latency as well because they will be equipped with both onboard compute systems as well as satellite telecom so that we can get the data back as well.

So those things are all going to be faster as well and so much lower latency at 10x there, too. So it's really a significant improvement on that system. And yes, we're looking forward to launching a demo.

Your next question comes from the line of John Godyn from Citibank.

I just wanted to square off the the backlog strength and all of the positive commentary with revenue guidance. The revenue guidance is fantastic. Don't get me wrong. But even so, it just seems like there's upside to it based on the commentary of incredibly strong demand signals, particularly in Europe as well as the fact that as a percentage of the backlog that you guys have right now, it doesn't seem like the revenue guide is a particularly large percentage versus maybe how you've set guidance in the past.

Yes. It's obviously a good question, John. We're in a really favorable position right now in terms of the level of visibility that we have.

Obviously, there's a lot of execution that goes into turning backlog into revenue, and we are laser-focused on that. And in terms of setting guidance, I think what you've seen from us, particularly in recent periods is we try to give ourselves room for the fact that on these big mission-critical types of transactions and contracts, there are things that can shift from quarter to quarter, and we want to give room in our guidance for that to happen so that we can keep our customers front and center around execution.

Similarly, we have a great pipeline of opportunity. But when those deals land, given how big they can be. can really impact revenue in the year. And so we tend to assume that new signings are back half loaded, which gives us opportunity to deliver upside if that doesn't end up being the case, if it ends up landing sooner, but it doesn't put us in a position where we're out over our skis in terms of the numbers we've given you.

That makes a lot of sense. It sounds like there are some layers of conservatism in there, which is appropriate, and we'll see how that plays out throughout the year. If I could ask one more. Just in terms of the activities in the Middle East, the conflict there, do you feel that, that has additionally kind of turbocharged the demand for your product in any way? I know the backdrop is strong, but has it -- has that had an obvious impact as sort of a recent event.

Well, obviously, there's a huge amount of focus in that, and we are, but again, as I said earlier, we're just focused on delivering pieces. We're doing mission-critical things. We're trying to focus on that. But we'll see. It's early, early days.

Yes. I think one of the things that we have seen in these types of situations is you do see an increase in usage, as there's just more urgency in getting as much data as possible around the situation. But ultimately, as Will said, situations like this can be very dim.

Your next question comes from the line of Trevor Walsh from Citizens.

Great. Will, you called out the Shield IDIQ in your prepared remarks. Can you maybe just give us a sense -- I know early days on this very large project and a lot of it's sensitive, but can you give us a sense of how you're thinking about that opportunity? Is that something where it's just kind of bread-and-butter Planet Labs earth observation data that you would be providing for that as you go after contracts opportunities there? Or might you look like something more of an the satellite services that you might even just building spacecraft that are fairly nontraditional for you guys, but just being used for all the things that are part of that project?

Well, yes, as you say, it's early days. There's obviously a big opportunity. There's a huge budget behind it. But the specific ways in which we fit in will have to be figured out as we understand the architecture, and they're still working on many of those aspects. There are, of course, ways in which our present data sets could fit into that early warning of certain things, strategic analysis across broad areas that obviously makes sense.

But right now, that is merely a vehicle and when we will compete on awards within that, and that's the same for all of the people that have got awards under that system. So yes, but obviously, finding unknown unknowns, there could be specific missions, but it's very early days to be thinking about that. What I will say is that we're continuing to lean into specific opportunities that are very live right now like in with Luno, with our Navy customers and others. So we're seeing a lot of interest in corners around the world. So the department has a lot of interest across the board, and we're leaning into it.

Great. Awesome. Appreciate that. Ashley, maybe just one follow-up for you. I appreciate the color you gave around free cash flow. I know you guys aren't giving an official guide, but just given how strong you guys ended this current fiscal year and as we think about '27, there's kind of -- there's obviously, there can be a bit of a step down from just going from $50 million to something that's just generally positive. So just want to make sure we don't get -- just given the CapEx spend and everything else, if you could just give us a little bit of maybe guard relative to how we think about that for '27? That would be great.

Yes. I mean, first, I'll just reiterate the point that I made. We definitely expect there to be pretty significant fluctuations quarter-to-quarter. Just like I said, timing of procurement versus timing of milestone payments. can cause one quarter to be much more positive and another quarter to be significantly negative. So that's one caution that I provide and that makes it a little bit harder to give very precise guidance around it, which is why I haven't.

And to your point, depending on how much more of this opportunity we continue to realize, it would not make sense for us to optimize expanding free cash flow on the year versus setting ourselves up to both deliver against the contracts we have and to bring more on. So if that offers enough color to you without giving specific guidance, which I'm really not in a position to do. We're not focused on kind of sustaining or expanding free cash flow from last year but really focus on balancing it quarter-to-quarter and leaning into the market.

Your next question comes from the line of Greg Pendy from Clear Street.

Just 1 quick one, just that I understand kind of the approach on this year of leaning in, in terms of the commercial and simple side. I mean it's hard to think back, but you did have a cost rationalization program at 1 time. And your sales and marketing is down around 15% from fiscal 2024, yet your revenues are roughly 40%.

So is it kind of that the customers through Anthropic will figure out how to use the data and how valuable it is into their daily work flows? Or do you think that you'll need some boots on the ground to educate the civil and commercial markets?

Yes Greg, it's a very good call out. We did realign the team across the board to really focus on where we have the largest account opportunities, which I think did disproportionately impact how much resource we were putting behind going after a more distributed commercial market.

And as we said, we were building out the platform to enable smaller customers to really access the data on a self-serve basis. I think as we are growing those markets and leaning into the AI that will highlighted, we will be making some targeted investments in those markets where we're seeing the most traction out of the gate. So we do have feet on the street going and meeting with customers and demonstrating for them. And that is a really exciting part of these new capabilities that we have is we can really show not tell in these customer meetings. All the things that you can -- all the insights you can extract from the data to answer their specific questions.

So we did a lot of training with our sales team earlier this year, really showing them how to use these tools and demo environments. Obviously, the world has changed a lot in the last 6 years. You can do a lot of that without putting people on airplanes, but it will require some investments across sales and marketing. And I did highlight that as one of the investment areas for us this year.

Your next question comes from the line of Alex Latimore from Northland.

Excellent quarter. Alex Latimore on here for Mike Latimore. I had 1 question. I just wanted to hit on guidance over time. good raise on guidance. I was wondering if you could talk about what assumptions are factored into that raise on guidance. Does this assume any new 8 figure wins? Or any commentary there?

Yes. Thanks, Alex. I'd say we're very balanced in terms of how we think about those types of opportunities that may be in our pipeline because obviously, those could swing outcomes based on whether they come in or not. So Typically, what we'll look at is a pipeline of opportunity where if an figure deal were to fall out of the pipeline, what type of backup we have for that opportunity and then probability adjusted.

So we are definitely looking at active opportunities, probabilities and then giving ourselves room for those deals where maybe we don't have enough pipeline and make up for that 1 landing on time or in the year. which gives us opportunity to outperform? And like I said earlier, it doesn't put us in a position where we feel over our SKUs.

Awesome. And then onee more. I just wanted to hear if there's any footholds in the Golden Dome initiative. I understand there was a $10 billion incremental add to the Golden Dome initiative for space-based capabilities. I'm not sure if you're seeing any demand there for planet systems. But any commentary around Golden Dome would be helpful.

Yes. I sort of said all that I can on that at the minute. It's very early days as they're architecting that system and there are potential, the Shield IDIQ just to be clear, is going down. And so that answer was about that.

And again, it's a framework that we have, and now we will bid for actual awards under that program. So -- but we don't know what they are exactly yet than when we do, we will respond. But my earlier answer, the general thing is giving domain awareness and other things that could be useful for that. So -- but we obviously have to see -- wait and see what comes through that.

Your next question comes from the line of Caleb Henry from Quilty Space.

A couple of questions on satellite manufacturing. Actually, first one, sorry, on Pelican. I noticed that you guys lowered 1 of the Pelican satellites, a little past 400 kilometers recently. Is that part of a larger fleet migration to a very low earth orbit -- or is there another way that we should think about that?

Yes. We lower space card, of course, the operational Altus and Pelican part of the reason we call it Pelican was to fly low Pelicans fly low to the water. And so we were mimicking that when we were talking about this, and they have iron engines such that they can fly really low and in time, that is part of the process that gets us to the 30-centimeter resolution target for those missions. But no changes to the plan.

Those are just operational adjustments as we will start with the satellite in a slightly higher orbit and bring down to operational orbit as we progress. And by the way, you may just on Pelican may want to look in the associated deck with this earnings -- there's a few really cool pictures of some of the fast response time lines that we had 3 pictures in about a year. It's very exciting to see in about an hour, and I just had a great performance of that system. So it's very exciting and we've got multiple launches for more of those systems going up this year. So it's exciting times. And was there a broader question about the manufacturing?

Yes. I definitely better look through these pictures. But -- looking at the contract for Sweden and tie that into manufacturing, is that -- can you give us a sense of when those satellites are supposed to be delivered and how many satellites? Is that sort of the reason for the the ramp-up in manufacturing space in California?

Nothing specific. I'm going to say specifically to that customer, but we're ramping up because of the demand overall, right? And and we're building fleets from multiple customers as well as for our own system. And that demand is obviously already clear such that we're expanding here in San Francisco and in Berlin.

Okay. And then last question. I was just curious if you could shed more light on what makes 2026 the year. You first anticipate seeing a return on investment on AI. Was there more of an aha moment that happened? Or is this just the natural evolution of the investment and how customers use plan data?

Yes. And that's an oversimplification because I mean we've had revenue from AI a fair bit before. I just -- what I mean is in terms of the big way in which AI can unleash those other market potential. And I think we're going to really start to see those generic solutions that I mentioned, ways in which anyone can turn out, build an application that's relevant to their needs and then start getting value.

That unlocks the markets that we've been talking about for years later in our data, agriculture, energy, insurance, finance, so on -- and so I think that it's just more that I see that all the pieces are coming together such that, that will come to fruition this year, and you'll start to really see that take off. Just like the Constellation service or satellite services really started to take off in FY '26.

Thank you. That's all the time we have for questions today. I will now turn the call back to Will Marshall, CEO and Co-Founder, for closing remarks.

Well, I'd just say that, obviously, it's great to see the business doing grade, both in the satellite services and in the AI-powered solutions side. And we're very proud of the financials that we reported today, not just the beating the revenue expectations, but I'm especially proud of the backlog improvement to $900 million and achieving the rule of 40 million again in the quarter.

And it really has set us up for a strong foundation for this coming year and given that backlog and confidence in our pipeline, we've projected quite strong growth again for this year, and that's why -- and even for years that follow, which is why we're investing this year strongly into that market opportunity. And like I was just saying this is the year for AI for planet. And I think this bridge of the solutions gap will unleash a huge opportunity late in Planet data.

I just want to end by thanking our teams as we started around the globe that have enabled all of us to be possible. Thanks again for joining, everyone.

This concludes today's call. Thank you all for attending. You may now disconnect.

[Audio Gap] to be here. Looking forward to our conversation.

Absolutely. Robert, typically, we've just given companies a chance at the start to kick it off with a bit of an overview of trends that they're seeing, things that they're excited about. I'll give you the floor.

Sure. No, once again, happy to be here. Thanks for having us. I'm looking forward to the chat. Planet overview, pushing almost 15 years now as a company, the last 5, obviously, as a public company. I actually joined the company after spending almost 4 decades inside the U.S. government, working inside the Intelligence Committee focused generally in this area of geospatial information and remote sensing.

Joined the company in 2021 in the position -- and by the way, to be really specific, what I chair is the Planet Federal Board, which is a subsidiary under Planet PBC. So think of it that way. But I do work with the C-suite on broad strategy, which I'm happy to talk about here.

So 5 years as a public company, and I just coincidentally, as a calendar just was with the Planet team over in Munich for the security conference last weekend. And it's a good way to kind of reflect where we are in the movie.

So we've -- Planet's core value and differentiated value is our daily scan. We scan the whole earth land mass once per day, and now I'm doing that for about 8 years. So think of thousands of images that are now stacked up literally over every part of the world.

And what's most exciting when you ask about trends is that the compute and the computation that we're all living through and experiencing with artificial intelligence is now unlocking that latent value that, frankly, has been difficult to tease out over the years.

And we're able now to obviously offer what we think is compelling imagery data sets and what I'd call the raw materials on the left side of your process to going to the other end and offering subscription services and analytics services and alerting services.

And we can talk more about the countries that we're talking to and that we've made good progress in. But as somebody who, again, spent 4 decades inside the U.S. government, as awesome as we are in the U.S. government, 4 decades is a lot. And so there's a lot of baggage in there.

And when you come to the U.S. government, and by the way, they're a great customer, too, great partner, it sometimes it's difficult to bring a new value proposition to such a legacy organization. But when you go to a country that's just starting, they have a cleaner sheet of paper.

Oh, my goodness, that's a sweet spot for us because you can really kind of build a baseline of commercial first and then add government capabilities on top. U.S. has been reversed, right? Government first, commercial on top.

I would say it's somewhere in this movie of transition. I wish it would go faster, both in my former government role, my current industry role, but it's still in transition. So very excited about those analytic services.

We might want to talk to about the Constellation deals that we've been doing in the past 15 months. That's selling satellites as a service, which has been, again, a very exciting new area for us.

Yes. There's a few things there I want to follow up on. The first thing is the uniqueness of the data, right? Can you talk a bit more about that? You've been -- you've got almost a decade, right, of data, doing it daily. It's very powerful. It's very rich.

As you mentioned, there are technologies that are emerging that are helping you mine that data and provide a real kind of value and insights. Maybe you can just talk about how special that is.

Sure. So I became the NGA Director, National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency in 2014 in the fall. I should get the date, but around the same time, Will Marshall, Co-Founder and current CEO of Planet Labs, did a TED Talk. I think it's -- and I didn't know Will at the time. I never heard of Planet Labs at the time. But basically, his TED Talk kind of previewed your question.

Why would you want to image the whole world, right? But Will basically went out and said, I'm going to build this company and we're going to figure out how to image the whole world once a day. And look, I get it. We're a rather small community, but my head exploded. I said, you can't do that. I mean, we've never done that. I mean that's just not possible.

And -- but I was intrigued by -- and because, again, that was a private company with private capital, taking a risk and innovating to meet this objective. And I think it took Planet 3 or 4 years from that TED Talk to be able -- they called it mission 1, right, to do it.

And look, in some ways -- and by the way, even today, I run into people to say, yes, but that resolution, the spatial resolution of that is only 3 or 4 meters, so which is 10 feet to 12 feet. It's pretty gross resolution. So I'm not interested in that.

But to me, while I understand that because I used to live in the spatial community and everything was about how exquisite of an image you can take, how detailed of an image you could take, that the differentiated value of the daily scan was the temporal resolution. It's Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, January, February, March, 2016, 2017, 2018.

And therein lies insights that just don't exist even at very high resolution because you see and sense trends over time, patterns of activity that just aren't detectable when you're staring in a very high resolution mode at a target.

So one way to think about it is, as humans, we have 2 kinds of vision, right? We have our staring vision. You and I are communicating to the other. So you're giving me body language and signals. I'm waving my hands at you to try to convince you to believe me.

But at the same time, we have peripheral vision. So that if somebody decided to throw a bottle of water, hey, I don't like what Cardillo is saying, I'm all detected at some point to do this, right? I'll turn my head, I'll be alerted and I'll put my arm up to defend myself. So think of the daily scan kind of like that.

While you're doing your daily life, think of us as your peripheral vision. And not more than just general peripheral vision, you set the dial to what you're interested in, maybe it's ship traffic, maybe it's rail traffic, maybe it's military activity. But you could set that dial.

And the only thing that will -- I mean, obviously, you're the customer, you can decide what you want, but you could only bother me when one of my dials gets a hit. If nothing gets hit, I don't want to hear from you because then I know nothing is -- you know what I mean, it's the absence of information, which is -- or activity, which is necessary.

So I know that was a long answer to your short question, but to me, that really is the difference. And again, to reiterate, no one else is doing this, which is, again, something that's very differentiated.

Yes, in and of itself. And I think ultimately, what's special is that you've wrapped a very scalable business model on top of this. And a separate question is debating the TAM, which we can get to, but talk about how easy it is to scale now that you have all this data.

And again, redirect me if I'm missing the point of your question. But when I think about where we're going vis-a-vis scale is it's less about the data itself and more now about the applications.

Mining it, yes.

That's right. And so Will Marshall has been public with our partnership with Anthropic and experimentation that we're doing with large language models, which, as we all know, are large multimodal models now. Most of us has taken the picture of our fridge contents and ask for help getting, well, you got to be able to interpret pixels to give you answers to that.

Now satellite imagery isn't exactly the same, but the fundamentals are the same. And so I mentioned earlier unlocking the value, but really what it's doing is it's kind of elevating, and to your question, it's scaling potential users that we just couldn't before.

Again, you're looking at somebody, yes, I'm in my fourth decade of this. So I've been around for a long time, but it was an exquisite profession when I joined it, right? I went to school for 9 months, 9 months, now I went to an Air Force base to do it, right? And it was all classified.

But they would not let me do anything for 9 months until I got -- and then when I got trained, I was given the very basic stuff to do because you don't want to make a mistake at that. So think of a very tailored bespoke profession. Now fast forward 4 decades, I won't say it's quite as easy as a ChatGPT query, but we're moving in...

It's getting there.

Yes, it's getting there. And so to me, the -- what's exciting are the scale applications that just literally weren't possible even a year ago, are now possible today.

Yes. And maybe you can elaborate on some of those services that are possible to apply to this data set?

So I'll start with 2 big broad areas, and we can unpack those, if you'd like. Planet provides a maritime domain awareness service today, which is exactly what it sounds like. So for example, kind of our largest contract in this area is with the U.S. Navy, who you might imagine is a pretty demanding maritime customer.

And the region they've asked us to monitor for them is the South China Sea. You might imagine that, that's a pretty challenging area to monitor. And so we were very proud when we won their contract, their competitively bid contract about 3 years ago, Actually, Maxar was the incumbent at the time.

The reason I think we became compelling and ultimately displaced them was, frankly, one, the daily scan that I've been talking about was over the land. We weren't monitoring open ocean because, quite frankly, there wasn't much business in open ocean.

And by the way, we're still not monitoring all the oceans. But South China Sea, Mediterranean, Black Sea, Baltic, Gulf of Mexico/America, I'm not sure what we're calling it today, are very interesting areas. So we were adding that capacity, right, through our scanning service.

And in this case, we found the right partner, a company called SynMax, a privately held company that specializes in detecting ships from our data sets. So they brought the algorithm, right? We brought the data set, and then we took that to the government and they said, "Oh, that's the solution I want." So that's one bucket of solutions.

And the other one is what we call it global monitoring service. So think of what I just described at sea on land. And the one that we've been quite public about and proud about is a pilot that we're doing for the Indo-Pacific Command headquartered in Hawaii.

That is the U.S. geographic command responsible for China and North Korea and lots of other trouble spots, but China mainly. So we've been now since last summer, so we're about 9 months into a pilot we've been doing for the command. Think of it as a China monitoring service. Now no, we're not monitoring every site in China every day.

We're monitoring the sites that INDOPACOM has told us we want on the dial. So let's face it. One of the major issues vis-a-vis a potential Chinese threat is to Taiwan. Obviously, it's in our interest to keep the Commander of INDOPACOM as alert as possible to any change in Chinese disposition.

And Admiral Paparo is the current Commander, and he's been public about saying that he has lost what he calls traditional indication and warning, which means there are signals that military commanders understand about other militaries. And you can imagine kind of the classic ones, multiple aircraft on runways and activity in ports that would transport marines and supplies.

Well, the way China is leveraging its ability to mask those, it's done it by kind of elevating the noise level. They're flying a lot. There's a lot of maritime traffic. And so they're trying to kind of keep the noise level up so that should they make a decision to invade, it would be very hard to detect.

So what we're trying to do for the Admiral is move what we call left on the schedule. I get it. We're probably not going to get the key indicator at the port or the airfield, but maybe at the place that supplies the port and the airfield, we'll see increased petroleum production or even medical preparations or logistics. You can imagine...

Unusual activity.

Right. And so that's what we're piloting now for the Admiral. We're quite proud of where it's going. Obviously, a pilot is a pilot, and we've got to prove it, and we're obviously learning a lot, too. So those are the 2 big use cases.

But let me just give you one more because it's a little different. We have a contract with the country of Brazil. They have an issue with deforestation and not just deforestation, but illegal activity in the forested regions of Brazil, which are quite large and quite remote. We do a daily scan. We provide the results of the daily scan.

And one of the things -- obviously, they're looking for tree clearing or cutting, that would be an obvious potential misuse of the land. And obviously, Brazil knows what is supposed to happen with their forest. But the other one is just airstrips that get developed quite quickly, usually associated with counter narcotic or weapons trafficking or human trafficking, et cetera.

It's something that obviously, somebody is trying to hide. So when that gets indicated, right, and when they get that alert, they send the right people and maybe they send a drone ahead of time. You know what I mean, maybe they go to -- or they deploy a petrol unit to go look.

And I don't have the stats in front of me, but we've done events with our Brazilian customer where they've talked about the reduction in illegal drug traffic and the reduction in deforestation that they've been able to do from that kind of scanning service.

Yes. And as you demonstrate more and more use cases, it does feel like we're hitting a bit of like an S curve, an inflection here. Award activity has been higher, right? Bookings are improving, et cetera. Talk to us about how important it is to show multiple different services, multiple different angles and how all that's combining into a broader trajectory.

Let me answer your question this way. So I'm going to generalize to make my point, and if you want to dive into any of these, we can. But if you think about the early days of Planet and its offerings, predominantly it was an imagery company, had imagery as a commodity.

You are a buyer of imagery. Let's see if we can meet somewhere on this cost chart where you will pay this much for that imagery. We shake hands. I task the satellite, I download the imagery and I send it to you, right? Now by the way, we love those customers. We loved them then, we love them today. The NRO, the National Reconnaissance Office is a very large customer of that kind of model, right, that kind of service.

Then I think the second set, and this is a newer set is the people that say, "Yes, look, I don't have an imagery factory to use your inputs. I just want the answers, right, or the outputs, right." So those are those dials that I set. And so we're seeing more and more people come to us and say, I appreciate the imagery, but just send me the analytics. So that could be a subscription, right? Or it could be the maritime service or the GMS service I described before. That's clearly growing.

I talked about kind of the weight of history in the U.S. model. When we go and talk to companies at the Munich Security Conference that don't have all that, they tend to go here, or they go to the third category that I'll talk about, which is what we broadly call constellations as a service.

So Planet -- by the way, that global scan is accomplished through satellites that we call Doves and SuperDoves. There's about 180 of those in orbit at any one time to do the -- to get the whole world. We have a smaller number of SkySats, which are a higher resolution, I think, 40, 50-centimeter resolution that can be pointed and tasked at a specific area. Those are being replaced with Pelicans.

We like bird names at Planet. And Pelicans fly lower in real life. So we're going to fly lower to get better resolution. So we're going to get 30-centimeter resolution from our Pelican fleet, which has 6 up now, but will grow to satisfy the market.

And by the way, we've also launched a hyperspectral sensor, which is more a bespoke capability to really go after the methane detection and kind of climate mitigation issues around that. And we have announced that we're going to take the Doves and build an Owl constellation, again, back to the birds. And -- but the big difference there will be 3 to 4 meters to 1 meter. So much higher resolution, but still the daily scan.

But back to my point about satellites as a service. Up until 14 months ago, the only way you would have gotten access is either buy our imagery upfront or buy our analytic services here. Now we offer this satellite as a service. And we've announced 3 of those deals. Japan was first 14 months ago, Germany 6 or so months ago and Sweden just 1 month ago.

They're all very different. Well, they're all bespoke to what the country. But basically, what you should understand is what we've -- the need that we've gone after is those countries interest in having assured collection, assured capacity, guaranteed. So essential ownership.

Now again, each model is a little different. I can tell you a little bit more about the Japanese model. We've talked more about that. We haven't talked as much about the last 2, the details. But in the Japanese model, it's going to be 10 Pelicans that they will own when they're over their ground stations.

So think of it as fractional ownership, timeshare, if you will, of the whole orbit, but they get the part that sits over Japan, which is a large part of the world, but when it flies out of their area, it comes back to Planet to commercialize and monetize. So it's a win-win. They get their dedicated capacity where and when they want it. We obviously get revenue and returns on that. And then we also get to monetize the rest of the orbit.

So it's a growing model. When we had our Investor Day, Analyst Day in October, we talked about 20-ish, I think we actually used the number 20, so let's just say 20 that were kind of in the broad pipeline to head to a potential satellites as a service. That included Sweden. Of course, we didn't announce that because it wasn't done. So think of 20 minus 1 now out there that we're pursuing in that third category.

And the pipeline is still robust? Or is it growing? Or how would you characterize it at a high level?

If you haven't noticed, the world's a little crazier than it was. It always seems to be, but it's especially crazy this year. Again, I was in Munich. Europe, predominantly because of the Munich conference is quite nervous right now. They had made a long-term bet on cheap U.S. security. It turns out that bet is not paying off right now.

As a matter of fact, it's reversing. The U.S. administration has told Europe time to pay up. And again, I'm not -- we're not going away, but we're looking for you to step up here. Planet comes in and says, I understand your anxiety. I understand that you've got issues with your national budgets and parliamentary votes and difficult questions about how you're going to raise your investment here.

As you think about owning more of your own security, you're going to think about long-term production and manufacturing and talent and development, all these things that you would need to create a defense ecosystem, which probably will include eventually tanks and planes and submarines and ships.

But everything I just mentioned is a multiyear, minimum of 5, but more likely 10-year proposition. You're just not going to build a fighter jet on your own. However, if you want to increase your local awareness and your understanding of the threat and your regional activity, have I got a solution for you?

And I'll just use the German example, the time delta between when they signed -- we signed that contract and they had access to one of our Pelicans, dedicated access was 2 months. So we can move that quickly.

And the reason we can is because of the proud history of Planet, which is agile, innovative, economically efficient development of satellites, and we're proud of being able to do that. And we have an active factory in San Francisco. By the way, we love showing it off if you're ever -- and by the way, I mean downtown San Francisco, Harrison Street, so really San Francisco.

But we're also proud we just announced the intention to build a satellite factory in Germany. We'll build Pelicans there. Again, those details are being working out, but lots of good reasons to do that. We need more capacity. We need to spread our manufacturing risk, and let's face it, it helps us, quite frankly, in Europe. I mean we had and have a large team in Berlin, about 300 Planet employees, but this obviously helps our local investment and local recognition, if you will.

Yes. Changing gears a little bit, but building on the same themes. Can we talk about how AI is being leveraged or could be leveraged in the business more and more? And what services or opportunities that might unlock?

It's terribly exciting. We've talked publicly about our partnership with Anthoropic and the Claude tool. We've got research teams dedicated to answering your question what can happen. Will Marshall has been public about how impressed he has been.

And again, Will is an astrophysicist, has very advanced understanding, obviously, of satellite technology, but also AI, about how good Claude was, is out of the box. So no fine-tuning, right? Just take the core Claude AI tool, load up some Dove imagery and say, tell me what you're seeing that's interesting. I mean, you could be more specific, interesting around Chinese military facilities in January.

Claude will come back with an interesting answer, but just like your experience kind of get some things right, kind of get some things wrong. You go back, you just said, "Hey, I like the first part of your answer. Not interested in the second part, please go back and rerun it." Now we're not ready today to put that out, download the app, Claude, Planet app kind of thing.

However, to me, it's clear that the development of those models, which obviously are multimodal now, is going to accelerate the unlocking of what the value that has been latent, hard to tease out of our archive. So I'm very optimistic about this. Please don't ask me how we'll market it, how we'll price it. I have no idea. They don't tend to ask me those questions.

But what excites me, though, is, again, just as a personal user that I've -- when I've interacted with kind of the prototypes, it just -- it has that same kind of like, oh, my goodness, and look, I'm a lifelong professional here. I've been very pleasantly surprised with it just -- it lowers many barriers to admission here. And so it feels like to me like we could broaden use cases and users, I think, in a very exciting way.

At a high level, though, it seems fair that a year from now or make up a date in the reasonable future, we're looking back and saying like, all right, Planet Labs really unlocked some interesting services, interesting technologies that were AI driven. Is that fair?

I think so. Yes.

And marketed it to customers.

Right. And again, I just don't know how to do that. Look, I mean, again, I'm not Will, but I've been around him and Robbie and another co-founder, they formed the company to be that, right?

The original -- I think the original tagline for the company was use space to help life on earth, right? Just make life better by using space, right? And make access to space cheaper and more -- and make the world more transparent and all these things. And by the way, that is still the DNA of the company.

Have we shifted or added focus to defense and intel over the past few years? Of course, we have. And you've seen those results as we report out quarterly quarter. Let's face it, the budgets are there, right? And we're obviously competing for those budgets. But yes, I do think that there will be a broader democratization, which again, goes to that core value proposition.

But again, I'm glad we have smarter people in the company that can figure out how do you do that while still protecting your differentiation and making sure that there is a monetizationable, I make up words now, process.

Yes, sure, how to commercialize it. My point is just that there is urgency to deploy AI and create real products around it.

There is definitely urgency to do so. Yes.

Got it. Okay. Can we just check through a few of the strategic highlights from the last quarter. And I was just hoping you could elaborate? So what I'm talking about are things like the Owl constellation and just double clicking on that. Just update us on the progress there and what that unlocks?

So again, Owl is the follow-on to the Dove, SuperDove constellation. It will be the new daily scan, so 3.5 meters down to a meter. We intend to have a tech demo end of the year, early next year, so around a year from now. We haven't announced when we think the full constellation will be up.

But if you look at our past, tech demos tend to -- when they work, right, tend to -- I mean, that's our bread and butter, right? Once we figure out the technology, we can ramp up production. So I'm optimistic that we will have an Owl constellation in a handful or less of years for sure.

And look, as a professional, I'm very excited about what we're going to be able to sense and detect at a meter versus 3.5. We've gotten great reception from government customers about because they, too, understand what will be detectable. And look, we're also experimenting with onboard compute, right?

We've announced the edge compute that we're doing with NVIDIA. So think of the algorithms that we're running on our desktop today running in space. And why would you want to do that? Because you could get to the answer sooner, right? Get the signal, run the algorithm, just send down the answer.

And then the other thing we're working on is optically connecting our satellites to also move just data faster. So in a world in which what have you done for me in the last 3 minutes, it's better to be able to send you the answer in 2 minutes.

And so we're setting up a series of links so that -- whereas today our data is down linked to a ground station. And by the way, we have a few dozen of those around the world. So there's plenty of them, but it still takes time to go from Norway to San Francisco and back to the customer. So with the mesh network, we could compress those time lines.

That, too, will be part of the demonstration that we'll look with Owl so that Owl can be that mesh network and very timely responses to analytic detections.

Yes. And then the manufacturing facility in Germany, what opportunities does that unlock?

It's Pelicans to start. That's what we've announced. It's -- I mean, if you come to San Francisco, and I've already invited the audience, they're invited a second time, you'll see SuperDove production, you'll see Pelican production, and you might even see Tanager production.

Have we talked about Tanager yet? That's our hyperspectral sensor, yes. So all done the same shop floor, right? There's just different corners of it or in different cubicles, et cetera. Berlin will be a Pelican factory in the beginning, but I think the market will decide whether or not it becomes more than that.

What it -- let's face it, because of the geopolitics I mentioned earlier, as a U.S. company, we come with baggage because we're a proud U.S. company. We're a proud server, a partner of the U.S. government.

But let's face it, when non-U.S. countries are thinking about how am I going to grow my own capability, they don't always think about, well, I'm going to go buy that from a U.S. company first, right? They would -- might want to buy locally or develop locally.

So -- but we didn't wander into Germany yesterday, right? We've had almost 10 years of presence there. Now that was with a satellite command and control station and our 300 employees. So we're German already from that sense or European already.

I think this is also going to help because we'll hire German engineers and metalworkers, et cetera, to populate the factory there in Berlin. And obviously, we want to be competitive going forward and we think this is a way to increase our competitiveness there.

Recognition that there's a lot of demand for services in Europe broadly.

That's correct.

Yes. And then Project Suncatcher, that was another thing that came up recently. Would you mind just elaborating on that?

So Suncatcher is our research and development agreement with Google, which, by the way, is a long-term partner and investor in Planet Labs. Actually, the SkySat, I haven't talked much about those. Those are our legacy -- they're still flying, but those are our legacy high-resolution satellites that Pelican is replacing. Those we bought from Google a few years back. They were called Skyboxes for them.

So we've had a pretty tight relationship with Google. Suncatcher is very early days exploration of a potential compute and space proposition. And look, I'm the wrong guy to have the debate about how real this is and if it's real, how close it is. I appreciate there's vastly disparate views about compute and space.

So you should think about Suncatcher this way, about us doing very early exploration of the core R&D that would be required at a very small scale. And I think a lot of the debate is about not the basic R&D. I think people agree about the engineering science. I think where people disagree is how can you scale that.

So I guess our message is while we're excited about it -- well, we're obviously excited about our partnership with Google in general. While we're very interested in it, we'd recommend caution here, early days.

Sundar, by the way, talked about a 10-year horizon kind of is when he thinks about it. I'm not going to question that. I'm just going to throw it out that there's somebody that's pretty thoughtful about delivering services like compute and space. But please don't think about it as a quarter-to-quarter kind of effort.

Yes. No, makes sense. And we have a few minutes left. I wanted to talk about M&A and the broader strategy there. You have had a couple of successes. Bedrock comes up, right? Maybe you could talk about the landscape as you see it and how you think about the M&A philosophy?

I'm just happy I got this far in our conversation without saying, I don't know a ton about that. Guess what? I don't know a ton about that. Now look, I met Bedrock. I'm very impressed with them. I'm glad they're on our team. But it's not -- while I do strategy, I don't do that part of the strategy. So I'm sorry.

Fair enough. Maybe I can open it up to the audience for any questions.

[Technical Difficulty] and sensing within space, the other things going on in the space. Are you going after that?

So non-earth imaging, which, by the way, I just have to say is exciting for me as a civil servant to say in public because for years, I couldn't talk about it, right? It was so sensitive, right? Nobody talked about it. We called it sat-squared in the days, satellite-to-satellite imaging. So this is just fun for me.

It's an area that we have discussed various partnerships with companies that are pursuing this as kind of a primary delivery service. But I would describe it as more of R&D, test and evaluation versus something that I would put into those 3 big buckets. So exploring, willing to be surprised perhaps at what it might become, but not a key business area for sure for now.

Yes, sir.

Two quick ones. So number one, you've got factories in -- a factory in San Francisco, you're building another one in Germany. I'm sorry, if I missed it. Like what quantum of satellites are we talking about here? How many do we need? Number one.

So since Planet was born, we've launched around 700. So it's a lot. It's the most earth observation satellites anyone's ever launched. Elon is launching a lot more comm satellites, we won't compete with that, but for earth observation.

So -- and we launch about quarterly. I mean we launch, we subscribe to a Falcon 9 or a Rocket Lab. And every launch is obviously different, but I think our last launch had a Pelican and 36 SuperDoves. So we launched them in flocks.

So that's -- those are the kind of numbers. Yes, I know it's a bird thing. Those are the kind of numbers that -- and again, if you come to Willy Wonka land in San Francisco, you'll see it's a busy place. And we can turn them out quite quickly.

I mentioned the responsiveness to the German demand, 2 months. And the way we did it was basically they took a satellite off the line. So think of an automobile line. "Oh, I want that car." Well, it will be done next Thursday. You can have it next Thursday. Now we're not quite that fast, but very proud of that kind of volume. Germany, again, will be focused on Pelican to begin with, and then we'll see from there.

And are they principally Low Earth Orbit? Or...

Yes.

And then finally, it sounds like the level of redundancy around sort of denial of -- in a more -- do you have the redundancy in a sort of denial of...

Yes, space is a competitive environment. Our -- the Planet approach is proliferated architecture, right? Meaning not that we want people to attack our satellites or to jam them or to lase them or whatnot. But if it happens, we don't just have 1 or 2. We have 180.

And again, we're not asking anybody to do anything to any of our satellites, please. But we understand that it is a risk. And just -- and I know we're over time, but just one of my early introductions to the Planet was one of the launch failures. This is back in 2014. Remember, I was just learning about them.

It was a launch from Virginia, which is an interesting place to launch from anyway. It was an Antares rocket at the time, and it was at night. It was a dramatic explosion, right? Just one of these fire balls that go up. there was like 3 dozen Doves on the thing.

Some of them landed on the beach, right, because that's as far as they got. And they started to communicate. They said, "Hey, I'm in space. I'm ready to start taking pictures." And we said, "No, you're not. You're here on the beach."

What I loved about it was, and I can't remember the exact number, but 3 months later, I think it was October to December, some of the same Doves that either landed on the beach or maybe they stayed intact, were launched on a SpaceX rocket. Do you know what I mean? So to me, that's resilient, right? And that's 10 years ago. And so we're very proud of our ability to brush off the sand and let's go again.

Listen, that was fantastic. Robert, thank you for joining us. I really appreciate it, and thank you for the audience for being engaged.

Thanks. Appreciate it.

Good afternoon, everybody. Thank you for joining us for our lunchtime presentation. I'm incredibly fired up to have an amazing American Patriot, leader in intelligence and a corporate leader at Planet. My name is Matt Spence. I'm a Managing Director here at Barclays. And I'm here from Silicon Valley. I work out of that side of the office. And one of the reasons we wanted to have this conversation today is at the intersection of technology and national security.

This conference has been around 43 years. And for the last 4 years, we have introduced the Defense Technology Summit as part of this conference. started with just a few ragtag folks. And now we had 7 panels yesterday, which had a packed house, which I think reflects a lot of the interest a number of you in this room have about seeing what can be done to both increase our national security through technology, but also in a market that is really ripping and promising a number of things.

For that, I am really thrilled to welcome my friend, Robert Cardillo. Robert has a storied and amazing career in both public service and the private sector. Robert served as the sixth Director of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency from 2014 to 2019, led an organization of 14,500 people responsible of analyzing our nation's SIGINT and other types of intelligence. Prior to that, Robert was the Deputy Director of the Director of National Intelligence after having a 3-decade career in the intelligence community.

So if you're wondering why I'm so excited, we have a legit spy here to tell us what the secrets are. In a previous life, I served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense and as the National Security Council and had the great fortune to spend many hours with Robert in the White House Situation Room with the President and the cabinet, seeing Robert in action, answering some of the toughest questions that the President would ask. Now Robert leads Planet Federal as the Chief Strategist and Chairman of the Board. It's the division of Planet, which is focusing on U.S. government and defense customers.

As many of you know here, Planet operates the largest fleet of earth observation satellites in history, over 200 satellites providing daily imagery to the entire planet. And I think why it's so interesting now, it's a capability that fundamentally did not exist when Robert was running the NGA. And we're having conversations today about the evolution of intelligence, the role Planet and the commercial sector is playing. And then as folks finish up their salmon, please let me know, raise your hand, and we also open it to questions as well. So Robert, thank you so much for joining us.

Thanks, Matt. It's a great pleasure to be here with you all, and I look forward to our conversation. And I just noted, given the 43rd year, it was 43 years ago that I joined the community out of college under President Reagan. So there you go. There's the rise of Barclays conference in my career.

It's well time. So maybe we can start with that. So Robert, in the 43 years when you joined the intelligence community, running to its very highest levels. What prompted the move to the commercial sector? And what has surprised you most about that transition?

So I think the best way to describe that transition is to give you a little bit more color on what my world, no pun intended was like in the '80s as an imagery analyst, what we now call geospatial intelligence, supporting what was the dominant national security issue at the time, Soviet Union. And so I joined an agency called the Defense Intelligence Agency because in those days, we didn't have an agency dedicated to imagery and mapping and geospatial intelligence, that didn't come until '96.

And so you got welcomed into this community. Your background was checked to make sure you were trustworthy enough to hold a top-secret clearance. And then quite literally, you got thrown in the basement. No windows, doors with ciphers on them, very low light in the spaces because you were about to exploit imagery that was taken the following way. And so we would have a top-secret satellite that would fly around the earth 23,000 miles an hour, open an aperture.

And by the way, it carried film in those days. Some in the audience will remember what film was, expose that film over areas of interest, right, capture the canister of film once it was exposed and actually eject it out of the back of the satellite, have it drop back through the atmosphere, deploy a parachute. And I'm not making this up, a plane with a trapeze behind it would try to time the descent to catch the canister of film before it fell into the Pacific Ocean.

And how many times did they miss -- lose the great film?

Once. And you can imagine because -- look, that was a top secret satellite with top secret imagery, taking top secret photos of top secret facilities. There was a lot of concern when the canister went into the ocean, right? Again, height of the cold war. And so at great expense that was recovered eventually. But the point I'm making is really how closed that world was, right? Because basically, if you were my customer, you had a top secret clearance, you'd ask me a top secret question. I task that top secret satellite, get a top secret image, write a top secret report and give it back to you, right?

So it's a very small, important but small world. Notice I've said nothing about commercial. Now U.S. government didn't build that satellite, right? A prime contractor would have built it, right, for us. And I think they should be paid great tribute for their service and contribution. But the utility of that result, right, was kept to a very small group purposefully so, right? We were in a cold war with an adversary that was quite dangerous. And in such a world, you're always looking for an incremental advantage.

So such a dangerous adversary, what types of questions would you be asked? And what were the best secrets you found that you could tell us without having to kill us all?

So you'll -- I mean, I'm sure most people will remember that as in what became the space race and the nuclear competition and for global dominance, there was many debates in the early days about Soviet bomber programs and missiles and capacities and capabilities. I mean one of the most famous was the Cuban missile crisis when they actually did move capabilities to -- quite close to where we are right now in a way to convey a threat that was meaningful to create an outcome that the Soviets wanted.

And now the imagery played a role there in those days, but it was from air breathers, okay, the U2's pipeline. And as we move forward, even though the -- well, as the technology was evolving and the intelligence challenges were evolving, to me, it all came back down to the core value proposition because as you and I served in the White House from 2010 to 2014, the way I used to describe my job to others was you basically have about 30 seconds to get some of the most busy people in the world, including your boss, Mr. Donilon, to get their attention, one, because, again, they're juggling 18 issues and 3 crises and the President is waiting for some due out from them.

And if you're successful getting their attention, you have about 30 more seconds to prove they didn't make a mistake giving you the first 30, right? So what have you done for me lately? And so I know I skipped over a lot in your question from the way things were and the way things are, and we can unpack this. But basically, I had to find a way to create an increment of advantage, information advantage, ultimately leading hopefully to decision advantage that would tell Mr. Donilon, the National Security Adviser, or to give him more confidence about an Iranian threat, right?

And let's face it, we were still engaged in both Iraq and Afghanistan, a better understanding of the reality of the ground situation and something more strategically the rise of Chinese nuclear play. So it could have been any or all of those things and tended to be a mix of everything every day. One thing we might want to talk about is -- the other hat I wore during that job was editing the President's Daily Brief and then delivering it on most days to President Obama. And obviously, that is the centerpiece of our value proposition and...

So maybe on that, it's -- so the President's Daily intelligence briefing is the stuff that we see in the movies, at the time, the President would receive a leather-bound book. It said Barack Hussein Obama on it. And...

That's the Presidential see alone.

And basically was -- the way we talked to you was the 20 front page stories that would break at any minute that we never wanted anyone to find out about. Tell us what was in the presidential daily briefing, what type of topics, how you thought about putting that together, what you decided went in and went out? And was there any role that any of these commercial technologies played in gathering some of that information that you would serve up to the President?

Yes. So first, let me give you a little bit of insight into that world of the President's Daily Brief. So actually, to this day, it still isn't quite daily. We do take Sundays off, which I was grateful for because it allowed at least one part of the week where you could decompress a little bit, but not much. So you can imagine there's a team from across the intelligence community that is dedicated to creating those handful of stories that we put in front of the President every morning.

And there's 2 fundamental questions that I, as the final editor, I would -- so basically, if you think about the clock around 6 or 7 at night, Sunday night through Friday night, I would get a set of draft articles for the next day that were proposed from the PDB staff. And my first challenge was, do we put it in the book or not, right? And the way we made those decisions, at least I did was I had to answer 2 fundamental questions. And the first one was, why does the President need to know this information? What's differential about it that needs to be in front of him.

Now that one, a lot of things got through that one because as the President of the United States, you can imagine his expanse and interest area is quite large. But it was the second question that was more critical. And the second question was why does the President need to know it now, like tomorrow morning. And obviously, it could be because of an upcoming trip or a decision or a negotiation or a deployment that he's got to consider. And so that would winnow it down.

And at least -- and by the way, the most important letter in PDB is the P. So every President -- and I served mostly under President Obama, I see -- 3 years under President Trump's first term. But again, I was at the NGA Director. I was not in the White House for that service. But President Obama was quite particular about the way he wanted to consume the President's Daily Brief. He was a reader, and he wanted to digest it himself in his residence before we came in to do the morning brief. It's quite different than the former President, quite different than it is today, but that -- again, that's the President's choice.

So the book would get to him around 6 in the morning. Again, I would have done my editing and decision-making and approving probably by 10 or 11 the night before the production would go into play. and then be delivered to him. And then once we saw him generally at 9:30 in the morning for our half hour session, he's read the book. He'd have it with him. Sometimes he would hand it back, sometimes he wouldn't. It's his book. And then if he had questions about the book, that was the time to answer them.

If not, we then built what we call a walk-on brief, which was, again, kind of like live theater. You just had to look across the expanse of the news, and this is where commercial had a big play because let's face it. While we were quite proud of our contribution of giving him the most exquisite secrets, right, that we could help inform his understanding, ultimately, his decisions, President is awashed in information, right? He's got his own sources.

And by the way, this is 2010 to 2014, and it's only scaled up since then with the amount of information and questions about the credibility of said information, right? If I could take a quick segue, and I'll get to the commercial question here. I built a walk on brief. I think it was about 2012. And generally, if -- look, our job was to bring as much honest, well-developed crafted intelligence as we could about the world as it is. That's the intelligence community's job.

Now you're supporting somebody who's a policymaker who's seeing the world as they wish it would be or would want it to be. And so there's always going to be a tension between that provision of intelligence and their job, truth to power, I guess, is the shortest -- sometimes we get some criticism, including from your old boss that we would only [indiscernible], right? And it's always where the world is breaking, where the biggest risks are. But we said, well, I'm sorry, that comes with the territory. You have other ways to find the good news stories.

But I was building this walk-on brief and quite frankly -- and again, I'm an imagery guy, that was my background. And one of the government classified satellites had taken just an exquisite amazing image that I just thought was going to knock the President socks off because he's going to say, wow, I had no idea. You had such powerful satellites and whatnot. Well, it happened to be of a North Korean mobile missile. It happened to be on a launch pad.

So North Korea builds premensurated positions by which if and when they choose to employ their mobile missiles, they'll come out from their underground bunker, often in a mountain, right? They'll get fueled and they'll go to these predesignated spots, so they know where they are and they can get more accurately.

So I made a mistake, though, because I thought I was showing off a capability, right? And so I handed it to the President, and I said, oh, look at this, you can see the wing nuts there on the side. It was just the most -- I thought as an imagery person, most beautiful photo. And he looked at me and he said, well, that's travel mode, right? And I said, yes, sir. meaning the missile was in its bed because it's on an 8-axle vehicle. And he said, well, how long does it take to go from that mode to launch mode?

And I said, oh, sir, about 6 or 7 minutes because it's got to have some final fueling and whatnot, and it's got to move to its direct position. And he said, then how long before it launch? And I said, it's up to them at that point. He said, so you're telling me that in that photo, there is -- and by the way, these were the days North Korea has kind of always been North Korea, but they were threatening the U.S. with intercontinental ballistic capabilities, right, that they could put a missile on our homeland.

And there was a lot of debate within the intelligence community about whether that was verified or not. And he said, so what you're telling me there is that you're showing me something that in 17 minutes, right, could threaten Seattle, okay, like the blood drained out of my head, right? I said, oh, this is going very badly. I just wanted him to say what a nice lovely picture you brought to me, right?

But I bring up that story to tell you 2 things. One, you've got to be very discriminate about what you decide to put in front of the President, especially that President. But two, because of the sensitivity of the image, there was no way that we could use it well, it'd be very difficult to use it diplomatically, right, and to try to create an alliance or agreement about North Korean sanctions, for example. But if I had tasked a commercial image, right, of that site at that time from a commercial imaging company, then I could have -- now if you don't know, the U.S. licenses commercial imagery satellites in ways that restrict their abilities for just this reason. Current limit is a resolution no greater than 25 centimeters.

And what does that mean? Put that into context, like so if the resolution is less than 25 centimeters, what can I see and what can I not see with those restrictions?

So what it means, technically, and I'll get to you what does it mean to you as just a consumer is that the pixel that you collect from your sensor can't be any smaller than 25 centimeters, right? So it's about 9 or 10 inches, which means that you can resolve something on the ground of that size. Now it doesn't mean you can identify everything that's 9 inches square on the ground, but it does tell you that you can -- when you put those pixels together, understand the difference between a pickup truck and a car, right, or certainly an armored personnel carrier and a tank or a variant of a tank.

And so it allows you to interpret and to understand details at a lower level. And again, those restrictions are still in place. Actually, the U.S. has recently liberalized the policy to include the reality that the U.S. isn't the only player in space. So it didn't make a lot of sense for us to restrict American companies from imaging a certain resolution when France and China, et cetera, would be out there imaging at a different resolution. So now there's a recognition that there is a foreign space capability, and it's in our U.S. national interest that the U.S. commercial imagery industry is as competitive as possible. And so they've loosened some of those to allow U.S. companies to be more competitive.

So moving into -- so I want to focus before we get more into sort of what Planet is doing and how, I want to talk about one of the most difficult intelligence issues we had been on together, which is the operation against Osama bin Laden. When I think about this, the outcome is like the United States is able to find the smallest needle in the largest haystack on the planet, small capability in a compound in Abbottabad.

To the extent you can talk about it, I remember when we're in the room with the President, and he's presented with the model of the compound, the person who you can -- who we believe was Osama bin Laden, but the intelligence was very unclear. There's a moment which our colleague who is the Acting Director of the CIA after, Michael Morell said, on the final decision, Mr. President, I believe Osama bin Laden is the person in this compound.

But I was more confident that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction than I am that this is Osama bin Laden. That said, my recommendation is we should do this, as a Deputy Director of DNI, how did you think about delivering that intelligence to the President on what was arguably one of the most consequential decisions of his presidency at that time?

So first, a little context. So I joined or began that position in August of 2010. Late that month, early the next month, so on August, September 2010, Leon Panetta, who is the Director of CIA, we were finishing up a meeting in the Situation Room. I was in the meeting with -- for my boss. So it was a principles meeting.

And he taps me on the shoulder, Mr. Panetta and he said, oh, hey, come on upstairs, we need to brief the President. Now it's 5 or 6 at night. And I go, no, no, I don't brief the President at night. I'm the morning guy. I didn't say that, but I mean I'm thinking I'm not supposed to be upstairs at 5:30.

It doesn't sound like the right answer...

No, no, he said, come with me, so I came with him. So -- and by the way, I'm still 2 weeks into the job. I don't know the West Wing. I don't really know where things are. I'm kind of getting lost. So I just follow Mr. Panetta upstairs. We go into the Oval Office. By the way, the Oval looks quite different at dusk than it does in the morning. In the morning it's pretty bright, airy, it's kind of more somber at night.

Anyway, I see a number of briefers from CIA sitting on the couch. John Brennan was there, of course, as the National Security Adviser for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism. And I just go stand behind the couch because I'm not supposed to be here other than Leon told me to come upstairs. And they rolled out on the coffee table that you see in the middle of the Oval Office, a commercial image in color.

It was the first time I'd ever seen Abbottabad, first time I had ever heard of the town Abbottabad. And I'm hearing them update the President on the case. Now this is September. The raid wasn't until May. So we're 9 months away really from decision. Well, I'm processing all this quickly, and I said, oh, goodness. And you can imagine how closely held even the assessment was, right? There was just very few people.

The number of people in the White House. Plenty of time it was probably 4 people...

And to this day, I credit Leon Panetta for at least really trusting my boss, Jim Clapper, at the time to invite me upstairs because he didn't have to. But back to your question, what we then did was the case was really run out of Langley, out of CIA. Now whether you've seen the movies in the documentaries or not, National Security Agency played a large role as well.

NGA, my home agency of the model fame contributed. So it was completely a team sport, but it was run out of Langley, right, the case, whether or not this was it. And over the next 10 months, I felt like my job was to be somewhat of a red team because I wasn't doing the job daily. I was on the receiving end of the analysis and the update. But to your point about weapons of mass destruction, I thought we owed the President and obviously, the country to make sure we were asking every question that could be asked to try to poke holes in the case so that we could at least give him the clearest picture of what do we know, what do we assess, what don't we know and keep those things all very clear.

And I appreciate Michael's recollection of it. I remember when the President was going around the room, this is like April now. So we're moving up on the point of decision whether or not to authorize the raid. And this has been documented in a few books and he was -- somehow we got into a numbers game. And people were asked, well, what odds do you say, right? And somebody would say 20% and somebody would say 50%. And of course, the analysts were up at 80% or 90%, but that's kind of analyst life, right, because you start to get your belief system built into your case.

And Mike Leiter, who was the Director of our National Counterterrorism Center, said I thought was a very important thing. And it was quite different than Michael Morell's point. Mike sat at that table, said, Mr. President, I don't know if it's 40, 50 or 60. And actually, I think it's a little silly for us to be giving you a number like that. But I will tell you, I think this case is 10x better than any other case we've had for bin Laden's location. So he just put it in a comparative mode, and I thought that was very helpful. But as has been noted, it was an assessment.

And the stakes are high. The reason why I'm pressing on this question is we've all sat in board rooms and briefing your investment committees or your CEOs and important decisions are made under uncertainty. If it's an easy case, it doesn't go to the President. And in retrospect, much like the amazing raid with Maduro in Venezuela, it's due to the heroes of our special forces operators and that. But there's so much uncertainty that remains.

And I remember the risk is at that very end, there was divided counsel around that table and that last meeting on Thursday evening when the President was there and asked his nation security cabinets, what should I do? Half the room, including some cabinet securities said, I don't think we should do it. Others said, we should. It was the President's decision to make on his own as he made that lonely walk from the Situation Room through the Rose Garden back to the residents.

But the key question is part of it is Robert Gates, who was a Republican appointed Secretary of Defense under George W. Bush, sat there as probably one of the more experienced people in the room, had been Deputy Director of the CIA, Deputy National Security Adviser. He said, Mr. President, I know this sounds like a very compelling case, but I was here in the Iran hostage operation, and he pointed to me because he had the job I had then.

And we were so confident everything would work, and we know how that ended. So raised the stakes dramatically to know we're violating the sovereignty of a foreign country, going after one of the most notorious terrorists who took so many American lives. And the question that he's asking the intelligence is sort of an impossible question and you're given circumstance [indiscernible], you have a photograph of bin Laden.

Robert, having been in the room for that, having been in the room about the nuclear program in Iran, the nuclear program in North Korea, with the new intelligent satellite capabilities we have now, now in 2026, how would that have expanded the decision set available to the President? Like if you know what you know now and we have the technology, either for the bin Laden operation or the other things, how would that have changed the decision process at all?

I think the first thing that just is different from today's world is it's a more transparent planet for good and for bad, right? And some of that is owed to the company I work for called Planet Labs and 200 satellites and providing an unclassified daily scan of the earth, right? But there's multiple companies that are doing that. And some part of it is coming from our mobile devices and our posting and our sharing and whatnot. So the world is, in many ways, more open.

I think we could have provided more context for the strategic environment, and you mentioned Pakistan and for the implications of a rift with a major ally who was supporting our operations in Afghanistan. I think we could have had a better understanding about the risk to the -- because people think about the raid itself, which obviously was the most important part, but the raid doesn't happen until you have a logistics flow and you have base camps and you have rehearsals and you have courses of action depending on what's found and what occurs.

And I think today, we could have provided the President with more confidence about that environment in which he was making the particular decision. To me, I think it's the beauty of the confluence of the highly classified information that I've talked about and this open and transparent and recurring -- I noticed on the escalator, the term global insights. I said, yes, exactly that, right? It's these global insights that just give you -- I think, just raises your level of understanding and confidence. And so it doesn't make maybe the decision any less hard, but maybe you can just be more confident about it at the point of decision.

And as we finish up, how should we think about, like if we're having this conversation in China right now, and there's the Robert Cardillo, who had brief President Xi, how do their capabilities compare to America, both when you add in the government top secret side of things as well as commercial capabilities?

Broadly speaking, analogous, similar. I think we still have an advantage. That advantage is shrinking. When I'm explaining the value proposition of Planet Labs to people, we'll show them the 200 satellites and how they do the line scanning. And we'll proudly say that while we've been doing this for 8 years now, there is no other company that does that daily scan, the daily scan of the earth and has now 8 years of archived with AI applications to unlock the value.

But then I have to add, but there is a company called Jilin in China that is pursuing not exactly the same, but close to 200 satellites themselves to provide a similar type of awareness. So sometimes when I'm in meetings with national security officials today, and I'm trying to explain to them the value that commercial imagery could add to their decision process, I often remind them, by the way, whether or not you use this commercial aspect of that, do know the adversary has this capability to monitor your movements.

And that's that red team analysis that I talk about. So this is why I say transparency is broadly good. I think transparency is good for liberal democratic societies where open information is generally a good thing. China has a different social compact with its citizens and so less so there. But my top-level answer to your question, Matt, is still better, but close in.

Getting close in.

Yes.

This raised a point about Planet as a disruptor in this space. So I want to talk about how as a venture-backed public company, Planet thought about operating in a market that has historically been dominated by cost plus. Like when you mentioned the satellites that you viewed in this kind of scary windowless basement when you started your career, the U.S. government didn't make those. How do you navigate working in a market that has historically been dominated by cost-plus contractors, it's -- you're bringing a different technology, a different system, have a different DNA to where they've grown now.

Look, we're quite proud of Planet of the growth we have experienced, especially in the past few years. We went public 5 years ago now. So quite frankly, we're getting better at answering your question each quarter, and we're proud of that. But Planet basically introduced a different value proposition to the government and to commercial partners. And it was more -- it was less about I'm interested in selling you an image, right, or a data set that's filled with pixels.

And it's more about are you interested in subscribing to alerts and to answers and to tip-offs, et cetera. And this is where the confluence of artificial intelligence has made all the difference because I mentioned the 8 years of archive. And a matter of fact, when I was at NGA, the Planet first started to fly these, they call them Dove satellites, imaging at 3 meters resolution. Remember, I said 25 centimeters, so think 3 meters pixel size.

And frankly, my experiment at NGA didn't go over well because I was turning that imagery over to humans, people that were succeeding me in those jobs. Now they weren't in basements anymore, but they were still basically exploiting imagery the old-fashioned way by squinting at it, right, and writing down what they saw.

Well, Planet's daily scan is much more of a machine-first proposition. And the idea is let the machine answer 3 questions that machines are quite good at and getting better at all the time and answering -- and the 3 questions are what, where and when. What's the object, where is it and at what time? And because algorithms are helping the machine -- or they extract that automatically out of imagery in a very efficient and effective way, you can save your human analysts like I had at NGA for 2 much more difficult questions, which are why and what's next.

And especially as an intelligence analyst, that's really what you're there to do, is to make your best call about why, why is this Chinese development happening? Why is this Russian movement occurring? What's the meaning of this exercise or this deployment? And then more importantly, what do we think is going to happen tomorrow and the next week.

And on that question of what's going to happen tomorrow and the relationship between the questions you ask machines and the human, I want to ask about AI's role in changing that. As you guys know, investment banks are not allowed to have a conference by the SEC without talking about AI these days.

So this is a required question. But how has AI changed that analysis of what you guys can do? Obviously, you're a tech-first company, you developed this. What is the role of that human analyst now compared to where you think it's going to be, call it, just 5 years from now?

AI is accelerating everything I just described, right, about the power of the algorithms and the ability of the machine to do those 3 basic questions. To me, it's now elevating the human because, again, to do why and what's next, you've got to have experience and expertise and context and understanding. Now again, that too can be machine aided, but ultimately, you're going to make a call, you're going to make an assessment.

And at least today, that's still in the realm of human capacity. But let me add that for those that don't know, Planet spun out of NASA. The founders worked at NASA. They actually had a project when they were in government called PhoneSat. And this was the early evolution of the iPhone. And the real question was, hey, can these things work in space?

Now I'm sure it was a little bit more complicated than that. But basically, NASA wanted to find out. And guess what, they work pretty well. Now they don't work perfectly, and there are some things. But basically, the technology that you need to resolve an image from space had moved quite quickly and powerfully to smaller and smaller unit economics. So that experience helped motivate the founders to leave NASA and say, hey, let's try this, and so -- by the way, the satellites they first built and built today are -- they're called 3U satellites.

They're literally this big, think a loaf of bread and they have a little bit more than an iPhone on one end now, but they have a sensor that scans down. So what's exciting about AI today is that most of us experienced the advancement through large language models and asking questions about what can you do with my refrigerators ingredients to help me make dinner tonight or how can you help me think about risks, balance risks and opportunities with respect to some financial decision or legal decision I need to make.

They are now doing the same thing with what they call multimodal models, right? Where certainly, they're consuming text, but they are now consuming pixels as well and video. And so I'm very excited about the interaction of those multimodal capabilities in that 8-year history of the earth. Now because of my background, I'm interested in patterns over time to what they could indicate about future events.

But you could do the same thing with respect to land management and supply chain and transportation, et cetera, to get a history that could inform decisions in those as well. So I think it's easy to say if we have the same conversation about a year from now, there will be applications that don't exist today, that will literally change the value proposition of that data set.

I want to -- if folks have questions, please raise your hand and we can send folks around. Before we get into those, one quick question and then I want to talk a little more about the business model. To the extent you can say, as we've moved from the 3 meters to 25 centimeters, what is the best that a satellite can pick up now? Like could they identify you and I by face? Is it something else? Like how good is the technology right now in picking something up from the sky?

So no, to facial recognition. You get much greater threat from a drone, frankly, obviously. But look, could it discriminate a crowd or a gathering? Yes. There's a number of humans in this area. And if you were to combine that image with, for example, cell phone tracking, right, you could combine the 2 things to say, oh, I had that signal at that time, and I'm going to correlate those 2 events.

So you're not exactly identifying a human, but I guess you could contribute to that question through today's technology. As I said earlier, I mean, it's -- you could -- pretty easy to resolve the difference at the highest resolution, like I said, between a sedan, a mini van, a pickup truck, those kinds of classifications versus, oh, yes, there's Matt, back at the beach and not working.

Got it. Yes. As we move again to the business model, so can you tell us a little about what Planet's business model is? You're obviously building satellites with private capacity, you sell capacity. You're using this with private capital. That's a very different model from the traditional defense contractors. Tell us about Planet's business model? And how do you sort of deal with your different business model working with these government customers who are used to working traditionally with the prime?

Yes. So I'll talk about it in layer. So Planet has and it does and will obviously sell its imagery, core raw imagery to anyone who's interested, who wants to do their own processing and their own analysis and their own manipulation of the image. And there's still that group of people by the U.S. government is still a consumer of, if you will, kind of that raw data.

The 2 areas that are growing most relative to that baseline capability are those that want the analytics. I talked earlier about those subscriptions. And so Planet has 2 broad applications that we market. One is called maritime domain awareness, which is what it sounds like. If you're interested in ship traffic over time and the movement thereof, there's a service that provides that, and Planet is proud of winning market share there with the U.S. Navy in very challenging areas like the South China Sea.

And then there's also what we call global monitoring service, which is think of that kind of monitoring but over land masses. And so tracking, again, supply chain movement and land management and if for a nation state military activity across the land. But the third category that is quite new for Planet, it's literally in the past 2 years is what we broadly call Satellites as a Service. And I just came back, by the way, from the Munich Security Conference last weekend, and this was front and center again because as most people know, that U.S. security blanket is less assured these days, especially in Europe.

And there's much more interest in our allies obtaining their own capacity for overhead sensing. Planet's announced 3 deals in the past 15 months in that regard, one with Japan, one with Germany and the most recent with Sweden. And it essentially works as a -- if you think of the constellation of satellites that orbit the earth, how can you fractionalize, I'll say, the ownership of those constellations in a way that's meaningful.

So our arrangement with Japan is that contract comes with 2 ground stations, which can both task and receive imagery to the satellites. And as our satellites come over those ground stations, they're essentially Japanese. They buy all that access over their ground station. But once the satellite traverses outside of theirs, then it goes back to global and Planet then markets and monetizes the rest. So think of it as a piece of the overall capacity.

Similar -- well, similar, not exactly the same deal with Germany that we announced and most recently with Sweden. And what it does for companies because Planet's ability to both build and innovate and fly satellites in a very timely way, if you want increased confidence in the near term, and I mean near term as in months, not years, we can move capacity to you. And so as countries get a little bit more nervous about what they know and what they don't know, this gives them increased confidence.

So I can buy of capacity when I need it, scale it down when I don't, sort of almost like the AWS of satellite collection.

The model that we have is you're really buying the capacity, okay? What you do with it, it's completely up to you. And so you could "maximize the throttle", but you own the throttle then. But the contract arrangement basically is that capacity.

You mentioned, Robert, you came back from the Munich Security Conference. One of the headline European defense forums last year, JD Vance made a lot of headlines talking about this new relationship, huge amount of attention. When I used to attend, they were mostly government officials, not as many private sector officials.

Now it seems like there are a lot of companies participating in the Security Conference. What is your role there? And what does this say about the new role of the private sector in playing a critical part in defense and some of these national security questions?

Well, I think it goes back to the core issue we've been discussing, Matt, which is in the old days, if you wanted "your own intelligence sources and capabilities", you would have to either build them yourselves or contract with a bespoke provider to build them for you. And because the world has become a more transparent place, you now have more options. And so as I mentioned earlier, broadly speaking, Europe had been the recipient, quite frankly, of cheap security for a long time.

It was us. So we were providing the security blanket for Europe, and you can have a reasonable debate whether that was a good thing or bad thing, but it's not a thing anymore. We've made it quite clear to them that it's time for you to increase your investment. And look, I used to -- when I was the Director of NGA, I would have dozens of international partners. And of course, I never met with a partner who had the same capabilities I had. I was always dealing with somebody who had something left.

But in many ways, I envied them because even though we had the largest enterprise, we also had the most baggage, meaning cultural baggage and technology baggage, and it was tough to reinvent yourself that way. And I used to envy some of my like very, if you will, nascent partners. I said, oh, you have a clean sheet of paper. What I would create quite a different intelligence architecture today if I had a clean sheet of paper. And so in many ways, and again, Planet is proud to be competitive in this space, you can create a baseline of understanding that's completely unclassified, right?

And then on top of that, then just build the bespoke pieces that you need, which tend to be more expensive anyway. And so as these countries in Europe and in Asia now build up their systems, I think the reason why commercial companies are so compelling is because, one, we compete. So we would have a meeting with a senior leader and another commercial imagery company would come in behind. So you know what it means? So the market is essentially trying to work competitively to satisfy your need. So that's good for you.

And then you can be more efficient in how you scale it. And so you're right. I mean, Munich is a mad house just because of the chaos of bringing 60 international leaders into one small space with 60 security details and all of the challenges of logistics. But it is the crossroads of the world in the sense of it's bringing that world together and those industries together, both government and commercial in a way that just hasn't before.

Robert, as we wrap up, you've had this amazing career in some of these intelligence questions we've had. You have a broader lens now seeing this from Planet, what we can collect. What keeps you up at night? Like what are the biggest threats in today's world we should be worrying about right now?

And I don't mean my answer to be political because I would have given you the same answer under a Biden administration or even Obama administration. I mentioned that I was -- joined the community during the height of the cold war, right, Soviet Union. Well, Robert McNamara in the 1960s, God bless him, built a machine to beat the Soviet machine, right? Soviet had their kind of infamous 5-year plans, right, in which they would set these goals, national goals and they would rally the nation to achieve them. They weren't all that efficient, but they were very ambitious.

And so we built something called the Future Years Defense Program, which was another 5-year plan. And by the way, our 5-year plans ended up being better than their 5-year plans. And so we "won the cold war", right? And the wall came down and Soviet Union became the Russian Republic. Even in the past 30 years, we've made a lot of changes. We still keep that system, broadly speaking.

And so what -- and by the way, I sleep well. I don't really lose sleep over this. But what frustrates me is, broadly speaking, even though our government often talks about being more agile, being more innovative, being more business like, the requirements process that the government implements and adheres to is still that old process. And so it's very deliberate because you do want our taxpayer dollars to be cared for, but it's so methodically slow.

Very frustrating for a company like Planet because we tend to innovate on quarters, not years. And even when you find the right government customer with the right need and the right budget, it tends to be, oh, yes, I can put that on contract in 6 or 9 months, maybe if it's fast. And then maybe I can program it in a year or 2. You know what I mean, so because I know China doesn't have the same system, I guess that's what I worry about, Matt, is that we now have a peer adversary, near peer adversary called China. They don't have -- I mean, they probably do have and they do have 5-year plans, but they don't operate that way. They operate in their own market.

They're operating and innovating faster than us.

Very close to our speed. And by the way, I want to complement this conference and Barclays, my -- what I used to always say is I have no interest in out China in China. I want to out America China, which means get the new idea, deploy the risk capital and interact with the market, let our competition happen and our capabilities will broadly grow. I still think that's the secret sauce here. And obviously, this conference is kind of part of that core heartbeat.

Well, I think that's a wonderful place to end as we think about how do we out-innovate and think about that piece. It's not a question of keeping the others down, it's racing faster. That's right. I've had a fascinating time learning from Robert. I think 3 things that I take away at first is, yes, it was pretty freaking cool. Second of all, the role of commercial in expanding the decision-making is really essential.

And then third, to really break through what I'm hearing, we continue to need to change how the government buys things, how the government uses technology and ultimately, that's the key to this out-innovating for national security. Please join me in thanking Robert Cardillo for spending his brunch with us.Thank you.

Thank you. It was fun.

Thank you for joining us, and welcome to the Planet Labs PBC Third Quarter of Fiscal 2026 Earnings Call. [Operator Instructions]

I will now hand the conference over to Cleo Palmer-Poroner, Director of Investor Relations.

Thanks, operator, and hello, everyone. This is Cleo Palmer-Poroner, Director of Investor Relations at Planet Labs PBC. Welcome to Planet's Third Quarter of Fiscal Year 2026 Earnings Call.

I'm joined by Will Marshall and Ashley Johnson, who will provide a recap of our results and discuss our current outlook. We encourage everyone to please reference the earnings press release and earnings update presentation for today's call, which are available on our Investor Relations website.

Before we begin, we'd like to remind everyone that we will make forward-looking statements related to future events or our financial outlook. Any forward-looking statements are based on management's current outlook, plans, estimates, expectations and projections. The inclusion of such forward-looking information should not be regarded as a representation by Planet that future plans, estimates or expectations will be achieved. Such forward-looking statements are subject to various risks and uncertainties and assumptions as detailed in our SEC filings, which can be found at www.sec.gov.

Our actual results or performance may differ materially from those indicated by such forward-looking statements, and we undertake no responsibility to update such forward-looking statements to reflect events or circumstances after the date on which the statement is made or to reflect the occurrence of unanticipated events.

During the call, we will also discuss historic and forward-looking non-GAAP financial measures. We use these non-GAAP financial measures for financial and operational decision-making and as a means to evaluate period-to-period comparisons. We believe that these measures provide useful information about operating results, enhance the overall understanding of past financial performance and future prospects and allow for greater transparency with respect to key metrics used by management in its financial and operational decision-making.

For more information on the non-GAAP financial measures, please see the reconciliation tables provided in our press release issued earlier this afternoon, which is available on our website at investors.planet.com.

Further, throughout this call, we provide a number of key performance indicators used by management and often used by competitors in our industry. These and other key performance indicators are discussed in more detail in our press release and our earnings update presentation, which are intended to accompany our prepared remarks.

At this point, I'd now like to turn the call over to Will Marshall, Planet's CEO, Chairperson and Co-Founder. Over to you, Will.

Thanks, Cleo, and welcome, everyone, joining us today. It was another strong quarter, so let's dive in. To briefly summarize the financials, we generated $81.3 million in revenue, representing approximately 33% growth year-over-year, marking another quarter of growth acceleration. Non-GAAP gross margin was 60% in the quarter, and adjusted EBITDA profit came in at $5.6 million, representing our fourth sequential quarter of adjusted EBITDA profitability. Our backlog was $734.5 million at the end of the quarter, representing a year-over-year increase of 216%. Once again, we delivered positive free cash flow, the third quarter in a row, reinforcing our expectation of being free cash flow positive for the full fiscal year. I'm particularly proud to report that with the strong performance in Q3, we are now also expected to be adjusted EBITDA positive in FY '26, an excellent milestone for the team as we work to strike a balance between profit and growth.

Turning to sales highlights. I'll start with the Defense and Intelligence sector, where Q3 revenue accelerated to over 70% growth year-on-year, up over 15% quarter-over-quarter, all driven by strong performance in our data subscription and solutions businesses as well as our satellite services business. As previously announced, we were awarded a prime contract under the Luno B program by the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency for a $12.8 million initial award with partner SynMax. The award is for advanced analytics for maritime operations and reconnaissance. Under this program, we will provide the NGA with AI-enabled maritime domain awareness solutions, which include vessel detections and monitoring over key areas of interest in Asia Pacific. We're honored to have been selected and excited to be expanding this relationship.

The National Reconnaissance Office renewed its baseline contract for PlanetScope board area monitoring data under the Electro-Optical Commercial Layer program for $13.2 million through June 2026. If you were to annualize this award, the annual run rate would be approximately $21.1 million. For the high-resolution component of our EOCL relationship, we have been awarded a framework contract, which the NRO can utilize to order high-resolution Pelican imagery. As a reminder, the EOCL program has been impacted by both the U.S. government shutdown and potential federal budget reductions. That said, we're encouraged by the continued engagement from this critical customer and see significant opportunities for growth in that relationship in the future, particularly as this administration leans into leveraging commercial technologies.

We also won an 8-figure renewal with a long-standing international defense and intelligence customer for high-resolution imagery as we announced last month. And also as previously announced, we were awarded a 6-month $7.5 million contract renewal by the U.S. Navy for vessel detection and monitoring over key areas of interest throughout the Pacific.

Finally, our global monitoring pilots with NATO and DIU have been progressing very well. We're pleased to share that last month, we were awarded a 7-figure expansion by NATO prior to the completion of our existing pilot for them. We're incredibly proud of this early traction and are working hard to continue delivering for these customers. More broadly, we continue to see robust demand for downstream products that embed AI-enabled analytics on top of our daily scan for customers' operations, enhance situation awareness and support informed decision-making.

Turning to the civil government sector, where third quarter revenue was up approximately 1% year-over-year and up approximately 15% quarter-over-quarter. To share a recent highlight, during the quarter, NASA awarded us a 1-year $13.5 million task order under the commercial satellite data acquisition program. As a reminder, this program has also been impacted by the U.S. government shutdown and potential federal budget reductions. Although this relationship has historically been an approximately $20 million annual run rate, we're very pleased to be continuing this important work with our partners at NASA and see opportunities to expand the relationship in the future. In fact, since the end of the quarter, we have received an incremental CSDA task order from NASA for disaster response. Under this new order, which is just under $1 million in value, we will be providing high-resolution tasked imagery to support disaster response and recovery.

Shifting finally to the commercial sector, where revenue was moderately down both year-over-year and quarter-over-quarter. While this trend is expected given our increased focus on large government customers, we remain confident in the commercial sector as a significant market opportunity for Planet, especially as we continue to advance our solution capabilities. We believe that AI-enabled solutions we're developing for our government customers will enable us to deliver insights that can serve applications across a broad range of industries and use cases from supply chain, security and optimization to insurance, finance, energy and agriculture, where we have had a number of marquee customers today. We expect these solutions will help unlock growth in the commercial sector, bridging the gap from data to insights for those customers.

To share a recent commercial highlight, we signed a new operational contract with AXA, one of the world's leading insurance groups following a successful proof of concept. AXA Digital Commercial Platform, or DCP, will integrate data from Planet Base maps, our medium resolution monitoring satellite and high-resolution tasking fleets as well directly into its DCP GeoClaims application to enhance claim processing efficiency and accuracy for property management. We've also signed a strategic marketplace agreement, which will add Planet's products to AXA's DCP platform, making them commercially available to AXA's vast client network of insurance partners. This partnership marks a major step forward in proactive data-led resilience in the face of complex disaster and crisis management needs.

Turning to our Satellite Services business. The team is continuing to execute well on our contract with JSAT, which once again contributed to revenue upside in the quarter. We've also begun ramping for our German-funded satellite services deal and saw a small contribution from that work in the quarter. As we've shared previously, we're seeing very strong demand signals for satellite services driven by our current geopolitical landscape and the demand for sovereign access to space. We continue to aggressively pursue strategic opportunities and the pipeline is robust.

Turning now to the consistently remarkable execution by our Space Systems teams. Just 12 days ago, we launched two of our high-resolution Pelicans into orbit, bringing our commercial fleet size to 5 satellites. We also launched 36 SuperDoves, which will join our broad area monitoring fleet. We have successfully contracted all 38 satellites, and they're now undergoing routine commissioning as they prepare to begin serving customers. We got first light down from the Pelicans the next day, and we're excited to share initial images, which you can find in the investor deck or on our IR website.

We also recently announced plans to open a new Berlin satellite manufacturing facility for the production of next-generation high-resolution Pelican satellites in Germany. We expect to begin ramping operations next year with the aim to roughly double our manufacturing capacity and better meet growing demand from the European market.

Now I want to provide a little more context on our two strategic projects that we announced in the quarter. Firstly, in October, we announced Owl, our next-generation monitoring fleet to continue our unique broad area monitoring mission currently serviced by the SuperDove fleet, but improving the resolution to 1 meter class, lowering the latency and significantly upgrading the onboard compute to incorporate NVIDIA GPUs. Owl is designed from the ground up to address expanded applications ranging from security to disaster response to rapid change detection. The first tech demo is slated for launch later in calendar year 2026, and we're incredibly excited about the future of our daily monitoring solutions.

Secondly, we recently announced a funded R&D initiative with Google called Project Suncatcher. Suncatcher aims to enable scaled AI computing in space by putting Google's tensor processing units or TPUs on purpose-designed satellites where they can leverage the energy of the sun and shed excess heat into the natural coolness of space. This is a competitive win for Planet and our strong track record of building, launching and operating over 600 satellites to date, together with our collaboration on AI-enabled solutions represents a competitive edge, underlying the depth of our experience and our agile aerospace approach. Suncatcher aligns well with our technology development road map for Owl, leveraging the same satellite bus and is therefore highly synergistic. As previously announced, we're planning to deploy two prototype satellites in early 2027. We're excited to be working with our long-term partner, Google, to develop this promising new technology.

On the solutions side, I'm excited to share today that we recently closed the acquisition of Bedrock Research, an AI solutions company based in Denver, Colorado. Through our collaborations to date, Bedrock has successfully delivered for our existing defense and intelligence customers. From a team perspective, they have a rare deep expertise in the intersection of remote sensing, AI and national security. We've been very impressed with their team's agility, creativity and innovation. We view this as a strategically valuable capability. And given the traction we're seeing in global monitoring, bringing this expertise in-house now will help us to accelerate our road map for AI-enabled solutions and support our ability to efficiently scale to meet that market demand. We're thrilled to welcome the Bedrock team to the Planet organization.

To close out, in Q3, we demonstrated continued momentum across the business, driven by strong execution, strategic wins in the government sector and exciting new developments and technologies that we announced, including Owl and Suncatcher. We believe we are well positioned for growth and profitability, reinforced by our robust backlog and commitments to developing best-in-class solutions for our customers. I'm incredibly proud of our global team for the phenomenal execution and excited for what lies ahead.

With that, I'll turn it over to Ashley to discuss our financials. Over to you, Ash.

Thanks, Will. I'll start by echoing Will's remarks and saying that Q3 was another outstanding quarter with strong execution by our teams around the globe. I was particularly proud of our finance and operations teams who added to our list of accomplishments by raising $460 million of convertible debt in September and hosting a highly successful Investor Day at the New York Stock Exchange in October, where we provided an in-depth update on momentum in the business and our go-to-market focus.

Turning to the quarter's results. As Will highlighted, revenue came in at $81.3 million, representing approximately 33% year-over-year growth. The outperformance was driven primarily by our defense and intelligence and civil government customers as well as continued progress against our JSAT satellite services contract. We saw upside during the quarter from the Luno B win with the NGA as well as contribution from some onetime factors, which supported our better-than-expected results.

During the third quarter, revenue from the defense and intelligence sector grew significantly year-on-year, driven largely by wins with the NGA, the U.S. Navy and international defense and intelligence customers. The commercial sector was down in part due to seasonality in the agricultural sector in addition to our shift in focus towards larger accounts. Civil government revenue was up modestly with strength from international customers in the sector, offset primarily by the end of our contract with Norway for their NICFI program. We're pleased to see strong uptake of our AI-enabled solutions in the government markets, contributing particularly to defense and intelligence wins in the quarter.

Turning to our regional revenue breakdown. Growth was distributed across the globe in the third quarter with approximate revenue growth of 38% year-over-year in both Asia Pacific and EMEA, 30% in North America and 7% in Latin America. As of the end of Q3, our end-of-period customer count was 910 customers, flat on a sequential basis, reflecting our direct sales team's intentional shift to focus on large customer opportunities and leveraging our self-serve platform to provide access to data for our other customers.

As a reminder, Planet Insight platform customers are not included in our end-of-period customer count. We continue to see strong revenue growth and thus a solid increase in average revenue per customer as a positive indicator that our sales team's focus on landing and expanding high-value accounts is yielding results. As we shift to some of our ACV metrics, I want to remind you that the JSAT multiyear satellite services contract is not included in our ACV metrics, although it is included in our RPOs and backlog, which we will discuss in a moment.

Recurring ACV was 97% of our end-of-period ACV book of business, reflecting our continued focus on selling subscription data contracts and solutions as opposed to onetime professional or engineering services. Approximately 83% of our end-of-period ACV book of business consists of annual or multiyear contracts, lower than prior periods as we have seen a higher proportion of large shorter-term government deals closed in recent quarters. Net dollar retention rate at the end of Q3 was 109% and net dollar retention rate with winbacks was 110%.

Turning to gross margin. Non-GAAP gross margin for the third quarter was 60% compared to 64% in the third quarter of fiscal year 2025, reflecting investments in support of our satellite services contracts and the mix of contracts, including AI-enabled partner solutions. Our gross margins came in better than expected, primarily driven by the revenue outperformance in the quarter. Adjusted EBITDA profit was $5.6 million for Q3, better than expected, primarily driven by revenue outperformance in the quarter and disciplined OpEx spend. This marks our fourth sequential quarter of adjusted EBITDA profitability.

Capital expenditures in Q3, which include our capitalized software development, were approximately $27.7 million. This was above our guidance range, driven primarily by our decision to prepay for more favorable pricing in certain hardware procurements and launch deposits for our next-generation satellites. As a reminder, we're currently in a growth CapEx investment cycle as we lean into market demand and build out our next-generation fleets.

Turning to the balance sheet. We ended the quarter with approximately $677 million of cash, cash equivalents and short-term investments, an increase of approximately $406 million sequentially. The increase is driven primarily by our convertible note raise in September. We achieved an excellent outcome, raising $460 million at a 0.5% interest rate for a 5-year term. Use of proceeds for the transaction are general corporate purposes with a portion of the proceeds used to purchase a capped call, allowing us to avoid dilution up to a stock price of $18.04, providing net proceeds of approximately $406 million. This capital provides us a strategic asset in the form of a very strong balance sheet.

Year-to-date, we generated approximately $114 million in net cash from operating activities and $55 million in free cash flow. Our focus remains on managing the business to enable sustainable cash flow generation through efficient growth across our data, solutions and satellite services revenue streams. At the end of Q3, our remaining performance obligations, or RPOs, were approximately $672 million, up about 361% year-over-year, of which approximately 33% apply to the next 12 months and 59% to the next 24 months. We estimate our backlog, which includes contracts with the termination for convenience clause to be approximately $734 million, up about 216% year-over-year. Approximately 37% of our backlog applies to the next 12 months and 61% to the next 2 years.

Let me turn now to our guidance for the fourth quarter and full year for fiscal 2026. In Q4, we're expecting revenue to be between $76 million and $80 million, which represents approximately 27% year-on-year growth at the midpoint and excludes many of the onetime factors that drove upside in Q3. We expect non-GAAP gross margin for the quarter to be between 50% and 52%, driven by our satellite services contract with JSAT, the mix of deals with AI-enabled partner solutions and investments in our next-generation fleets. Our range for adjusted EBITDA loss in the fourth quarter is expected to be between minus $7 million and minus $5 million, reflecting our investments to drive sustained growth across both AI-enabled solutions and our next-generation fleets.

We are planning for capital expenditures of approximately $22 million to $26 million in Q4. For the full fiscal year 2026, we now expect revenue to be between $297 million and $301 million. This increase reflects our strong performance in Q3 and improved outlook for Q4 as we've seen some of our U.S. government contracts come in. We believe our backlog provides us with good visibility to sustain our Q4 revenue growth rate into fiscal '27 and achieve our revenue and adjusted EBITDA targets as shared at our Investor Day in October. You can find these details in our Investor Day presentation on our Investor Relations website.

We are updating our guidance for non-GAAP gross margin for fiscal 2026 to be between 57% to 58%, reflecting the better-than-expected gross margins during Q3. We expect our adjusted EBITDA profit for fiscal 2026 to be between $6 million and $8 million, reflecting the strong performance we've seen throughout the year in revenue and cost efficiencies even as we continue to invest in downstream solutions and our space systems capabilities. Achieving adjusted EBITDA profitability on an annual basis represents a major milestone in the company's maturity and reflects the hard work of our global teams in focusing our investments in the highest priority growth areas.

We are planning for capital expenditures of approximately $81 million to $85 million for the year as the increased investments we're making in our satellite fleets puts us in a strong position to meet accelerating market demand. As I mentioned earlier, we're also pulling forward some investments to take advantage of some favorable pricing opportunities. We continue to expect to be free cash flow positive on an annual basis this year. While quarterly results may vary due to the timing of cash collections, CapEx requirements and other factors, we remain focused on generating sustainable annual positive cash flow. As always, we're incredibly grateful for the ingenuity, collaboration and achievements of our Planet team. These stellar results were made possible by your hard work.

Operator, that concludes our comments. We can now take questions.

[Operator Instructions] Our first question comes from the line of Ryan Koontz with Needham.

Terrific quarter, guys, just outstanding in the October quarter. I wanted to ask about the guide a little bit here. In terms of the revenue and the margin guide down, is the revenue down on onetime benefits on usage in the past quarter and then the gross margin guide down, is that mostly tied to some of your large international programs you're ramping?

Great. Thanks, Ryan. Appreciate the question. In terms of Q3 to Q4 trends, a couple of factors to keep in mind. So I did highlight that there were some onetime items in Q3. Those can be related to renewals of certain contracts that have archived components. Anytime we have any kind of bonus payments or deliverables that can factor into a quarter that obviously wouldn't continue into the next. And then I mentioned there was some upside that was driven by the timing of landing new business. That does continue into Q4, and you see that rolling through. That's balanced against -- we mentioned that both the NASA contract and the EOCL contracts were downsized. So we have to factor that revenue drop into the Q4 guide. And so that is fully factored into the guidance that we've given, and that results in that quarter-to-quarter flatness to slight down that we guided to.

In terms of margin, we're both investing in the opportunity that we see, as we've highlighted, investing into execution against our satellite services contracts, which continue to perform well. And also with awards like Luno B, those are with partners. And so we do have partner fees that go into COGS that get layered into Q4, and that also causes some margin compression quarter-to-quarter. So those are the factors. It really comes down to mix of business and the fact that we are investing because we see a lot of opportunity in front of us.

Great. And just a clarification on those partner fees, are those front-loaded in some way before revenue hits? Or how should we think about how those kind of behave in the future?

No, they align to revenue.

Okay. Got it. Got it. Perfect. And maybe a quick question on the acquisition of Bedrock. I mean, which sectors are these guys focused on? And what sort of data does Bedrock integrate?

Yes. Good question. I mean Bedrock is fantastic. It's a small team, but very, very talented at the intersection of remote sensing, AI and national security, very, very good solid team there. What we see them doing, I mean, we already worked with them with actual customers as we're building out our GMS solution, and it's been working really well. And so we thought bringing them in-house would help us to scale and speed that execution faster and make it more efficient to the margins point we were just discussing.

Got it. And what sort of data do they deal with? Is it all primarily your data? Or do they bring other data sources together?

Well, they've done multiple different data sets in the past, public and primarily the national security data sets on contract with the government. So it's a variety of things. And it's a sort of versatile approach that they've been doing using embeddings, a technology we've been also working with in our AI modeling work. And so it's the kind of very generic scalable solution that can work across different data streams.

Your next question comes from the line of Edison Yu with Deutsche Bank.

Congrats on the very impressive quarter. I want to ask about Project Suncatcher. There's been a lot of talk, a lot of excitement about data centers and space. Can you give us a sense on how you think about just the feasibility and viability of this? And how does one kind of measure that going forward?

Yes. Well, thanks on the quarter. We agree. It's really great. And yes, Suncatcher is really exciting. I do think it's a very viable project long term. It's -- we have spoken in the space sector for some decades about how as space infrastructure costs come down, it eventually makes sense to put compute into space and other energy-intensive infrastructure. And to your point about the feasibility of scaling it, well, that is hard, right? And there's only a couple of companies in the world that have done scaled constellations, basically us and SpaceX. And therefore, knowing how to put that -- get costs down is something that really is an incredible advantage we have and competitive position in going into this is one of the reasons, obviously, we're very proud that Google selected us. That's obviously one of the reasons for that.

I see a huge market opportunity here. I do in the long run. This is just an R&D at this phase. This is an R&D contract. We're going to do these couple of demo satellites that would test out some of the critical components of that, like shedding heat from the TPUs into our space and doing the formation flying so building towards a cluster system approach, which is the architecture that the Google and Planet teams have been designing towards. And we think the most efficient approach to this. So yes, so in summary, it's early days, but an exciting potential project for Planet, really exciting.

Just one follow-up. I think you mentioned in the prepared remarks that you're using the same bus as Owl. Are there any special kind of design changes you need to make on the bus, anything you do differently just from, I guess, engineering perspective, given it's a TPU?

Yes. I mean there's a few things, but not much on the scale of things. For example, we're expanding the number of solar panels a little bit and a few things like that. But on the scale of the hard complex things of the avionics and all those systems, how they work together, it's primarily the same at this stage. And that's why -- I mean, there were two big reasons we did this project at the tactical level. One was the -- how aligned it was to our Owl project per that point on the same bus. And the second is that there's an option on a big program in the future to the earlier point, I mean, I think this is a big market. So let's take advantage of the fact that we're one of a couple of companies that can do it.

I'll just add as well that Planet, we've been saying is a space and AI company. And I think we have the credibility to say that we're the first one in a way to prove that. We've obviously got scaled satellite stuff, so we're a space company. We've got at scale use of AI based on our daily scan. And we've already been putting NVIDIA chips in space on the satellites, including the ones that were launched just 12 days ago. And so we're already familiar with putting compute in space. So we -- it's a natural extension of where we're going to think about AI and space together in this way. And so Planet is incredibly well positioned for that, we believe.

Your next question comes from the line of Mike Latimore at Northland.

Excellent results. I guess on the quarter, I think you said JSAT was one of the drivers of maybe the upside. Can you talk a little bit about is JSAT sort of ahead of schedule? And maybe just generally, how is the JSAT and Germany deals proceeding relative to maybe your internal time lines?

Yes. Obviously, this was the first time we had engaged in this type of contract. And so while we have obviously agreed milestones with the end customer, we gave ourselves some flexibility for when certain milestones might get hit for the year. And obviously, that flexibility translates also into how we guide. And so that team continuing to execute and meet and hopefully exceed the customers' expectations also results in upside in our financial forecast.

I would just add, yes, I mean, overall things are going very well with those programs. And we're very focused on committed -- our commitments to those customers. And yes, things are going great. And the pipeline of opportunities for further deals is going really well as well. So yes, we're very happy with that side of the business, too.

Great. And then Ashley, did you say that the -- you expect the fourth quarter kind of implied growth rate to be sort of continue into fiscal '27, as well?

I did, yes. So as we're looking at the shape of the business, and kind of the drivers of growth. Q4 is pretty indicative of how we see things going forward. Obviously, I've mentioned the change in the government contracts, those go into full effect in Q4. We've obviously continued to land new business and expand relationships, both with the U.S. government and international governments. And we expect across all of the areas of business to continue to focus on converting the pipeline that we have. So we're very comfortable with that as kind of a target for growth going into fiscal '27. And also as we think about margins next year, that's a pretty good benchmark to use as a reference.

Yes. And we said at the beginning of the year, we would accelerate the revenue growth rate. And here we are, and we can -- it's nice to be in a position where we can see that continuing into next year.

And then the only qualifier I'd add to that is reference back to the Investor Day materials, where obviously, we're thinking about FY '27 very actively right now, and we continue to uphold a commitment to targeting EBITDA breakeven or better as well as maintaining our annual cash flow positivity.

Your next question comes from the line of Colin Canfield with Cantor Fitzgerald.

Apologies, Zoom mechanics. So just going back to the pipeline that you put together for the Investor Day, call it, 20 contracts, average contract value of $170 million. That tracks pretty closely to kind of the F-35 friends and family. So as we think of kind of drawing comparisons between that portfolio of opportunities and the companies that we're looking at, how do you kind of think about the sizing and magnitude of those awards? I mean is it fair to assume that like we could see 20% of that pipeline convert and maybe the magnitude of that pipeline looking similar as a factor of the JSAT and Germany deals such that maybe it's like $100 million awards upfront? Like how do we think about kind of that -- just the timing and magnitude of that pipeline?

Well, yes. I mean, firstly, I mean, I think Planet is extremely well positioned for this market. I mean our technology -- I mean, we're the only ones that have built hundreds of earth imaging satellites, we did 600 so far. So these countries, when they want sovereign satellites, especially at least in optical, we are the obvious first call. And yes, we feel well positioned against those 20 or so opportunities. We're focused on a half dozen or so that are a little bit more mature and those ones are doing very, very well. When we really go in, I think we've got a higher probability than that, but we -- time will tell exactly how this turns out.

We are committed to really executing on this business side and being a reliable partner with these countries, building off a long-term relationship we've had with them in most cases. And so yes, overall, feeling very good about where this is going. Does that answer your question? I'm not sure, [indiscernible] in your question.

Yes, no worries. I think timing probably might be a little bit too aggressive in terms of answering the question. So good to hear that you're well positioned and looking forward to seeing those awards. Maybe pivoting to putting some numbers around Suncatcher. So if we think of the 81 cluster concept, let's call it, $250,000 to $300,000 per satellite, $1 million per cluster, is it fair to assume that, that has some value capture tail on top of that such that it can be above, call it, an initial award of $81 million?

And then just a high-level question. As we think of Google's R&D budget of, call it, $30 billion a year and the concept that a lot of these AI people that are basically chasing data centers and the like are now pivoting that R&D spend from the development of the systems to the scaling of systems and that scaling of systems likely going through space infrastructure versus terrestrial. So maybe $81 million, is that fair? Or is it above that? And how do we think of kind of that longer-term scaling opportunity into that Google R&D wallet?

Got it. Yes. Well, firstly, what we're on contract to do with Google is a couple of demo satellites. It's really just the testing early phase. So we're not getting into the scale cluster. You're referring to the paper that they put out with where they were talking about 81 satellites in the cluster. That's more to do with the architecture that we're building long term. I think you're right to point out that this will take significant R&D dollars, and these companies are going to be willing to put dollars behind it because if it has the cost advantages, which we believe it will, and the experiments will need to show that, we will -- this is a scaled operation. It would require thousands of satellites and many other things. It's just -- but at this point, we're very early on. And I think it's important to think about Google is choosing us in this process is a huge compliment to us, of course.

But one of the reasons is that we're one of the few companies that has done this at scale, as I said, in my prior remarks. And so even though it's on an R&D scale at this stage, we think we're one of the few players that can really build that out. It is not trivial to put up huge numbers of satellites in a cost-efficient way. There's literally only a couple of companies in the world that have done that. And to boot Planet, as I was mentioning in my earlier remarks, really the first proven space and AI company. We've already put fast processes in space. We already do a huge amount of AI work.

And so our collaboration and a bunch of that AI work is with Google. We've got a partnership with the Gemini team, and we've got a long trusted record working with them. So I think Planet is well positioned. Again, this is an early option -- early contract on R&D, but it's an option on a big long-term future that Planet is well positioned to be taking part. Does that answer your question?

Your next question comes from the line of Jeff Van Rhee with Craig-Hallum Capital.

Congratulations. Just a few left for me. Will, on the compute front, as it relates to -- obviously, congrats on what you're doing with Google, and you've been ahead of that embedding compute into your platform already. Just talk about the demand pull. You're pushing it, but to what degree are people ready to consume it, demanding it, having use cases already pegged out and driving value from it?

You mean demanding compute in space?

Yes.

Well, look, I mean, this is really talking about putting compute in space because ultimately, as launch costs and satellite infrastructure costs come down, it makes -- there's a point at which it becomes more economically feasible to put those entire data centers in space. So it's not about any particular compute demand. It's about the entire compute demand in principle. But that depends on us getting to that cost threshold. I think it's the position of Google and Planet that we are just a few years away from that. And therefore, it's the right time to starting to invest in that R&D.

There are some types of compute demand that more lend themselves to space than others. But generally, we're talking about the entirety of that business. I would just say, I think similar to Sundar, he was talking about this last week and talking about how in 10 years' time, he thinks most compute will be going up to space. So that's the way I perceive it, too. So that's the way I think we should think about it. Does that make sense as opposed to any particular piece of the compute sector?

Yes, understood. That's fair. Two last, if I could then. One, as it relates to Pelican, congrats, real quick first-line imagery. Is there a number in the sky or a particular point in time this year? Just talk maybe to whatever degree you can share how that revenue layers in, if it just tends to be very gradual, if there are going to be lumps in that. So that would be the first question. And then my last would just be on EOCL. Obviously, the cutbacks in the first place shocked everybody. Just wondering if you have any more clarity on what might replace what they've taken away, if there's any clarity there. So those two questions. Appreciate it.

Yes, absolutely. Let me take the second one first. I mean, I just came back from D.C. and I can tell you that there is a lot of interest in this administration in leveraging new tech to drive real mission value in the DoD, and we sit firmly in that area. And so we are seeing them leaning in. So despite what you're seeing there with the UCL, a, it's growing. But more importantly, they are leaning in heavily. In fact, I mean, we see this, of course, in the numbers already. The Luno award, the Navy expansion and so on, they're already leaning into this stuff, but I think we're going to see it in a big way coming. So I think the outlook is really very positive. What was the first part of the question again?

First part of the question is, as we continue to launch Pelicans, how do we see revenue flowing in? And I see it more gradual -- yes. As we continue to bring on contracts, obviously, if we land bigger contracts. We talked about we have a framework contract in place already for Pelican or for high res in general with USG under EOCL. There's opportunities to expand that. There's opportunities, obviously, to expand with many of our existing customers and new customers. So nothing at this point that would cause me to say there's going to be irregularities in it.

Yes, I'd say it's roughly linear as we scale it and they are scaling as the SkySats are ramping down and then we're building towards what we've said before, ultimately a 30 satellite fleet with 30 revisits a day, 30-minute latency and all this. And yes, we're already seeing customers very excited about leveraging that data, and I'm glad you saw that first light as impressive with the team to bring it out. And the next day, I think the first light came out. So it's really fast how quickly they are able to process all of this and get those satellites up to -- it's almost routinized at this point that we can launch these satellites and get them going. It's really cool.

Yes, absolutely. Congrats on the quarter.

[Operator Instructions] Our next question comes from the line of Kristine Liwag with Morgan Stanley.

I guess, look, you've delivered 4 consecutive quarters of positive adjusted EBITDA and the loss for 4Q is really driven by incremental investments, which are all good problems. I was wondering, can you parse out how much these investments are for 4Q, their duration into fiscal year '27? And if we take out these investments, would fiscal year '27 be adjusted EBITDA profitable?

Thanks, Kristine. I appreciate the question. So first of all, at the Investor Day, I talked about the fact that for fiscal '27, we are targeting EBITDA profitability as one of the metrics that as we're doing our fiscal '27 planning, we are keeping in mind, so breakeven or better. So I'd urge you to look back at some of those materials where we talked about just general framing for thinking about that year.

For Q4 specifically, it's kind of a step-up as we're ramping up some new contracts and then scaling the revenue alongside of it. So as that revenue continues to scale, that gives us the opportunity to sustain these investments but get to that adjusted EBITDA breakeven or better goal. So really, the key for us is balancing the opportunity for growth that we see with sustaining profitability across the business. I hope that helps you.

Yes, super helpful. And if I could do a follow-on, the AXA contract that you mentioned earlier, if you think about the opportunity set for that kind of insurance type business, when you sign on incremental customers, how scalable is your capability set there regarding profitability? Like would you sign on new customers and have incrementally higher profit? Like how do we think about that versus incremental investments you would have to make if you sign on customers similar to what they're already doing?

Yes. and highly scalable. And I mean, the direct margins of this sort of data business is extremely high, I mean, in the 90s percent. What we did with AXA is really cool because just think about it very practically, they're trying to make claims processing more efficient, take natural disasters like floods or fires, have quicker assessments of losses and damages. And instead of people having to send individuals out to check, they can, in many cases, just check that with the satellite imagery automatically from their computer. I mean this is a huge efficiency saving across a big business. That's why AXA has not just bought some data for their own use, they're also putting it on their platform, exactly to your point about scaling it up to other insurance companies in their network, in their partner network on their platform.

So they're providing the platform and yes, the incremental margins on that are really great. And I see lots of potential customers like that in the future. We think the commercial business is going to continue to grow really well in the long term. And yes, I mean, things like insurance and finance, we believe, are massive markets for us to go over after. So I hope that answers the questions.

Our next question comes from the line of Trevor Walsh with Citizens JMP.

Cool. I guess around the Luno B contract and the upside in the quarter for Will or for Ashley jump ball, but can you maybe explain or go in a little bit more detail as to how -- that just seems like a very from kind of signing the contract in quarter and then having it immediately kind of lead to recognizable. I mean this seems like a nicer, just better, I guess, execution. And is it -- is that more -- is that actually what happened? Or was there some details around the POC being set up beforehand and just kind of getting off with that customer right away specific to NGA? Or I guess I'm trying to understand if there's going to be more kind of potential with that with some of these D&I customers where you kind of sign the deal and then leads to kind of immediate revenue impacts in that actual quarter?

Yes. I mean, look, we're ready to go on these things. We've already got the data. We've already got the analytics, so they can just turn it on. And the great thing -- I mean, sometimes the government can be slow initially. But when they go, it can just be straight away. And so we just turn it on, and that's exactly what happened in this case. It's great to read that we primed that and it's a really substantive award. And it's in an area we've talked about that NGA are leaning into broad area looking with AI on top, and it is an area that Planet believes we are -- we believe we're really well positioned to take. And that's for Maritime Domain 1. It's a bit like our Navy program. And the Navy has subsequently in extensions, been doing that as a sole source award because we're the only ones that can do it. That also speeds things up faster. But yes, the main ramp here was just because we were ready to go. And as soon as they turn us on, we were on.

Terrific. Great. That's really helpful color. Ashley, a follow-up maybe for you. Just circling back to JSAT and the Pelican revenues. I understand that the JSAT is not included in your ACV metrics as far as the recurring piece of revenue. But can you just help us understand or remind us exactly how as you build the 10 or so satellites specific to JSAT and that revenue flows in, is that going to create kind of a onetime nonrecurring type of bump in a particular quarter, which we won't really see in that ACV metric because you're not including that in there. And so in other words, you'd have a big revenue bump, but you still have -- that's not recurring, but you have 97% kind of similar to this quarter type of a metric. So not a good way to necessarily kind of track that, if that makes sense. Can you maybe just help us understand the dynamics there?

Yes, happy to. And I mean, basically, you can see this in our -- when we talk about RPOs and backlog and next 12-month revenue, it is more gradual. There might be some lumpiness quarter-to-quarter, but it's minimal. It's not something that's going to cause things to swing wildly. But -- so I would say the majority of our revenue still is coming from our traditional ACV business, and it is a very good indicator that we use both on internal managing that growth versus profitability balance, also looking at the health of the business, looking at renewal rates and that recurring revenue. And then the nice thing about contracts like JSAT and other Constellation services contracts that we're either engaged or pursuing is that it actually aligns the revenue quite nicely to the lifetime of the satellite. So while there is an upfront component of the revenue, there is also a managed component of the revenue that spreads the revenue over the lifetime of the satellite.

So it's a mix. It's a little hard to overlay it directly to our traditional ACV metrics, which is why we exclude it. But it is still very predictable revenue and obviously enables us to accelerate the build-out of that 30 Pelican fleet that we talked about, which we think gives us a great competitive advantage and competitive offering.

Your next question comes from the line of Greg Pendy with Clear Street.

On the quarter. Just a real quick one. I think you mentioned there was some weakness in agriculture on the commercial side and some seasonality. Is that just the overall pressure we're hearing about in the agricultural sector? And could you just provide a little bit of color on that?

Yes, sure. Actually, it's not weakness, it's seasonality, and it's just the timing of deliverables and usage around those contracts. So as I've mentioned, we get these annual commit contracts, but some of them are recognized ratably and some of them are recognized based on usage depending on the nature of the product that the customers purchased. And so in this case, you see a lot of usage in the harvesting or pre-harvesting periods for operational efficiencies. And then you see that drop off as you get later into the harvesting cycles. And so that's just seasonality that we would expect year-to-year.

Actually, we're pleased with the stability that we're seeing in the agricultural business. And I think that's largely driven by the shift that we've made over the last couple of years to move out of more of the marketing arms of the agricultural sector and really be embedded into the operations of our customers. So I'm actually very pleased with the progress we're seeing in the ag sector and see that as a potential growth vector for us in the future.

Yes. If I just add one more thing is that we have figured out how to align our business model with theirs. And now we believe we're in a stronger position to help serve that market. But you're right that the overall segment has been having challenges.

Our next question comes from the line of Chris Quilty with Quilty Space.

Following on the earlier talk of the pipeline, $170 million deals and the fact that you're doing the factory expansion in Berlin, what do you expect you'll need in terms of production rate? And is that -- where are you at today? And where do you expect to scale in the next year? And is that sufficient capacity with those two facilities should the opportunity show?

Yes. Well, obviously, we are building those facilities, both on our expansion here and what we're doing in Berlin exactly to build towards the demand that we expect to see. So yes, we're obviously trying to do that. As I think we said at the time of announcing the Berlin manufacturing site, that will roughly double our capacity to build the Pelican satellites. And we're excited to say that we're making some really good headway there, found the place and now next year, we'll be going into operations there. So excited about that. But yes, we're obviously trying to match that demand. We are seeing very strong demand for deals that include building new satellites and for deals that involve leveraging existing satellites, both.

Remember, there's a mix between those two and that affects whether or not we have to launch new satellites. But on both sides, we're seeing good traction. And I think what's great about this, again, is that it will take the CapEx of deploying that 30 satellite fleet or more. I think that we're in a great position with so much demand there that will help build out our full fleet.

And I would just add to that, Chris, that the team does a really good job of making these different fleets very synergistic. So just as a reminder, the Tanager leverages the same as the Pelican. We highlighted that we're leveraging the Owl bus with the Suncatcher program, and that enables us to also be very efficient in how we utilize space, both for the R&D front and the manufacturing side. So it enables us to run a pretty efficient operation through and through.

Got you. But again, Will said he doubled -- you'll double production to no number given, but how would you like to confirm that?

Yes. I don't want to specify that right now just because of competitive reasons.

No, fair enough. And again, on the Tanager, any update there? I mean, are you finding a killer app market or application with the hyperspectral? What are your thoughts on scaling with the technology?

Yes. Well, Tanagers got to its first year of being in orbit, had great traction so far. One of the things we're really pleased about is our California partnership and a powerful proof point that has shown that they are able to find methane leaks across California, stop them, have real incremental benefits for both those businesses as well as for the environment. And we're committed under that program to do the first 4 of those Tanagers.

Yes, so it's obviously -- as we've said before, that's a very new kind of capability, hyperspectral imagery. But so far, the results have been really impressive. The signal-to-noise ratio on that satellite, the quality of the data it is producing that is and it's been beyond what our expectations and the users are starting to report good results. And not just in the civil government side, we have early interest in the defense and intelligence sector as well.

Great. And congrats on the Pelican turnaround on First Light. I think was it a record? Certainly.

Yes. I think that might have been a record. I mean the team just keeps on getting better and better. I mean, just to put it in perspective, when I started in the space sector a couple of decades ago, this was a really complex process planning for launch. And now it's -- and commissioning and all of that process. And our team does this in their sleep at this point. It's incredible how well we do these operations. And I'm incredibly proud of how quickly and efficiently they build the satellites, get them to the launch vehicle, launch them, commission them contact them and commission them and then provide those capabilities to customers rapidly. And yes, continue to get -- continue to be impressed by that.

Got you. And we've got the -- is it the next two satellites going up will be next-gen 30-centimeter? And can you just remind us what is the fundamental difference in the driver for the improvement? Is it altitude taking the satellites down below 420? Or is it some change to the payload itself that you've learned from the first iteration?

Yes, it's both. It's upgraded telescopes on those future generations, those B2s as well as we are flying them lower as well. So yes, it's a bit of both. So some of those improvements can happen with the existing satellites and some of those improvements have to wait for the later satellites. But we will be doing those next year. I won't go into more details, but it will be exciting to have them up too.

That is all the time we have for questions today. I will now turn the call back to Will Marshall, CEO and Co-Founder, for closing remarks.

Thanks, operator. Yes. So I think in summary, Q3 was another excellent quarter for the company. The business is humming, both across the Data and Solutions business, which we see rapidly scaling. We saw the NATO expansion, the Luno B award and more. Those efforts in AI-enabled solutions are paying off. And in Satellite Services, we have strong execution and a strong and maturing pipeline. It was great to see us all of this leading to us beating our revenue guidance again in Q3 and raising our forecast for the full year.

Given our robust backlog and recent government wins, we're excited to share that we believe that we're well positioned to continue the end of year growth rate into next year. So -- and since last quarter closed, we launched those 38 satellites and brought in Bedrock and announced Suncatcher with Google, which is a new and exciting R&D initiative at this scale, but a lot of promise for the future. So the team is just executing at pace. I'm incredibly proud of everyone for the phenomenal execution this quarter and excited for what lies ahead. Thanks again for joining, everyone.

This concludes today's call. Thank you for attending. You may now disconnect.

Hi, folks. Good morning. Am I coming through all right? Okay. Hello. We're so glad you could join us. Welcome to Planet's 2025 Investor Day. We're glad you're here.

Now before we jump in, I'd like to remind everyone that today's presentation contains forward-looking statements and statements about our long-term targets and goals. Forward-looking statements are subject to the risks and uncertainties, as detailed in our SEC filings. We encourage everyone to review our filings, which are available on our Investor Relations website and the SEC's website. Additionally, the slides from today are available on Planet's Investor Relations website. We encourage everyone to review the disclaimers included in the accompanying slide presentation as well as our filings.

I'd now like to introduce today's speakers. We have Will Marshall, CEO and Co-Founder; Charlie Candy, Chief Revenue Officer; Robbie Schingler, Chief Strategy Officer and Co-Founder; and Ashley Johnson, President and CFO.

Here's our agenda for the day. First, Will will give you the Planet overview and the view from above. Next, Charlie will talk about the business momentum, driven by AI-enabled solutions and satellite services. We also have a very special guest today, Oleksii Reznikov, the former Minister of Defense for Ukraine. Robbie will discuss Planet's world-class execution and space featuring a testimonial from our partner, JSAT. Will will return to the stage to talk about a revolution in space and AI. We'll round out our speakers with Ashley, who will talk about the financial foundation for growth and returns. We'll then have a brief Q&A session.

Please welcome Will Marshall, Planet's CEO and Co-Founder, to the stage.

Thanks. Good morning, everyone. How is everyone doing? Good. Well, really, welcome to Planet's 2025 Investor Day. Thanks, all, for coming. Thanks, especially for you guys coming in person. Thanks also to the New York Stock Exchange for hosting us today. It was a delight to -- actually, yesterday, they gave us the closing bell to ring as well, which was an extra bonus. But of course, the best bit by far about the New York Stock Exchange is that they actually have a live dove, an actual dove down in the display cabinet downstairs, so you can go and see a real one. We've got one up here, too, it's a model, but that's a real one downstairs, so you can go and check it out. But yes, in all seriousness, thanks for joining us today, and thanks for joining in online for those online.

Planet is a fast-moving business. And so there's a lot -- and then there's a lot changing in the world as well. So there's a lot to discuss today. And so let's dive in. Let's kick off with the key messages that we want you all to take away from today. Firstly, we've transformed our business to focus on two key growth initiatives. The first is AI-enabled solutions, and the second is satellite services. And both are moving us towards more full solutions for our customers, meeting our customers where they need, and I am pleased to report that both of those initiatives are really humming.

We've made excellent traction on the business, catapulting us to positive cash flow this year, a year ahead of our plan. And these two initiatives are highly synergistic. Not only do the satellite services turn a former cost center to a profit center, but they also add capacity and increase revisit rates, which benefits all of our customers. And Charlie will go into that more in his section.

Next, these two initiatives have driven significant acceleration, leading to a year-on-year quarterly revenue growth rate doubling through the course of this year. We expect that growth rate to continue accelerating into next year, underpinned by our strong backlog, which has tripled in the last year, and Ashley will provide more details on the financials in her presentation.

And then thirdly, Planet is experiencing two key tailwinds. First, the change in geopolitical landscape, which creates an immediate imperative for nations to want eyes to understand threats in their neighborhood. And the shift also reflects the changing nature of modern warfare, and you'll hear that from Oleksii soon. Commercial drones, satellites, AI and cyber are becoming the foundation for security, not just peripheral.

And then many nations are realizing that they need to get up to speed with those sort of technologies and do so rapidly. Second trend is in AI, and AI is as good as the training data set in which you use, which Planet has an incredible training data set of 3,000 layers of imagery on every point on the Earth's land mass on average. And that geospatial data is only as also good as the AI insights that you pull out of it, and AI is really useful for that. So AI needs Planet in short, and Planet needs AI. And so I will talk about that intersection.

But basically, it's helping us to unlock the value of data for our customers. And finally, sort of as a result of all of this, I think you'll understand by the end of today, that Planet is both a space and an AI company. And we're uniquely sitting at the intersection of these two massive trends.

So let me dig back into the history of Planet and start with a big picture perspective. So in 2010, we set out to do something rather audacious, which is to image the entire planet every day with a mission to make global change, visible, accessible and actionable. And today, our mission is made even more powerful as we accelerate actionability through our new intelligence layers that fundamentally change how we observe the Earth and monitor the changes through time.

It's bold, it's disruptive, and it's unlocking new markets. It's the daily scan of the Earth that is the foundation of our business. And this is a Planet at a glance slide, which I think is useful to start with a quick overview here. So it covers what we do, how we do it and how we do financially at a glance, right? So we've truly built a unique, vertically integrated company that combines the most advances in space technology, proprietary data, turnkey solutions all the way up to AI-delivered solutions, delivering Earth intelligence to our customers.

So firstly, we have our constellation, which we have hundreds of satellites making the world's largest Earth observation fleet. They scan or task as a multi-sensor system, and they represent large barriers to entry for any other company. We pioneered agile aerospace, which really overcame challenges of building large numbers of satellites. And through that, we have built and launched over 650 satellites to date and continuously adapting those capabilities.

Next, we have our proprietary data layer. And Planet stands alone again in having our daily scan of the whole Earth, and now we've been doing that for 8 years. And this has resulted in archive, a sort of time machine that you can go back through time. So basically, Planet has the largest, in fact, by far and away, the largest Earth observation AI training data set globally.

Then we have a business model that sits on top of that, and we bring a unique approach to that where we have a high-margin, one-to-many model, because we image the whole world every day. We've already captured wherever anyone is interested, and we can sell each image multiple times. And that leads to what we actually deliver and how our customers gain value from our proprietary data.

So to maintain this immense data set, we've developed an AI-enabled insights platform -- sorry, an insights platform that simplifies working with the complex data that we provide and accelerating our customers' and partners' workflow. And these are large -- this is a large addressable market across 3 major areas: defense and intelligence, civil government and commercial.

The market size is huge. The World Economic Forum estimated that the Earth observation will enable -- Earth observation sector in entirety will enable over $700 billion of economic value by 2030. And then Charlie will describe a little bit more where we see the immediate growth, but it's a huge opportunity.

And all of this has led to some key financials. We have a robust business. And I'd just like to -- these are some of the summary stats, obviously. But I'd like to highlight the first one, $736 million as of the end of last quarter in backlog. That was triple what it was the year before. And this is what gives us great confidence in our revenue growth acceleration. We also have a strong cash position. We generated $54 million of free cash flow in H1, and our cash stood at $272 million at the end of last quarter. And this is before the $460 million that we raised in convertible debt. So to recap, overall, the largest Earth observation satellite fleet, providing unique data set, serving a massive market with a great business with significant traction of fast growth and a financially profitable position and solid cash position as well.

And then the momentum continues. So just since last earnings, last month, we raised that $460 million in convertible debt. We announced our plans for expanding manufacturing in Germany as well as our current facility in San Francisco, doubling our capacity to build Pelican satellites. We announced a $7.5 million with the U.S. Navy. And I'm pleased to announce just a few minutes ago, we showed a press release announcing a new partnership with the NGA, an 8-figure partnership called Luno B, also for wide-area surveillance. And Charlie will give a little bit more details on that shortly.

And then last, but no means least, last week, we announced our next-generation monitoring mission, which is upgrading to be faster and sharper, moving to 1 meter daily scan. Very exciting system, and Robbie will provide a bit more details on that in his section. So -- and that builds on a generally exciting and landmark year of acceleration for Planet.

And here are some of our notable business wins across those two business initiatives that I mentioned are humming. Firstly, in our AI solutions. Here, you see NATO, our partnership with NATO, DIU for Indo Pacom, the U.S. Navy, all of those are AI-enabled solution wins that are really large. And then we have added -- we've got to add a bit to this for the new NGA award.

And then on the satellite services side, we did our 2 big partnerships, the $230 million partnership with JSAT, our colleagues in Japan, and a EUR 240 million agreement funded by the German government. So both of our business areas are really in full swing.

And let me put all of this development into a bit of perspective with our time line. So it took us 7 years to build up towards completing our mission one of daily imaging of the earth. There were lots of components of this, putting up a large fleet of satellites into orbit, building and automating mission control, building ground stations around the world and so on and so forth. And then it took us another 7 years to get us where we are today, which is an enormous archive of imagery, adding analytics and insights and the interfaces for these to make it easy to use for analysis at scale. And now we're setting ourselves up for the AI revolution, and I'll talk more about that.

So together, this work creates a huge competitive moat based on years of operational knowledge, technical expertise and constant optimization cycles. And let's not forget, we've been working closely with customers for years now to tailor all of the stack to meet their needs, as well as building relationships with them, which are really critical for these kinds of services because they're really important services for these customers. They're not just side matters.

And let's take a quick look under the hood. So this is the satellite fleet that are powering our business today. You see the middle of SuperDove fleet. That's the one that is the backbone of our daily scan, and that's the model that you see over there. That's a daily scan of the whole Earth of 3 to 5 million resolution.

And on the right, you can see our Tanager mission, our hyperspectral satellite. Robbie will detail a little bit more about that shortly. And on the left, you can see our high-resolution tasking system, the SkySat. And that's been upgraded with the Pelican, as you guys know. And we've launched 4 of those so far, and we've got 2 more, along with 36 more SuperDoves on the launch pad in Vandenberg Air Force Base right this second awaiting launch.

And then, of course, we're very excited to have added Al, which is the follow-on to the SuperDove fleet. This mission is an upgrade. It will be smarter, faster and sharper, as I have already mentioned. So that's our fleet. And this once again is how it works, and I always like to play this because I think it's useful for those new -- just to understand how it works. Again, these Dove satellites in a polar orbit, each one takes a strip of images as it goes over the Earth's land mass. The Earth actually rotates under that, the plane stays fixed with respect to the sun. The Earth does the legwork, turning underneath. And as a result, it ends up line scanning the Earth. It's the only line scanner that there is.

And it collects vastly more imagery than anyone else, any other player. To put it in perspective, 200 million square kilometers of land, coastlines and open water every day. The Earth's landmass is 150 million square kilometers. That is orders of magnitude more than our nearest competitor, not exaggerating. And it's vastly greater coverage, this vastly greater coverage that unlocks the value proposition that opens up our markets in agriculture, [ there's ] 1/3 of the area, the landmass forestry, insurance, energy, defense and intelligence that's looking for broad area. All of these are areas that have never been touched by Earth observation because no one did this daily scan.

And so that's how the fleet works. And on top of that, we have our data stack, our software stack. So this is how we build up from raw sensor data to AI-enabled solutions. So it starts with the raw satellite imagery from our satellites. We build analytics-ready data which enables us to do automatic analysis, Planetary Variables, which are scientifically accurate understandings of the imagery, through to complete insights. And then at the top, these AI-enabled solutions.

So it's an incredible stack. And we call this -- so in many ways, what we call our satellite system, our first moat. And this software stack is our second moat. It builds up extensive system that enables the building of our TAM. And it ends, of course, in AI, which I'll introduce and spend more time on. So that's our two systems.

But what does this really mean for our customers? What do our customers get to see? They get to see solutions like this. It's like a Bloomberg Terminal, but for Earth observation data rather than financial data. They get to customize their capability towards the needs that they have, and it answers their questions, and it flows deep into their workflows.

And here, you can see our 3 main solutions today: Maritime Domain Awareness, global monitoring solutions and then area monitoring solution. And what they all have in common is that they enable our customers to monitor broad areas without high costs of having to send people into the field or high costs of thousands of analysts.

Take the example of the U.S. Navy. So for them, we won this Maritime Domain Awareness contract, away from an incumbent, by the way, who is just looking at narrow areas of the ocean, limited by whatever they knew where to look. But actually, the Navy wanted to look at the whole South China Sea. And so today, we are imaging the whole of South China Sea for them, detecting anomalies, tracking vessels and capturing blind spots for the Navy. So that's how the MDA system works.

GMS is primarily a land-based system that monitors sites for early warnings, and that's what we're doing with NATO, for example. And AMS provides civil government users with the ability to monitor agricultural subsidy programs. Charlie will speak to more of all of these solutions.

But I just wanted to point out that these solutions can act as bowling pins for new adjacent markets. So for example, Maritime Domain Awareness is focused today on defense and intelligence, but also could have great benefit from commercial, maritime, shipping or civil agencies like Coast Guards looking for illegal fishing and things like this. And we haven't deployed into those areas yet, but they could and are easily extensible into those areas.

And there's simply no better example of how all of this comes together than the work that we have done in Ukraine. And I'm not going to go into that here because we'll have our speaker, Oleksii Reznikov, later, the former Minister of Defense, to talk through some of that use case here shortly.

So to bring it to a close in my penultimate slide here. At Planet, we say we have two A++ strengths that no one else can touch us. Firstly, in satellites, where we pioneered agile aerospace, the approach that has enabled us to maintain our leadership in Earth observation satellites. Our satellite fleets are cost efficient, highly capable and highly distinguished in the market. Being vertically integrated, allows us to constantly update those satellite systems in response to the needs of our customers and stay ahead of the curve. And this is a competency that we're leveraging most directly in our satellite services offering, of course.

Secondly, we've got our daily scan data, which together with AI, offers immense value. It's a truly unique data set that no one else is capturing. And every new entrant that would come along, even if they did a daily scan, they couldn't go back and get the archive, which we are training -- that 8 years of data training our AI models on. And it's the daily data, as I said, that unlocks the agriculture, forestry and other markets that are really what Planet is opening up with Earth observation, and it's the archive that's invaluable for that AI training.

So those are two key strengths, which bring me just to my final note about AI. And I'm just going to give a tease here. I can't give you an overview of Planet without talking about AI because, and I'll be back to talk about this a little bit more. but if you take nothing away from -- else away from this presentation, it should be that Planet is sitting at the intersection of both the space revolution and AI revolution, two critical and important trends. And AI is developing foundation models you see today, which primarily answer questions about the text of the Internet. That's what ChatGPT and these other things do.

But they're all moving towards trying to understand the real world and have real-world applications. And for real-world applications, you need real-world models. And for real-world models, you need real-world training data set. And Planet arguably has the best real-world training data set that there is. And so the revolution in space and the revolution in AI emerging and melding.

So to recap, overall, we have two key business areas, selling data and AI over solutions, selling our satellite services. Both are humming, and they're synergistic. Then the change in geopolitics and the AI revolution are accelerants further accelerating our business, and we've got pretty significant competitive moats, both in our satellite stack and our software stack. So in total, we see ourselves at the early stage of a vast opportunity, and we're really excited about that future.

So with that, I'll hand it over to Charlie, our Chief Revenue Officer, to go in more detail into our business. Over to you, Charlie.

Good morning. Thanks, Will. And adding my welcome to everyone here in the room and also joining us around the world online. So I'm excited for you all to be here to hear the next chapter in the Planet story. So Planet is the only company that images the planet daily, and we've been doing this now for 8 years. This has resulted in a vast archive of over 3,000 images for every location on land. And as Will has said, creating a time machine for the planet and the largest Earth observation AI training data set globally.

We image over 200 million square kilometers of land, coastlines and open water every day, a capability unmatched across space and time. And having designed, built and launched over 650 satellites, our constellations don't just live in investor decks, they are a reality. And through Agile Aerospace, we build and launch faster than anyone, constantly innovating and adapting our global space architecture with over 50 ground stations and fully automated mission control, which allows us to downlink trillions of new pixels daily, providing unparalleled scale, flexibility and resilience.

To manage this immense data set, we've developed an insights platform that simplifies working with complex data, accelerating our customers' and partners' workflows. This combination of unique capabilities is what differentiates Planet and is driving our transformation of the EO market.

So 18 months ago, we restructured our go-to-market operations around 3 key markets: defense and intelligence, civil government and the commercial sector. This commercial-centric approach enables our go-to-market teams to develop, sell and deliver high-value solutions with our customers and our partners. We have put the customer and their needs at the center of everything that we do. And our goal is to become indispensable to our customers' daily operations, shifting from merely providing data to creating insights to powering daily use applications that help our customers make better decisions about a changing world.

Beyond solutions, Planet offers a growing ecosystem of data and our Planet Insights Platform with platform services to large enterprises, startups, NGOs, and of course, education and research. And we do this through efficient sales channels, fostering Earth observation use cases for our customers of the future.

All 3 industries rely on satellite generated data. And we now offer satellite services for dedicated areas of interest, with the remaining capacity increasing commercial availability for our customers and for our solutions. So how does this all play together? So our solutions, scale fleets, Insights Platform and satellite services create a self-reinforcing network effect, starting with the customer at the center, enhanced by AI at every stage.

On the left, our unique multi-sensor capabilities, including daily scans, high revisit, high-resolution and hyperspectral data. As we move down our AR capabilities are embedded in our satellite bus, enabling AI at the edge for faster insights and increased fleet efficiency with intelligent monitoring. And as we continue through the loop, this data fuels enhanced analytics, tailored solutions on our platform, and we create time series data from deep archive to develop intelligent alerts, integrating them into our solutions and our partner solutions, making our data indispensable to customer workflows.

Our solutions inform our dynamic tipping queue system, automatically instructing tasking of our high-resolution and our hyperspectral satellite to look closer, and then the loop starts again. So as you see, this system provides deeper insights into global changes, impacting businesses, economies and societies, from crop health to border security. And this feedback loop continually refines our technology road map. Acceleration in satellite services scales our constellations, providing more data for our customers and fostering more powerful differentiated solutions. And this compounding effect ensures that with each new customer, the system becomes smarter, more valuable, with global insights deeply integrated directly into the customers' operations.

So today, as Will mentioned, we have 3 AI-enabled solutions: The unique use Planet data to uniquely cover areas such as Maritime Domain Awareness, global monitoring and area monitoring. And these solutions have 3 things in common. Firstly, they require that broad area coverage at a country, continent or even global scale. Secondly, they leverage that deep time stack of daily data, going back many years. And finally, each underpin significant market opportunities.

As Will shared earlier, we're excited to share that we've had our first win under the NGA Luno B program. And this is our first win under this program as a prime. And this deal is for $12.8 million, and we're incredibly excited to see our U.S. government colleagues leaning into Planet's broad area monitoring and AI-enabled solution offering. In the following slides, I will take you through the solutions, what they do for our customers and the market potential.

So let's start by taking a look at MDA. The oceans are vast and a challenging environment, with 80% to 90% of world trade moving by sea. Over 100,000 merchant ships operate in this space, making monitoring difficult for governments with limited resources. Maritime monitoring is complex, as vessels can spoof AIS signals to hide illicit activities like transshipment or ship-to-ship oil transfers, often used to evade sanctions. There's no single source for detecting such activities.

Planet's 140-plus satellites capture over 25 million square kilometers of ocean imagery every day, and we're expanding this capability. Our MDA solution provides actionable insights to governments and to agencies. As Will mentioned, previously, a competitor provided the U.S. Navy with task images over open water, delivering perhaps hundreds of thousands of square kilometers per year. Planet now delivers over 13.5 million square kilometers on a daily basis. This highlights the need for a full operating picture as a foundational evidence layer to work with other sensors as you don't know where you need to look.

The U.S. Navy's recent sole source contract renewal is one of the strongest possible validations of our strategy. They determined that Planet is the only provider capable of delivering a complete integrated solution, and they require -- otherwise, the decision process would have been lengthy and competitive, and this is a testament to our strategic moat.

MDA is a significant known market and set of markets with a TAM of $24 billion today, scaling to $36 billion by 2030. And growth in demand is primarily driven by national security needs, with surveillance and training applications dominating the market. Historically, customers have relied on limited contracts with an incomplete picture, tasking satellites when capacity is available to try and piece together the seam with other supporting data types such as AIS, RF and SAR. Without our unique ability to scan all of those maritime areas at scale on a daily basis, we can now provide that foundation picture. So it is no surprise we're seeing such strong demand for our data and our analytics solutions and our partner solutions in this space.

Today, Planet's direct sales teams are mainly focused on our government customers, working with analytic partners to service the commercial market, which is, Will mentioned, can include insurance, energy, finance and supply chain. So together with our partners, we can monitor millions of square kilometers of open water, coastal areas and ports globally. This is where AI tools help focus the attention to the areas and the activities of importance, classify vessels and then triggering alerts on suspicious behaviors automatically, allowing users to work rapidly in real time to take action rather than just observe.

And with the archive, they can look back through time and see patterns of behavior and build a profile to collect insights and evidence. And this was recently put into practice by the Washington Post investigation, which was conducted over 2 months, which tracked Russian vessels transporting cargo from North Korea. No ships have traveled that path until that August, after which the shipping volume is significantly increased following high-level meetings between Russian and North Korean officials based on vessel detection, made possible Planet imagery and validated with U.S. intelligence, the investigation determined that North Korea was replenishing Russian arms, providing key military intelligence and public transparency during the Ukraine war.

So our customers typically need 1 or more of these 3 services from us for MDA. Our wide-area monitoring data to capture maritime areas daily, combined with tasking for rapid high-resolution data based on those alert triggers. Planet imagery-based analytic fees, the wide area ship detection, and both these feeds can be ingested either into in-house customer MDA platforms or partner-driven platforms. And for a complete solution, which combines advanced analytics with AIS, SAR, RF and other sources, we've developed a strategic partnership with SynMax, with our team selling their Theia platform to our customers around the world.

So whether it's open water data, imagery, analytics or a partner MDA solution, the demand signal is absolutely clear. Customers need more insights across wider areas with lower latency, and Planet is stepping up to that demand with investments in Planet's scope to expand our coverage and reduce latency and with Pelican rapid high-resolution data and in the future, Al.

So you've heard that this is a powerful broad area solution with a large and growing TAM that Planet can uniquely serve. So now let's shift gears to another critical example, and this one, also in defense. Early threat detection is crucial for commanders to act decisively. Current reliance on episodic image tasking over limited AOIs for military bases, borders, missile sites, this method misses the bigger picture, as it only reacts to known threats. A lack of persistent wide area monitoring means unknown threats go unnoticed. Our customers need that early insight to tip the balance and allow them to preempt opening the option space for non or lesser kinetic actions and to prevent escalation to hot wars, which ultimately saves lives. That knowledge is true power.

The challenge for the customer is how do you detect deviations without knowing what normal looks like. The market opportunity has been broadcast across news headlines. Governments around the world are responding and massively increasing their defense spend. And the question is where will they spend it? The most obvious first choice is knowing where to look, to investigate and to deploy your scarce resources. And to do that, you need eyes.

Global monitoring leverages Planet's unique data archive and our comprehensive global coverage model with that daily revisit. We can deliver time series, data and change detection. AI-enabled systems can analyze changes, infrastructure objects and activities at scale, powerful use cases across both government and commercial markets that cannot be replicated by the competition.

So let's take a closer look at the global monitoring solution. So let's start by looking at the challenges that Planet's customers are facing and how we are solving them with our global monitoring. Intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance operators are responsible for collecting, analyzing and disseminating critical information about potential threats, adversary activities and operational environments to support military decision-making and mission planning. They are looking for indicators and warning that provide them timely awareness of events that may require action, giving them the edge over their adversaries.

Indicators and warning are a technical term used by defense industry referring to an early warning sign or signal. Indicators and warning have been historically difficult and incomplete, resulting in defense leaders reacting to situations rather than being proactive to preempt influence or mitigate. They have limited resources, leading them to focus only on the highest priority areas, and they often have too much data, making it hard to distinguish the signals from the noise.

So what this means is that our customers are focused on the known problem sets, either a known activity or a known location. More commonly, a known activity in a known location, and it's just a matter of getting an update. The way they do this today is with tasked imagery of high-resolution data, and they have to already know where they should be looking to collect that data. But that means they are not looking -- aware of activities happening in and locations not being monitored, leaving commanders to make incomplete decisions, giving them an incomplete picture of the situation.

So Planet is combining data from our broad area monitoring capabilities with advanced AI and analytics to help them create a more comprehensive indicators and warning for a more comprehensive and complete picture of their adversaries. And we do this through global monitoring, services that detect unfavorable or unwanted activity at an unprecedented scale. And we offer the solution that can provide global near-daily operational and strategic indicators in warning that our customers are looking for. And we do this through our global near-daily imaging, looking back through at least 4 years of archive.

From our imagery, we generate baselines and then monitor for indications of activity. Those insights are delivered as mission-critical alerts for our customers so that they can act. For our users, this is a highly tailored approach, meaning they get critical information needed for understanding the indicators in warning with the least effort from their side. Meanwhile, we're keeping line of sight to the future opportunities beyond today's top customers by modularizing what we build so it can be reused to serve other customers and industries. Customer signals are telling us we have a very strong product market fit. And that's evident from the deep partnerships we've developed with customers to build this capability in direct collaboration with them.

So let's take a look at this in action. First, we start with site monitoring. Sites are known locations such as ports, military bases, airfields, industrial sites. We are able to monitor thousands of sites to predict an alert for anomalies like military buildups. Here, we can see a base where we're looking at occupancy. At a given site, our users can quickly contextualize several years' worth of imagery over a given location through our pattern of life analysis, and this is cross-referenced across all sites to give a full regional picture. And from this, we can identify anomalies to alert users of these changes. From the known sites, our customers can then scale up to broad area monitoring to look across the unknowns.

To look broader and generate the indications and warning our users need, you need Planet's daily scan and the deep archive that we've built over several years. So we're imaging the places for our customers before they even know that they should be looking there. And our deep archive is essential because the common thread that our customers are after is what has changed. And to know that, you need to know what normal looks like. Without that, you cannot identify deviations from the norm.

Planet's archive establishes that baseline at any given location, and we've been collecting that data that no other competitor has. The next key differentiator we deliver is the analytics across these broad areas. And today, many of our customers are focused on imaging the known locations and the known activities. And to find those unknown unknowns, we make them known, we apply artificial intelligence on top of our imagery across enormous areas to find the signal our customers need.

And here, you can see that with the heat map -- so, apologies -- with a heat map that shows places where we've detected changes. And that could be construction, such as the building of roads or buildings. And in this case, you can see, a trench is being dug.

And the final differentiator is our multiple constellations that work together synergistically. So when we find an indicator from our global scan and AI, our customers need to know that they need to look closer. And for this, we can respond with our high resolution task satellites, including SkySat today and our next-generation tasking through our Pelican constellation coming online very soon.

So whether our customers are conducting site monitoring like known airfields, basis, ports or industrial facilities or broad area monitoring, we help them take that next step in their assessment and they can make more informed decisions. And Robbie, our Co-Founder and Chief Strategy Officer, is going to go into more detail about our constellations later, and you'll see how the enhancements we are making with the Pelicans are going to drive through more opportunity with onboard AI at the edge for even faster imaging.

So when you combine our global data scan, AI and analytics and then combine high-resolution task imagery with our customer-centric approach, we solve customer problems in a way that no other competitor can match. Previously, commanders spent the vast majority of their time on this tip of the iceberg at the top here, focused on activities they already knew were happening. Our approach helps our users see around corners, bringing the unknown unknowns into the view, leaving fewer places to hide and making activities transparent so our customers can make more informed decisions and detect adverse activities at unprecedented scale.

So a final solution that we look at today is focused on agriculture. Governments are challenged to feed growing populations and protect land productivity from declining soil health from years of intensive farming practices and dealing with more extreme weather conditions at the same time. So governments are implementing efforts to create incentives and penalties around land use, farming practices and protecting biodiversity. Implementing these efforts at countrywide scale is challenging. With limited resources, governments can only visit a tiny fraction of the farms and the fields, which is both inefficient and it's ineffective.

Public satellite resolution is too coarse and infrequent for the observations required for all fields. The EU Common Agricultural Policy is perhaps the most comprehensive and ambitious of all these efforts. With a EUR 50 billion to EUR 60 billion per year, it is one of the largest line items we've spent for the bloc. And Planet is already working with payment agencies across Europe, including the Netherlands, Slovenia, Germany and the U.K. And we provide coverage across the country for every field, every week. High-frequency satellite imagery powers timely crop monitoring, compliance checks and sustainability tracking, and our platform enables field level insights for agricultural, environmental monitoring and resource management.

Customers can monitor activity at both the parcel and national scale from space, again, every field, every week. Now shifting to the Data & Insights platform. Real-world problems require real-world data. And today, they need a lot of it to power AI models and solutions. As you can see, this is a robust and growing market. The World Economic Forum estimates the market opportunity to be $700 billion by 2030 with a strong balance towards a nascent commercial opportunity, which we believe is still very much in front of us.

Customers don't just get data from Planet. We also provide scientific grade derived data which we call Planetary Variables. Combining raw pixels with other data such as SAR, passive microwave and LiDAR from public missions to create fused analysis-ready building blocks, which stack like building bricks for our customers. Customers use these to build tailored, powerful solutions. The heavy lifting already done by Planet, this saves the customer effort and allows them to focus on solving the problem.

An example of this is our analysis-ready PlanetScope, and this enables consistent long-term time series analysis going back to 2017, critical for tracking trends in agriculture, climate, security with very high accuracy, harmonized with Sentinel and MODIS data sets. Success depends not just on products, but also ease of access and ease of use. And Planet focuses on the boring foundational elements of EO. So data access, delivery, developer tools. We look to remove the cost of things like storage and compute through the economies that we can deliver through our cloud infrastructure and our service contracts.

And we do this in 3 ways. So we have the Planet Insights Platform. And we also have low touch enablement, and we have single order tasking. So the Insights Platform is a key enabler of this mission. We've made it in -- investments in improving the platform experience, with improved onboarding and simplified workflows. The goal is to make Planet powerful and approachable for faster time to value with less effort. Customers can now sign up and start accessing monitoring data plans and platform services directly through our website. We've also integrated the ability to task a satellite directly from our website without ever needing to speak to any one at Planet.

Now as Will mentioned, 2025 has been a landmark year for Planet with major contract wins globally across Europe, U.S. and Asia. And to call out a few of our customers in the commercial sector, we partner with the likes of Bayer and Syngenta for digital agriculture and production optimization, with PG&E for infrastructure management, helping to reduce the risk of wildfire and with Swiss Re to provide parametric insurance to ensure areas of the world previously challenging to insure, helping food systems.

Now in our final section, we'll take a look at recent evolution in our satellite business model, responding to customer demand. So unfortunately, we live in challenging times with geopolitical unrest and an increasing occurrence of natural disasters. Governments have a sovereign duty to protect their populations. And this means having the ability to look at events as they happen to respond fast and make decisions about how they deploy resources and ultimately save lives. And they need to do this without competing for satellite access.

There's a lot on this slide, and this slide is based on research from Novaspace, formerly known as Euroconsult. And let me just highlight a few key points I'd like you to focus on. So firstly, governments around the world are increasing their budgets for space, driven by defense and security. They estimate $139 billion for satellite manufacturing revenues between 2025 and 2034. The opportunity there is estimated to be larger than the launch market. Defense and intelligence is driving that demand, making up to 54% of the satellites to be launched, but the demand is diverse, including an estimated 34% from civil government. There's increasing demand for satellite constellations rather than individual satellites.

And growing the next -- the growth in the next decade is to be dominated by low Earth orbit satellites, and the LEO satellite launches are increasing by 58% from one decade to next. This market is big and growing rapidly. As Will mentioned, Planet has launched over 650 satellites. We are the only EO company positioned to do this at speed, scale and with a proven track record for delivery, making Planet a natural trusted choice for the delivery of these complex systems. We have different offerings based on customer need for satellite services. And Robbie will talk you through these in more detail in his section.

What's important to understand is we offer a spectrum from dedicated commercial capacity, all the way to fully owned and operated satellites for a dedicated AOI, allowing Planet rest of world commercialization, and the customer, a rapidly deployed advanced resilient solution from a trusted operator. By having a full range of options, we have been able to identify a strong pipeline of opportunities that we are actively qualifying. We've been pleased at how quickly this pipeline has grown and matured.

Several of the opportunities in our pipeline are from relationships we have had for a while with our customers. And customers are actively using our data, deriving significant value and are now exploring how they might expand the relationship through a premium engagement. This is an example of how our relationship with the customer can expand over time and how that translates into ACV to Planet.

So the graph is illustrative, based on real customers' ACV. Looking forward, we have committed backlog, and we've made some assumptions around renewals and expansions to illustrate how our customer evolves from buying data to AI solutions and then adds dedicated capacity from our satellite services. And every time we do one of these deals, it funds our building up of more of our space architecture, and it's this virtuous circle that where these deals are great on their own, but they also power more data and solutions to build more products and benefit all of our customers moving forward.

Satellite services helps increase the competitiveness, differentiation we have by increasing the speed of our build-out.

So to close, I've outlined how we've transformed our go-to-market strategy. To be customer-centric, we've explored our AI-enabled solutions, which leverage Planet's unique data to solve real-world customer problems at scale. I shared how Planet has built resilient, scalable Earth observation data and platform infrastructure along with efficient paths to market to serve large enterprises and foster new use cases in science, research and with startups.

And finally, we've discussed how constellation services are increasing our revenue and our fleet, making more high-quality data available to power increasingly powerful solutions and insights. And this creates this virtuous circle, extending our differentiation. More satellites, more revenue, more data, more powerful solutions and more differentiation for Planet. And this is a repeating cycle of success with the customer at the center.

So we'll now take a short break. So please join us back here at 10 a.m. Eastern Time for Will's fireside chat with our most important speaker of the day, the customer. Because it's through serving them that we can help life on Earth through space. Thank you.

[Break]

Okay, folks. Can everyone sit down? So it's my distinct pleasure to introduce Oleksii Reznikov to the stage here, virtually joining us from Ukraine. Let me -- it's worth giving a short introduction. Welcome, Oleksii. I need to give you a quick introduction first. It really is worthwhile. Oleksii Reznikov was the Defense Minister, the 17th Defense Minister of Ukraine from 2021 to 2023. He's also the Chairman and Co-Founder of the Analytical Center Dream Hub. But he's a long-term government official and public servant. He served as the Deputy Prime Minister, the Deputy Mayor of Kyiv. He was the head of the Ukraine delegation to the council in Europe. He's had a distinguished career. He was also the Head -- or the Deputy Head of the Minsk negotiations prior to the full-scale invasion, the peace settlement, and cemented him as one of the Ukraine's top lawyers. And he received the nickname "peace maker" and that title for the, of course, conversation we have today.

On a personal note, I've known Oleksii for 4 years. And we've had many, many conversations at different times of the night and day. And Oleksii, I visited him in Kyiv when he was minister and others there. and it informed me really firsthand of the role that satellite data is playing in support of their country, the varied roles it is playing. And I'm immensely proud of the work that we've been doing for him and his country for over 3.5 years and helping them with their urgent need.

Ukraine is one of the most sophisticated users now, arguably the most sophisticated user of Earth observation, data and AI because necessity is the mother of inventions. And they've been constantly adapting to stay ahead. So I'd personally like to thank Oleksii for speaking with us today. It's really an honor to have you, Oleksii. Thank you so much for joining us. Let's welcome Oleksii, if we can.

And now we had sent Oleksii a few questions that could be prepared to answer this. And he said, "Well, I'll prepare a little opening remarks." So Oleksii, would you like to go ahead and again, welcome to the stage and want to give your opening remarks.

Thank you, Will. And I think I have to say good morning, not good afternoon, because you have early morning in your location. And ladies and gentlemen, thank you for the opportunities to speak to people who invest not only in business, I mean, but in the future, when Russia launched its full-scale invasion, we witnessed and we helped define a new kind of warfare. The nature of conflict has changed and with the tools that ensure security and how the nature of war has changed.

Wars today fought not only on the land, in the air or in -- at sea. They are fought in the information domain, in space and across digital networks, including cognitive warfare as well. And superiority no longer comes from having more tanks, but from having better data, faster decisions and more precise strikes. Modern defense is about seeing, understanding and acting faster than your enemy.

Technology and innovation, the primary response, looks like from the very first days of the invasion, Ukraine became a laboratory of defense innovation. Engineers, soldiers and entrepreneurs worked together, testing solutions in real time and under real pressure. Before this war, it was official -- according to the law, we had 261,000 servicemen in Armed Forces of Ukraine. Today, we have more than 1 million only in Armed Forces, plus bodyguards, National Police, National Guards, et cetera. It means that a lot of civilians come to be soldiers. And it means that they became the, like game changer in Armed Forces.

And it proved a simple truth: Innovation under pressure saves lives. A drone built in a garage or an algorithm written by a start-up can change the course of a battle. Because normally, the generals in all army of the world, they try to prepare for the future wars -- some for the former wars, but civilians thinking with the mindset, trying to be prepared for the future wars.

So in this moment, I would like to emphasize the -- many of the military intelligence at this moment, at this period of time because today, what -- why it matters. When I speak about intelligence -- about intelligence, I mean military intelligence, the system that collects, analyzes and transforms information about the enemy into decisions that save lives and shape strategy. It is not about secret alone. It is about situational or operational awareness, anticipation and strategic foresight. We have learned to integrate traditional military analysis with the cutting-edge technologies from AI-driven data analytics to commercial satellite imagery.

This experience forged in war holds lessons for every democracy that faces potential aggression. And the role of military intelligence means that from the very start of the best intelligence capabilities of the West were placed at the service of Ukrainian Armed Forces. This gave us a significant edge in reconnaissance and targeting. This was especially true for space-based intelligence provided by both, by western military satellites and by numerous commercial Earth observation companies. Even without our old military satellite constellation, Ukraine rapidly integrated commercial space infrastructure, starting from SpaceX for communication and Maxar, Planet Labs and ICEYE for real-time reconnaissance. And today, we can fix results on the ground.

When we combine this intelligence with more than 155-millimeter artillery from -- of NATO standard, and timers and other types of MLRS systems, using precise GMLRS rockets with a range up to 90 kilometers, Ukraine achieved the size of fire advantage in the second half of 2022. This enabled precise long-range strikes that complicated Russia logistics and operations.

And in this new environment, data and intelligence became as critical as weapons. And complete results and achievements, according to Planet Labs. Since the start of cooperation with the Planet Labs, Ukraine's Defense Intelligence Service or directorate has ordered and received around 50,000 satellite images with the enemy territory and essence, I mean the concrete detailed pictures and more. Based on that imagery, operations were carried out that destroyed enemy equipment worth $1 billion, including the destructions of the landing ship means the submarine Rostov-na-Donu, strategic aviation facilities and defense industrial sites. Because enemy electronic warfare complicates the use of drones, space imagery from Planet has become the main reconnaissance tool at operational and strategic depth.

And strategic importance at this moment, we use these images to monitor enemy strategic aviation, track equipment depots deep within Russia territory, plus unfriendly territory of Belarus, the proxy, and confirm strikes and plan follow-on actions. But there is a broader perspective. Russia and other potential aggressors are constantly planning and adapting. They are very good students. They watch how the world reacts, how intelligence and industry cooperate and how fast democracies respond. That is why operational awareness, the ability to see, predict and respond to threats before they escalate is vital for the entire free world.

Ukraine's experience and the intelligence ecosystem we have built together with the Western partners must be shared and applied. This is how we prevent future wars: By being informed, connected and ready. What partners and investors can do? So what does this mean for you, investors, partners, companies? Ukraine is not asking for the charity. We are offering partnership. Ukraine today is a living test bed of innovation where technologies are validated under real conditions and successfully 1 scale to global markets. You will have a stamp combo tested in Ukraine. You can invest in analytics and AI for satellite imagery, resilience communication systems that work under attack, dual-use technologies that serve both defense and similar needs, data infrastructure, secure cloud environments and human training.

Vision and call to action. The future of defense is being built today through cooperation between governments, business and innovators. Ukraine is open to all who believe that security and progress are two sides of the same coin. Together, we can make Ukraine not only a defender of freedom, but a global driver of security innovation. And if this fireside chat, which is almost feels like I'd say this is a private conversation. After all, I am a former Minister of Defense, though truth be told, I'm also a lawyer.

So believe me, when I say this honestly, we are your product for victory. You all know James Bond, the famous brand of MI6, military intelligence with a 6. In Ukraine, things are simpler. We just call it MI, military intelligence, and you, our partners, are already part of it. Thank you for your support, your belief and your investment in our shared future. Glory to Ukraine.

Thanks, Oleksii. That's really, really helpful context for a lot of people. I'm sure a lot of people learned a lot through that. Now I just want to pick up on something -- a couple of things you said. I mean, I can really attest to what you said about Ukraine being a lab of innovation and we've learned so much from you and helped adapt our products and services. Can you speak a little bit to the nature of how Planet's system was particularly differentiated and how it helped Ukraine with our broad scale scan and tasking system? You were talking about the 50,000 task. Can you talk a little bit about what Planet's system does in particular?

I will not dive deeper to the technical details because it's a field for the operational officers. But as I know, first of all, Planet Lab come in time. According to your service in 2022, we used your service plus inter weaponry on the ground, and it became a game changer. According to the options to using your imagery, what liberated Hereon district, I mean, right bank of the Dnipro river and a lot of other successful operation on the battlefield. Plus we're getting from your side, 24 hours, 7 days per week, the full information from the Russian territory battlefield line plus unfriendly territory of the allies.

And as I heard from the team, which provided the cooperation with you, they are really satisfied and absolutely happy. And today, at morning in Kyiv, it was night in your location, I met Commander General Budanov, he is Head of this Military Intelligence in Ukraine. He asked me to say hi to you, to your audience. And I told him, Will, your -- hi from your side yesterday, information about the dedicated satellite. And he asked me to say that he really believed in Planet Lab in informal times, and he really believes today also.

Well, thank you, thank you. And you talked a little bit about how the data is useful in time of war, of course. But I think a lot of investors are interested to know if, and we all hope we can get to a piece soon between Ukraine and Russia. If that happens, is there still a need for this sort of data? Do you still need to look at threats in the neighborhood? Can you speak a little bit to that?

Absolutely. I have not any doubt that your service would be very, very efficient and needed to provide security operational awareness for the Europe as minimum if we are talking about the Russia. But globally, if we are talking about their allies like Iran, China, North Korea and other countries or allies, because the last meeting in Russia in Valdai when their leader, President Putin, trying to explain to his auditory, that President Trump called Russia during his speech in U.N. General Assembly that Russia is paper tiger, the response of Putin was we are not paper tiger because we are fighting with the NATO countries. He didn't mention Ukraine. Russia absolutely sure that this war is a war between Russia and NATO.

It means that if in Ukraine, or when in Ukraine, we will finish this war, it means that Russia will try and dreaming to restore Berlin Wall again. And you see the threats in the Sual (sic) [Suwalki] Corridor near the Lithuania in direction to the Kaliningrad. We see the threats in Narva. It's a Russian-speaking territory of the Estonia. Because after the joining the -- when Sweden and Finland became a full-fledged member of the NATO allies, Russia got more unfriendly borders, 1,000 kilometers. And I'm calling that Baltic Sea became internal NATO lake, and Russia don't like it. So that's why your service would be very, very needed and very, very efficient because we need to be prepared. If we will be prepared it will allow us to stop next war for the next generation.

And that's the point I was trying to get at, you said maybe this sort of service can help deescalate before things. If you can see things further left of launch as they say, further ahead because you can see threats coming, maybe it can be helpful for -- to deescalate. Can you say a little bit more about that? How might we use these sort of capabilities as a deterrent to stop it -- conflicts from occurring in the first place?

I would think that, first of all, you can see what is going on the ground online using your capabilities. And this is not the interceptors of the radio communications. This is not the intelligence, special operation forces which crawling in forest. You can see it from the sky. And momentum inform leadership of all countries or commander post of all countries. And if you will see the movement of their troops, they will see that they try to accumulate something else on the concrete place or location. If you will inform civilized world, Western world, they will react, and maybe they will stay and stop. This is one of the point of the -- how to deter them.

Second. After the Second World War, the Germany as a country became Pacific country, according to the last verdict of the International Tribunal, which calling Nuremberg process. And I'm absolutely sure as a lawyer that if you have -- if you want to have Pacific Russia on the globe, we need to provide International Tribunal with a verdict against the criminal, war criminals from Kremlin. For that reason, we need a lot of evidence about the mass grave, about massive massacres, which did by the army of [ orcs, ] of looters, rapists and looters and murderers. And using your images from the sky, we can submit it to the International Tribunal. It would be evidence which will stop this policy in the future generations in Russia territory, I hope.

Absolutely. And that's part of our mission with Planet and why we care about security. As well as bringing transparency, we can also bring accountability to what goes on in these situations.

Yes. accountability. Yes, it's a very good word, accountability.

And so just a final question for you. How can companies and organizations help Ukraine further? What -- do you have any advice for how -- what can we do more to support Ukraine?

My understanding that we are living in 1 house or in 1 building. And if you're talking about the security invest in Europe, first of all, invest more than -- not only in Europe. We need to invest in security. And the first idea to invest, first of all, in Eastern wall, Ukraine is an Eastern wall of the Europe. Because we are staying between [ Orcs' ] country and worst. And you can use our experience, you can use our territory as a polygon or as a laboratory, trying to combine our real experience, plus your innovations, your ideas, your cutting-edge approach, your finance also, and we will have a very serious product.

I would like to remind to you, friends, the very, very, very, very old story, Bible story. Then David, small, young guy, deterred -- defeated a monster, Goliath. He was brave, he was creative and he used technology. Sling was technology in that period of time. So we have to be David, and we will win this war of democracy.

Well, thank you, Oleksii. Thank you so much for joining us today. We really, really appreciate you spending the time to give a few insights into this. I really hope that others also are learning so much from you looking at what Ukraine has done in that innovation laboratory that you mentioned and to learn lessons to help defend and hopefully avoid future conflict. So thank you so much for joining us today.

Thank you, Will, that invited me and we'll be online.

Thanks a lot. So with that, I'm going to now turn it over to Robbie, our Co-Founder at Planet and Chief Strategy Officer to take you through some of our spacecraft developments.

Thank you, Will, and good morning. That was phenomenal. And I'm really, really glad that we also started to think about the next stage of this accountability is absolutely the thing that we need one puts into a peace agreement, to have a measuring reporting and verification system to make sure that actors all around the world can see what's happening and then mitigate any sort of aggressive activity as well. So pleasure to be here, and good morning.

This morning, before we heard from Charlie, and Charlie walked through the momentum in our business across the AI-enabled solutions as well as the satellite services. In my section today, I want to go a level down -- well, back up into space to talk about satellite services. And so I want to lead this section with the exciting wins in this space over the course of this year. We began the first half of this year extremely strong by signing 2 new contracts with existing customers for our satellite services. These are long-term contracts, and they deepened the relationship with our customer, and they are perfect examples of the satellite services offerings that I'm going to talk about today.

So the first is JSAT. They've been our partner for over 10 years, and they were an early adopter customer for our data as well as our AI-enabled solutions. And given this, it was only natural to structure a satellite services deal together. In fact, they've kind of asked for it for quite some time. And towards the end of last year, we started to enter into conversations with them and then announced this deal in February of this year, $230 million, resulting in building 10 new Pelican satellites for JSAT. Planet operates these satellites for them, and we are able to commercialize the excess capacity outside of their area of interest that they care about for their end customers. So that's the first one.

The second one on the right, this contract is funded by Germany to support European peace and security. This bundles together our AI-enabled solutions with dedicated capacity of Pelican satellites in their regional AOI that they care about. So I'll explain more throughout this section, but broadly, satellite ownership, which is JSAT, requires us to build new satellites. Whereas dedicated capacity funded by Germany here, it leverages our existing satellite fleet. So the two fundamental things between satellite ownership and dedicated capacity.

And these contracts are not one-off. They're not opportunistic deals. Rather, it's something that our customers have been asking for, for quite some time. And Planet is uniquely equipped to provide. So as Charlie mentioned in his section, entering into satellite services market represents a significant increase to Planet's TAM. I think you mentioned $139 billion for satellite manufacturing, and it deepens our long-term operational engagements with our most important customers.

So we are meeting our customers where they are, and we're skating together to where the puck is going, allowing our users and their end users to have better data, faster data and deeper operational integration. When we started Planet 15 years ago, the world was very different. Satellites took about 5 years to build. They would be operational for more than a decade. And that meant that the technology on board was already out of date by the time it was launched, let alone by the time that it's still operational. It was a world of large governments and geosynchronous telecommunication satellites, and the technology and innovation cycle was extremely slow.

And last decade, though, the economics of space changed. And this was driven by mainly two things. One was the decreased launch costs coming with rideshare missions in addition to reusable first stages of a rocket. And second thing that happened last decade that changed the economics of the space was mega constellations. And Planet was the first company in the world to develop and deploy a mega constellation, more than 100 satellites. And in fact, during the previous decade, Planet launched more satellites than any other entity or government in the world.

And to do this, we built a deep amount of technical and operational expertise inside Planet. We changed how satellites are designed, manufactured and operated, moving from the era of single satellites into a disaggregated upgradable sensor networking space. And this led to a more resilient architecture that's continuously upgraded with new technologies, including new sensors based on what our customers are asking for.

To our customers, they get a service level agreement, they get an SLA that we deliver based on our multi-sensor constellation, which has allowed for us to pioneer a new business model, the one-to-many business model in Earth observation, and that's really empowered by our daily scan.

So let's take a look at how our constellation in space works today. Will talked about this in the morning, and he showed the video of the SuperDove satellite. That's a monitoring mission. Just looks down, takes a picture and indiscriminately captures 4 million pictures of the planet. And -- but there is another way of operating a spacecraft. And that's with the tasking missions. SkySat and Pelican and Tanager are the 3 satellites that are tasking missions.

And the tasking mission is important because you have to actually just look either left or either right rather than straight down. So the SkySats are our high-resolution systems, and Pelican is also the very high resolution system. Our Pelican satellites will provide continuity and upgrade to the SkySat satellites. The current fleet of Pelicans, including those currently on the launch pad, as Will mentioned, Pelican 5 and Pelican 6, will maintain the operations of our SkySat contract. We continue to innovate around the capabilities of Pelican, including iterations to aim to upgrade the telescope to deliver 30-centimeter class data for the next-generation fleet, targeted to launch next year.

And finally, last year, we went beyond the visible into hyperspectral with the Tanager tasking satellite. Tanager can detect signatures well beyond what the human eye can see. And all of this is powered by our vertically integrated scaled space model. So for the past 15 years, we have been a leader in agile space missions. We have pioneered agile development in all aspects of our vertical integration of space capabilities. We can introduce new technologies seamlessly, new sensors, new radios, new ground stations and new vendors, leveraging the core infrastructure that we designed from the ground up.

And this enables us to move fast to solve emerging needs of our customers. We can adapt new technologies quickly and field them into space. With approximately 4 launches every year, we continuously upgrade capabilities on orbit, resulting in more, better and faster data. Our in-house design of satellites are designed for manufacturability. We have a steady high-rate manufacturing capability, which allows for unit cost to decrease, efficiency to increase and for us to respond to customers to quickly build new satellites to meet market demand.

All of our ground support equipment, testing procedures, inventory management systems are all built from the ground up, allowing for rapid scalability. We have common subsystems so we can buy in bulk, manage working inventory and rapidly field new satellites quickly. And as an example, the SuperDove satellite production capability allows for us to build, test, calibrate and deliver up to 40 SuperDove satellites in just 1 week. That allows for us to launch the latest technology that is fielded from our fundamental space systems research and development. And we pride ourselves to be able to continuously adapt our supply chain for resilience, cost efficiency, performance and speed.

So with hundreds of satellites in space, we've built an automated mission control with over 50 ground stations all around the world. The same mission control is used across our multi-sensor constellation. And if a region based on our customers require faster latency, we can deploy more ground stations in that region. We continuously improve satellite operations year-over-year. And in fact, while the SkySat satellite hardware design hasn't fundamentally changed since we acquired them from Google in 2015, we increasingly -- we increased the yield of the satellite by over 10% every single year. And that allows for us to do task aggregation and premium products for lower latency.

Our vertical integration encompasses a highly aligned and loosely coupled architecture, from subsystems in a satellite that can be shared across missions to manufacturing processes for all of Planet satellites into our automated multi-mission operations. And when we develop a breakthrough in 1 subsystem, it benefits the entire fleet of satellites. Bringing forward capabilities in greenfield areas of the growing space industry globally enables a very unique mission architecture and never before offered capabilities. And we, again, pride ourselves in the efficiency in operations and cost management in all stages of the mission life cycle.

So while we have a massive head start with the largest constellation of Earth observation satellites in history, speed is really the thing that sets us apart from the competition. One of the things that makes us faster is that we have automated everything, leveraging the core infrastructure that we designed from the ground up. And this enables us to be faster than anybody. And our edge is only getting larger over time. And that's what we call the agile space missions flywheel.

This is a major differentiator that we have at Planet, and -- which we saw demonstrated with the German satellite services contract. We started the conversation in May of this year. We got on contract by July. And by August, we had the first satellite in space for the customer. We did this in 5 months, something that would normally take 5 years, and created a phased program to meet their unique needs.

So I mentioned earlier how we were the first ever mega constellation launched last decade. And over the last 5 years, we have continued to innovate with our agile space missions. In 2020, during the height of COVID, we actually had 5 different launch campaigns, including 2 launches of SkySat satellites to achieve higher resolution and higher revisit imagery. The next year, when we went public in 2021, we succeeded in the complete upgrade of our Dove Constellation to SuperDoves, doubling our spectral range for our customers from 4 bands to 8 bands with backward compatibility for the archive, giving our customers more and higher quality data.

And on this slide, you'll actually see Carbon Mapper twice. And 2021 was the first time when we entered into a funded research and development contract and project with them. This resulted in a $40 million development program to design the Tanager satellite, but with an eye for cost efficiency and toward a scaled constellation. And this is now being realized with the successful launch of Tanager 1 in 2024 and with Carbon Mapper earlier this year, winning a $95 million contract with the California Air Resources Board.

And what that means for Planet with our constellation services is it resulted in a dedicated capacity satellite services over California, enabling us to build an additional 3 Tanager satellites that will be launched over the next couple of years. So with our Carbon Mapper -- with the work with Carbon Mapper became the genesis of our satellite services offering.

And finally, we signed another funded research and development contract in 2022 with NASA. And NASA is the end user. And what they wanted to do was to leverage the investment that is happening in satellite communications. And NASA, like ourselves and what our customers, they want satellite-to-satellite connectivity. So we are demonstrating real-time connectivity for both Ka-band as well as optical inter-satellite links. And for our end customers, this means that we will be able to offer a premium service for multiple pathways of communication to occur to enable real-time tasking and rapid downlink of data into various workflows. And this meets our customers for where they are and is a critical technology to help realize our real-time insights space architecture.

And as I mentioned earlier with the Pelican satellite in production this year, we have entered into the 2 satellite services deals for Pelican, 1 for JSAT to support Germany and 1 for Germany -- to support Japan, and 1 for Germany for European security. And finally, to support the unprecedented doubling of the European defense spending that's happening over the course of this decade, we announced the expansion of our manufacturing footprint into Europe to leverage Planet's agile space missions. This doubles the overall capacity of our production capability and positions Planet in the center of European aerospace innovation.

As an example of our agile aerospace and modular system architecture, both the Tanager satellite and the Pelican satellite leverage the exact same satellite bus and mission control. This allows for rate manufacturing in the common bus, enabling cost efficiency and scale. And what you see here on the left is our version 1 modular architecture, and it's already being updated for future satellite missions.

I want to return to Tanager for a minute. This is a phenomenal mission. The Carbon Mapper coalition brought Planet and NASA JPL together. And NASA JPL, they build the world's most sophisticated instruments for hyperspectral data for both science missions and national security missions. And we learned how to build this instrument from them, pulled it into our agile space mission stack and successfully launched and calibrated Tanager 1. And this is a science grade mission at approximately 50x the cost reduction in manufacturing production compared to NASA's estimated cost. But this is fully built by the Planet team and delivers high-quality science grade hyperspectral data, and according to JPL, it's the most sophisticated imaging spectrometer in the known galaxy.

You may know the industry saying, a spectrum is worth 1,000 pictures. In this case, it's worth 420 pictures. In other words, a picture shows you something -- what something looks like, while a spectrum helps you understand what it is. A photograph is about observation, whereas a spectrum is about understanding. So there isn't a large existing market for hyperspectral data yet, but we're making an informed bet. With the advances of Earth data and AI technologies, new significant markets can be unlocked across energy, mining and insurance. It's a whole new category of instrumentation.

So our customer-first model is exemplified by Tanager. Carbon Mapper exists to address the problem of monitoring carbon and methane emissions at their point source. And before the commissioning was even complete for this mission for Tanager 1, Carbon Mapper identified a significant leak in the Permian Basin that you can see on the left image here. And ultimately, they showed it to the operator, which led to its mitigation, as you can see in the right picture. And that was the equivalent of taking and removing 200,000 cars off the road. One capture, immediate impact. And that's the crux of the Carbon Mapper's $95 million contract that they secured with California. And I expect that Carbon Mapper will expand to other regulatory agencies around the world for a similar type of service.

And now there's Pelican, the upgrade to the SkySat in our very high-resolution tasking spacecraft. It includes additional radios for last-minute tasking and fast data downlink, thereby reducing latency. After the completion of our funded R&D efforts with the NASA CSP program, the Pelican satellites will contain inter-satellite links that will allow for even lower latency. And additionally, we have onboard compute via the NVIDIA GPU architecture. And that allows for our customers to upload their algorithms to run on the edge. When you combine the real-time connectivity with the edge compute, that's when you have real-time insights. This means that future AI-enabled applications that you heard Charlie talk about before will be powered by a distributed sensor network and a distributed compute network that essentially happens in real time.

So we have a lot of agility and flexibility to meet this market opportunity. We can offer the capability that the customer needs in the way that they want it. So in this slide, I'm going to build it out and explain to you what our new constellation services offerings are. And on the far left is what you can see with our commercial Planet tasking missions today.

A customer, they purchase tasking credits, and they can either request a flexible task or an assured task. And as a reminder, this is historically how we provided high resolution tasking and hyperspectral tasking for our customers. But as you move to the right, the customer will get greater control and autonomy. In a rapidly changing global security environment, there is the desire for our customers, for nations to have greater sovereignty and assurance that these satellites will be there when they need it the most. And they need it quickly.

Okay. So if you're a customer using tasking credits today and you want more, dedicated capacity is the model around how to get started with satellite services. It's cost effective, an efficient way for customers to gain access to competition-free, advanced space-based capabilities without the operational complexities of building, operating, maintaining their own satellite infrastructure. Anytime a named satellite crosses over the customer's area of interest, that satellite pass is reserved exclusively for them. It gives the customer peace of mind that they have assurance that they can use the capability when they need it the most.

Next, customers can also choose a direct access offering, which offers additional benefits beyond the dedicated capacity to the customer, like an in-region ground station with direct downlink of data. These ground stations have on-premise image processing for optimal security and privacy, and it can go directly into the workflows and their operational infrastructure. And this further allows customers to have extremely low latency delivery of imagery and insights.

And finally, we also offer full ownership of the constellation and the ground stations for eligible customers that need full control and sovereignty over their assets and data and orbit. And if desired, we can still operate the satellites for the customer as well as commercialize outside of their area or their neighborhood that they really care about, thereby making this premium product offering more cost-effective for the end customers.

So our new satellite services offerings range from dedicated capacity, all the way to constellation ownership. And let me explain where our existing satellite services contracts fit into the spectrum. Carbon Mapper represents dedicated capacity for California with Tanager. Our JSAT contract is a customer-owned fleet, far right. So it's constellation ownership, but we operate it for JSAT. And we provide them with direct access services in Japan and dedicated capacity in the Asia region. Even with these JSAT-owned satellites, Planet can commercialize outside of their area of interest.

And finally, our German contract sits in the dedicated capacity bucket, but it also includes some direct access capabilities. So as you can see, we can flex to meet the market opportunity. We are building out these capabilities, we're building out the capability in ways that the customer wants to buy. All of these services leverage our agile space missions flywheel.

So with satellite services leveraging our rate manufacturing capability and mature spacecraft, this does lead to high return on invested capital. But more than that, satellite services are a win-win-win. It's a win for our satellite services customers, where they can move at the pace of their urgency, enabling them to establish sovereign EO capabilities at the speed and cost that fits with the geopolitical urgency and constraints. It's a win for Planet because this pulls forward the capital that we need to build out our fleets, dramatically enhancing our return on invested capital as we have effectively monetized the constellation ahead of build-out while maintaining additional capacity to deliver to our one-to-many model.

And third, it's a win-win-win for our ecosystem of partners and customers. The faster we build out capability, the greater the revisit rate, the faster the pace of innovation and the more powerful our network becomes, which benefits the entire ecosystem. The network effects are compounding, thus creating this win, win, win.

So satellite services are a natural extension of our total addressable market and position us to deepen the relationships with our customers for the long term. And there are 4 primary reasons why our customers choose Planet. One is that we have built a solid reputation and a foundation of trust with our customers. We are their scaled space partner and with proven operational reliability.

Two, our high rate responsive manufacturing and scalable multi-mission control allows for our customers to get started immediately with satellite data and AI-enabled solutions and quickly create phase -- and phase them from dedicated capacity all the way to satellite ownership. Our scaled agile aerospace missions also enable continuous upgradability over time. Our customers know that they will get more capability per year. And finally, as Charlie mentioned earlier, these are highly synergistic with our data and AI-enabled solutions.

And Will spoke about -- this is a video. Will spoke about our key differentiation and our first moat being the world's best satellite imaging fleet, enabling Planet to collect vastly more imagery than anybody else on the planet. And we're not stopping there. And we are excited to announce Owl. Just like we upgraded our Dove Constellation to the SuperDove Constellation, Owl is the SuperDove upgrade of the monitoring mission. It's a step change for the monitoring mission, upgrading our mission architecture to improve our near daily global scan from 3-meter class imagery to 1-meter class. This 1-meter class scan will enable a wide range of use cases across governments and commercial industries, providing foundational imagery for a common operating picture. And because these use cases were previously satisfied with high-resolution tasking assets, Owl further expands the TAM for our monitoring mission. Owl leverages an upgrade to our small sat modular bus architecture, meaning that we will leverage the learnings, the cost efficiency and the scale that we broke ground with the Pelican and Tanager satellites.

Owl is designed for edge compute and real-time communications, identifying change as fast as it happens. As we think about deploying this fleet, we'll be responsive to customer demand as we decide exactly when we'll launch. As you've heard from us repeatedly, our in-house manufacturing and agile aerospace approach allows for us to be very nimble. So following our tech demo, which is scheduled for late next year, our current estimates in order to get to our fully operational capability is about 40 to 50 Owl satellites that will be launched over the following several years. And this will deliver a daily global scan at 1 meter resolution.

So combining this with our tasking missions, we'll also increase the utility of very high resolution tasking. And that will be further enabled by our AI-enabled solutions that Charlie talked about before. So we're incredibly enthusiastic about the market potential for this fleet and to further expand our AI capability on orbit. Like their namesakes Owls are smarter, faster and wiser.

So shortly, we'll watch a brief testimonial from our trusted partner, JSAT, and you can hear from yourself about their enthusiasm for next-generation monitoring. So our operational focus for our satellite services is really intended to drive continued strength in the model for a high-margin, high-growth business that generates cash to sustain the pace of innovation for our competitive differentiation and ultimately, for customer value. The recent success has been built on very disciplined direct sales efforts for our 3 satellite services offerings that you can see on the bottom of the page here.

But I can also see future offerings on the horizon. And this is when we can also build scalable products to capture even more than the 100 -- even more of the $139 billion addressable market that Charlie mentioned before. In addition to entering into select funded research and development contracts to prototype new technologies for our partners and customers, I believe that there will be a demand for a satellite subscription model. So imagine 2 years from now, when a customer is happily tasking their 10 Pelican satellites from the satellite services, and they're getting tremendous value, and they want more. I can envision a satellite subscription offering where we launched 5 new Pelican satellites a year. With a lifetime of 5 years, that means you have a steady state of 25 Pelican satellites.

And what the customer gets is the latest version of the Pelican satellite fleet. And that allows for it to be continuously upgraded, continuously adaptable with increased resilience, giving our customers and their end users always an edge ahead. And finally, with our U.S. and German rate and responsive manufacturing capability, we can offer premium services to governments that have urgent need to cache satellites and/or rapidly build and deploy spacecraft to support coproduction capability to create a commercial responsive space industrial capability.

So in summary, Planet's vertically integrated agile space missions is key. It's fundamental to our comparative advantage in the market by leveraging our speed, our agility and our efficiency. And listening to and responding to our key customers, we're meeting them where they are so that we can judiciously enter into the satellite services market. We are expanding Planet's addressable market with satellite services working across the company to best serve our customers, with our data, AI solutions and our satellite services.

So the revolution of space is largely underway, and massive reinvestment by governments and new entrants are moving new digital services into orbit. And these actors need it fast, securely and future forward. And we met -- and we meet this need by demonstrating that we're a proven scaled space partner. And I expect in the back half of this decade, we'll move toward our real-time insights vision for more data, better data, faster data to power our AI-enabled solutions and deliver a trusted source of real-time facts about the planet.

Okay. Well, thank you very much. That is our satellite services section. And right now, we do have a video from our long-term partner at JSAT. So JSAT, for those that aren't aware of them, they are a geostationary telecommunications company, been around for about 40 years. They operate the world's largest telecommunication satellite in geostationary orbit over Asia. And they've been our partner for 10 years. In fact, they were our first partner that we were able to offer our Dove monitoring services to any government around the world. We've grown so much together. They really believe in the Earth observation market, and that we will see in this client video about the satellite services. So thank you.

All right. So with that, I'm going to move a little bit into the AI world. So if you can bring up those slides, I believe we can get to that deck. So -- where is the AI slides? I have to move -- I have to do the clicker. All right. So the AI stuff. But in all seriousness, this is not just hype for Planet. The revolution in AI is really a big deal for us. I'm excited to talk about the strategic vision that we have, both the future of space and AI and how they combine.

I personally find space and AI solutions and the emerging trends at the AI frontier super compelling. And it's unprecedented, what we're building together with these technologies. You'll see -- I think there's an incredible opportunity for us here to massively expand the market for our customers and capabilities and values for our customers.

So let's start by taking a little bit of a step in to the -- examining the current landscape. So Planet stands at the intersection of these two trends, two massive trends, one in space and the other in AI. From day 1, we've been strapping space to Moore's Law, and we ping the latest sensors and chips and processes in space. And now we're doing that with AI in that, we are leveraged, just like we were leveraging the better chips into our satellites as they got better and better, satellites got better and better, we're leveraging better in AI models. As they advance, we're incorporating those advancements into our offerings, into our AI solutions.

And we have a highly cost-effective one-to-many business model, as we mentioned, and so it addresses a broad variety of markets. And because we're vertically integrated between everything from building the satellites all the way up to these AI answers, we know -- and because we know what our customers really need, we're positioned to figure out how to leverage AI really to enable them and constantly adapt this whole stack and then know where to put AI in to help our customer needs.

So lastly, let's touch on the space renaissance, and Robbie talked a little bit about this, but just to put it in perspective, a lot of people know about the first trend in space, which is rockets coming down fourfold in cost roughly in the last 10 years, primarily because of reusability of rockets that were pioneered by SpaceX. But what people know less well and has simultaneously been happening, as Robbie was describing, is that the capabilities of satellites, increasing cost performance about 1,000x. What that means is we've taken school size satellites, shrunk them down to just a few kilograms. This is really akin to the revolution that happened in computing, in changing from mainframe computers, down to desktop computers, but obviously apply for space.

And that is really the scale of the change that's going on, and that's why we're seeing these larger constellations of satellite fleets. And that -- so stuffing more capability in every kilogram in the rocket is a big deal. And 1,000x is, of course, a huge change to this industry. But the upshot of all of this has nothing to with satellites or rockets, it's to do with data. Because the upshot of it is either more communication data around the planet or more data about the planet. We are collecting now orders of magnitude more data about the planet. And the upshot of all of that has nothing to do with the space economy, it is to do with the Earth economy. This is all about helping the Earth economy.

So that's the space revolution. Now let's talk about the AI revolution. So what's going on? Things have been progressing rapidly, as we all know, in AI. But we -- it didn't all happen overnight. It took years of advancements in AI to arrive at the moment we're here today. And here's some of the progression. Of course, taking from raw imagery all the way up to capabilities that we see today.

It takes AI to analyze the massive amounts of information that we have. So starting on the left, we have our imagery, the raw imagery, the pixels, then we have simple derived indices link, we call pixel mass, like NDVI for agriculture. We deploy those at scale. We have analytics that pull those together to regions. And then we spend a lot of time on convolutional neural networks. So that's -- those are the systems for doing object detections in imagery.

They take a lot of training. So you have to train on thousands and thousands of pictures of ships, label them, or planes, buildings and so on to get them working at scale. And that's the system that is now at scale with a lot of our customers. Looking across all of Brazil for deforestation, that's using road alerts, doing large analysis of ships that's using our ship detection. So that's all based on CNS.

But now we're in this new mode -- new era of large language models. You've obviously heard about that or foundation models, sometimes they're called. And they're really good right now at text, but they're actually increasingly getting good. They're being moved towards multimodality. So not just being good at text, but also being good at audio, imagery, videos. And that, of course, is super relevant to us. So it's accelerating for us, the vision of having real-world impact because AI can be leveraged then to answer real-world questions. And to do this, of course, they need that real-world data.

The first example of that for us was these balloons. And that -- those balloons traveling across the U.S., we didn't actually have to retrain. We just showed it one image, and then it automatically found through our data back through time where that Chinese balloon have flown across the United States and all the way back to its launch site in China. And -- but all of this is now building towards something even greater, I believe.

It's something more like planetary intelligence or Earth intelligence with profound implications for the Earth economy. And it's Planet's data, no one else in the Earth observation business or any other player in the space business at large that has the daily scan that is the core to building Earth intelligence or planetary intelligence because, of course, you need data of the whole planet.

All that's to say that AI, the trajectory of AI and the trajectory of Planet, I believe, are tightly coupled. So let me get a little bit more concrete. It's where AI -- we use AI at Planet today. Obviously, we use it in productivity. So around our company, software engineers are using it to improve software efficiency, people in the marketing and using it for marketing.

But there's really 3 key ways in which this is entering into our products. The first is leveraging AI models to accelerate those solutions that Charlie was talking about earlier, enabling the scaling up to broad area analysis that only AI models can do. The second is where we take it to space. So putting GPUs at the edge on our satellites. We talked about having the NVIDIA Jetson Orin platform on our Pelican spacecraft, and they will be going on to the Owl spacecraft as well.

And this means that we can both capture an image and then automatically extract insights that use of the customer, as Robbie also mentioned, putting the customer's code on the satellite, reducing time to answers from hours to minutes and opening up new applications in things like anything that needs a rapid response, like disaster response, security application. And it also supports more efficient data collection in orbit.

And then finally, we're leveraging foundation models. So Planet's data enables these foundation models to break free from the Internet, right, to not just talk about text on the Internet and to deliver valuable answers about change happening around us every day on the planet. And we're doing that primarily with our work horse of our daily scan. And we're doing that work both in-house. We have an in-house team and with partners. So we work with Google and we work with Anthropic, in particular.

So how does this then translate to benefits for our customers? First, it speeds time to value. So that means getting from 0 to an answer, even if it's rough, getting from 0 to an answer much faster than was possible before. The second benefit is that it helps them to scale to large geographical areas or time slices, not just being able to monitor boats in a port, but across the whole South China Sea, like we do with the U.S. Navy. And then third and perhaps most importantly, I think, is making it easier to get access to answers out of geospatial data, unlocking the power of that data for the non-expert use base. So you don't need teams of people with PhDs in satellite imagery processing in order to get answers out of the data.

So now I want to give you a little demo of what this might look like ultimately for users. I spoke in 2018 at a Ted Talk about Queryable Earth, sort of like how we could query the Earth for answers. And so that's obviously been a guiding light for Planet for many years. But it's -- we're building towards that. And now these foundation models help us to really get towards that.

So let me just show you this little quick demo here built by our internal AI research team to give you a sense of the art of the possible. So imagine the power of being able to ask questions of the actual physical world on a day-to-day basis. So this is just a recording on this internal demo. You can imagine the platform just being able to ask questions in natural language and get answers back on the physical planet.

An economist, like in this example, could ask questions about commodities. A journalist though, could also separately ask questions about pollutants that have been dumped in or nearby river. A government agency could -- a civil servant, that is, a government agency could determine changes of land use change over time. It could give plots. It does give plots. First responders can use it to give locations of houses the moment a disaster strikes.

The use cases of this abound, and it simplifies access and democratizes it to those non-geospatial users, increasing the base of potential users by orders of magnitude and allowing insights to move at scale. It moves the target user, if you like, from a geospatial analyst to any person that is interested in getting answers about the physical world. And it massively increases the TAM for Planet.

Planet is not alone in this. We're doing this daily scan, which is truly unique in the industry, but we're doing this also in partnership with others. We're doing it in partnership with our customers. And you've seen this chart before where a customer was at the center, and I think that's the appropriate place, but also AI is in the middle of all of this. Every single step is being sped up by AI. It's -- and ultimately, this is building towards a planetary intelligence, this Earth intelligence. And all of this is a compounding network effect that accelerates us towards that vision. And I believe that we really have this incredible competitive advantage, and we will continue to evolve this capability with our customers to enable this feedback loop to improve this continuously and to build out this capability.

So before I welcome Ashley to the stage, I want to close with this. Just imagine, you've seen all the trends in AI and geospatial data, of course. You've seen ChatGPT, you've used it to answer questions about the Internet and the text on the Internet. Just imagine the power of being able to answer questions about the physical world, all of the economic benefits that, that unlocks, and Planet is the foundational dataset to do that vision. That is the only one, and it's a massive opportunity that stands in front of us. I'm super excited about our future, especially here.

And so with that, now the person that you've actually come to see, Ashley Johnson, our President and CFO.

You all have been very gracious, spending a lot of time with us today. Many of you traveling from far away or those of you who have dialed in, and thank you for listening to all of the excitement that we have for the opportunity in front of us.

So I'm now going to talk about how we've laid the foundation for a high-margin, high-growth business. As those of you who have tuned into our recent earnings announcements and press releases, you already know, we're seeing real momentum in the business with many opportunities ahead of us. Our backlog at the end of Q2 '26 is at $736 million, which is growth of approximately 3x in 12 months. Much of this momentum stems from our new very well-received satellite services model, which Robbie walked you through.

But we also have a proven track record in delivering revenue growth, including demonstrating meaningful acceleration in our year-over-year growth rate in this recent Q2. And given the backlog we now have, we expect this growth acceleration to continue in the back half of fiscal '26 and beyond. The increase in backlog obviously gives us the benefit of greater visibility to this revenue acceleration.

And given the recurring nature of our subscription business, we've had strong visibility into our revenue coming into each year. However, the ratio of the next 12 months' backlog based on our -- to the next 12 months' revenue based on guidance and consensus estimates has stepped up considerably in the last 2 quarters as this backlog has grown.

So just to take a minute because it's not the slide we've used before, this is the expected revenue from the next 12 months of backlog as compared to the forecast revenue based on our guidance or guidance plus consensus estimates. And how this is configured is detailed precisely in the notes. But you can see a considerable step up in recent periods. And this increased visibility reflects the criticality of the services that we're providing to our customers, as well as our rapid execution after we secure these new contracts.

Now this graph reflects a calculation of the revenue expected to be recognized in the next 12 months of our 24-month backlog. So again, we're taking the 24-month expected revenue as disclosed in our filings and subtracting out of that, the first 12 months to give you a view as to what we expect the next 12 months' revenue to be, which facilitates our own planning to have this level of visibility for out-year revenue and ensuring that we can align our investments to continue progress toward our target margin profile.

So Robbie walked you through the details around how we're delivering satellite services to our customers and why the market demand is so strong. I'd like now to underscore all the ways our move deeper into satellite services has benefited our business. So first of all, the payment milestones of satellite services contracts align cash inflows with our working capital needs. Second, these improved cash dynamics, combined with the committed long-term demand for data, accelerate our path to having 30 Pelicans on orbit and a market-leading revisit rate.

Third, these contracts often include both AI solutions for optimal value of high-resolution tasking and AI at the edge for optimized delivery. Fourth, this flexible contracting for our data through satellite services allows us to meet customers where they are and more rapidly capture the available market for high-resolution data services. And finally, through all of these positives, Planet is able to accrue the benefits inherent in scaled operations and the associated cost efficiencies around manufacturing and procurement.

So the change in our go-to-market strategy into satellite services accelerates our growth in market capture, and it also impacts the mix of our revenue and cost recognition. So while we operate these satellites on behalf of the customer, the flexibility in how we contract with our customers allows faster market capture, but also results in varied revenue recognition. So as Robbie outlined, satellite services that are sold as dedicated capacity are recognized as data revenue, whereas sovereign capabilities in dedicated ground stations are recognized as hardware revenue.

So I'll step you through what this looks like today and demonstrate how this could evolve over time. So the dark blue area at the bottom of this chart represents our contracted data and AI solutions backlog and its expected revenue recognition over time. The data portions of our satellite services contracts are typically recognized over multiple years, while our traditional data contracts can be either ratable or usage-based with 1- or 2-year commitments.

So our traditional data and AI solutions contracts are typically 1 to 2 years in length, which is why you see the step down in FY '26 to FY '27 for backlog, while recent long-term dedicated capacity contracts, part of our new satellite services solutions, extend this revenue into the out years. This is, again, one of the key benefits of this new model.

The next two blue areas reflect our continued focus on strong retention, both through renewals, which is reflected in this kind of sky blue area, and through expansions, which is incorporated into this new business area. So these projections, while illustrative, are achievable as we bring the customer into the center of everything that we do. Now the green part of the graph illustrates the backlog associated with hardware delivery and expected revenue recognition over time. So for instance, the JSAT contract, the $230 million consultation services contract that we just talked about earlier, this revenue recognition is based on completion estimates over time. So this bright green in the middle there is showing how we expect this revenue from JSAT and similar contracts to play out over time. And so you can see that this revenue is relatively front-loaded. The olive green represents what we might see as we layer in more of these kinds of contracts over time.

Just to spend a second on the cost side. So hardware purchases and labor for building the satellites are typically CapEx for our data and solutions business. When we contract for customers to take ownership of the satellites, the hardware and labor elements associated with building the satellites are recognized as COGS. So that's not illustrated on the slide, but it's important to understand how this is evolving.

So you can see this illustrative model envisions trending towards approximately 2/3 of our revenue coming from data and solutions over time as we have increased capacity and capabilities that drives accelerated solutions and data adoption. All of our operations are part of a virtuous cycle, enabling us to meet the customer where they are today and reinforcing our value to customers. So in short, we forward from the constellation build, more satellites equates to more data, more data leads to even greater insights and capabilities.

So if you take nothing else away from this slide, you should recognize that there are incredible synergies between our offerings and an enormous opportunity for capital-efficient growth. And as we continue to execute to meet the market opportunity in front of us, we're doing so with operational discipline. The combination of increased scale, focused operations and our one-to-many business model has enabled us to generate positive adjusted EBITDA for each of the last 3 quarters and for the trailing 12-month period. In addition, we've generated very strong positive cash flow in the first half of fiscal '26 due to our business momentum and attractive working capital dynamics in our satellite services contracts, which has been instrumental in changing our cash flow profile.

Not only did Q2 represent our first ever 12-month period of being cash flow positive, but the strength of these cash flows in H1 put us in the position of being able to say that we expect this fiscal year to be cash flow positive, a full year ahead of what we had targeted at the start of the year.

All right. I want to spend a few minutes discussing our opportunistic yet very strategic capital raise we did last month. We ended Q2 with over $270 million of cash on our balance sheet and no debt, and we projected positive cash flow on the year. Thus, we remained very much in the position of being able to say we would finance our operations without raising additional capital. And that said, over the summer, we watched as the convertible debt markets became very attractive to issuers with low interest rates and high underlying conversion rates.

So on the heels of our strong Q2 earnings report, we launched a convertible debt raise targeting $300 million at attractive terms and ultimately achieved a capital raise of $460 million at even better terms, an annual interest rate of 0.5% and an $11.95 conversion price. We used a portion of the proceeds to purchase a capped call, which means we do not expect to incur dilution from this financing until the stock price exceeds $18.04. We were very pleased with the execution on the raise and our ability to attract a number of new institutional investors to our story. We now have an even stronger balance sheet, enabling our customers who are working with Planet on their most critical operations to know we are going to be around for the long term. This provides us with an incredible competitive asset.

So it's important to underscore that this capital raise does not change our operational plans and our commitment to operational discipline and efficiency. Given the opportunities ahead, we are going to strategically invest in the business across both OpEx and CapEx to capture this massive market opportunity unfolding in front of us. But we will do so with discipline to maintain our trajectory to our target margins and cash flow. We are currently deep in our planning for fiscal '27 and beyond, balancing our objectives of continued growth acceleration and the operational efficiency and focus that we've delivered in recent quarters.

Our goal is to be in a position to exceed a Rule of 40 by fiscal year '28 -- exceed a Rule of 40 by fiscal year '28, and we're defining Rule of 40 here as revenue growth plus adjusted EBITDA margin. So based on the midpoint of our most recent guidance, we expect to achieve a Rule of 40 in fiscal '26 of approximately 15%, which is a significant improvement over prior years. And with our current backlog, we have strong line of sight to continued revenue growth acceleration, which allows us to target a Rule of 40 of at least 30 in fiscal '27, while investing to deliver on current contracts and capture a rapidly developing market for space-based intelligence.

Establishing these priorities, continued growth acceleration, adjusted EBITDA breakeven or better and positive free cash flow sets the boundary conditions for our operational plan and ensure strategic and disciplined focus on execution and market capture. So turning to our long-term financial targets. Generally speaking, our profitability targets are unchanged versus targets we've set before. We believe the market opportunity in front of us is massive, affording us the opportunity to consistently deliver 20% plus growth over the long term. Non-GAAP gross margin should continue to expand based on our one-to-many model, moderated only by the revenue mix and the pace of growth in our sovereign satellite services.

And just as a quick aside, there may be a few of you who are new here. But as you're looking at this market, there are some companies that don't put D&A in COGS. We follow the model of traditional SaaS and DaaS companies of our COGS, and so our gross margin targets include depreciation and amortization. So as you look across the market, just make sure you're looking on an apples-to-apples basis.

Shifting to OpEx. We invest strategically in AI and space innovation to bring the latest technology advances into our solutions across data, AI-based solutions and satellite services. We are right now investing, in particular, in scaling our manufacturing capabilities to support our satellite services contracts. At the same time, changes in our go-to-market strategy have enabled efficient customer acquisition costs as our direct sales team focus on the largest opportunities, while we leverage our platform for long tail in the system of partners and customers. And as we scale the top line and lean into AI internally, we see operating efficiencies across the board, but in particular, in G&A.

So all of that said, operational discipline and scale support achieving 25% plus adjusted EBITDA margins, and we are very focused on that target. So while we're currently just shifting to CapEx, while we're currently in an investment cycle to replenish our SkySat fleet with more efficient and advanced Pelicans, we continue to build and launch our satellite infrastructure in a way that supports a maintenance CapEx model of 5% to 8%. We've been there historically, and we target getting there again.

So to summarize, our strategy continues to support our ability to be a high-growth, high-margin business for the long term.

We see operating efficiencies across the board, but in particular, in G&A.

So all of that said, operational discipline and scale, support achieving 25% plus adjusted EBITDA margins, and we are very focused on that target.

So while we're currently just shifting to CapEx, while we're currently in an investment cycle to replenish our SkySat fleet with more efficient and advanced Pelicans, we continue to build and launch our satellite infrastructure in a way that supports a maintenance CapEx model of 5% to 8%. We've been there historically, and we target getting there again. So to summarize, our strategy continues to support our ability to be a high-growth, high-margin business for the long term.

So in closing, I'd like to summarize our unique position in the market. Our differentiated and highly synergistic products combine the latest advancements in space and AI to deliver actionable intelligence. Our one-to-many data business model is highly scalable and enables compounding network effects. We are a trusted partner to governments and enterprises seeking to modernize and scale their decision-making capabilities. Our years of working with leading customers across a broad array of industry, combined with our decade-plus of investments in innovation, provide for a significant competitive moat, underscored most vividly by the depth of our archive. And the result is a high-growth, high-margin business with a very strong balance sheet.

So with that, I am going to -- not go into the appendix. I am going to ask everyone for just a moment of patience while we rearrange the stage here a little bit, and we'll get everybody back up here and take your questions. Thank you, again.

[Operator Instructions]

So I wanted to ask about AI first. I think the vision makes total sense. In democratizing you can open up to a big user base that is in super experts, specialized team of PhDs. How much data do you think it requires to get there? And in conjunction, do you need a tremendous amount of compute from somewhere to train that data? And then for the data itself, is it just optical? Or do you need SAR? Or do you need RF or signal? What kind of diversity of data do you need to kind of create this vision that you have?

Yes, good question. So -- yes, the AI models do, of course, benefit from more and more data and the actual amount of data that you need to put into increasing the fidelity of these foundation models, tends to be in the sort of billions, but we have a lot more than that. We have 4 million per day. So we have a lot. But in terms of the multi-modality, of course, it benefits from different modalities, and that's why we haven't yet got to the whole point of putting the hyperspectral data in there, for example, and seeing how that merges. But just to give you a sense of how we combine the data sets that we do have, we looked at coincidence collect between our SkySat and our SuperDove fleet, and there were of order 200,000 collects where they were just within an hour or a few hours. And then we took those to then train a model to look at the low resolution data and make it look like the high-resolution data in those cases where we have that simultaneous collect. And we use that data to train this super resolution, that was the super resolution model that we have now provided to our customers. So that enables them to improve the resolution with that. So it combines the benefits of that scan with the high res.

So I think models will take that into account more and more with time. But -- and just one more thing like that. So a lot of there's actually a huge amount of value that people get from looking at the entire archive to normalize what is normal. All those defense and intelligence applications, like what's the normal number of ships in that port. What's the normal number of planes in that air strip and so on. So you actually look at most of the data when you're analyzing any new piece of data, you're looking at the whole archive. Is this out of norm or in norm. And to have that piece we look at the whole archive. So I think in many ways, the very latest days is the most valuable, but if you like, the signaling the whole archive is needed to know what that means. Does that answer your question?

And then compute?

And what about the compute about?

You need someone to provide? Or will you go out procure? Do you require a lot of it to get the trend...

We have a lot of compute. I mean, we -- most of our compute is done on GCP, on Google Cloud, and that's done for both the storage and the processing of the imagery on a day-to-day basis, and that's where we do our AI purchasing as well. Yes, it does take a real amount of compute. The training is the most compute piece and then inference, the day-to-day operation of those models is relatively light. Obviously, it just scales with the number of users.

And just a follow-up on the services side. You obviously just put a plant up in Germany. You mentioned on one of the slides, you have 20, I think, deals of $170 million. Is it safe to kind of infer that one of these or several of these could be in Europe?

I'll let Charlie answer that, but just a key. I mean, yes, so we are seeing global demand for our satellite services. It really is in Asia, Europe and, of course, the U.S. as well is interested in this, too. But Charlie, yes, do you want to speak?

Yes, I was going to say the same thing. It's not restricted to one region, actually, like we're seeing demand across all of the areas of the world. So I think there's good opportunities here in Europe and Asia as well.

Colin Canfield, Cantor Fitzgerald. If we can go back to the slide with the visual stack of the new and based on the AI and hardware models and just kind of compare that.

So just comparing that to the long-term growth target of 20%, it looks like the long-term growth target is probably based on what's in backlog today, but the illustrative chart you had behind you looks like revenues perhaps doubling or tripling over a 3- to 5-year period. So can you just talk about the level of conservatism baked into the revenue growth targets?

So one is just definition of long term and the ability to sustain, the other when you think about growth -- revenue growth targets, in particular, and you look at this chart, there's spikes. The new satellite services model, the more of it that it trends towards Constellation ownership. You can see some of those spikes from period to period. And so trying to normalize for that and ensuring that we're putting out targets that we feel very confident, we can stand behind.

And it's 20% plus.

Got it. And then just in terms of the gross margin like harkening back to 2021 Investor Day, 70% to 80% gross margin target versus the 60%. Talk about the level of conservatism in that target as well.

And again, 60% plus because a lot of it just depends on the mix of business. So no change to how we think about the potential, particularly around data and solutions in terms of long-term margin potential. It's really, again, about as you see spikes in hardware business causing blended margins to be lower than the stand-alone data and Solutions margins, accounting for how that mix could trend over the next several years.

And then one last question on the TCV with the customer list you put together. Can you just talk about maybe the time line of realizing those TCV? And essentially, as we think of the tranches like South Korea, Australia, Poland, the feedback we got from the Army show was that they were kind of looking at Germany as a demonstrator. But that once Germany was up and running, you would see the follow-on contracts from the other kind of F-35 friends of family. Is that a fair way to characterize the time line of that? Or does the risk environment suggests that that's pulling to the left?

I mean I would just say the urgency that we are feeling across all of these areas, especially in Europe, is so strong. I mean, Robbie mentioned, I don't know if you caught this, the start of our German conversation was in May, we did the contract in July, and we had our first satellite in space in August. I mean that speed -- we had not seen that sort of speed before. So that level -- any way, exactly the time line we expect on all of these things, but that level of urgency is great. And maybe a comment on the gross margin piece as well. I mean, right now, we're most focused on taking the market. It's an urgent time because of things like that. Let's go grab it. But the margin potential of the planet is really, great.

Firstly, when we put those margins out there, of course, in 2021, we didn't have the satellite services piece. But we also think that satellite services piece, the way we are doing it can lead to really high margins because we still can commercialize the rest of the world's area for Japan or Germany. And so that -- there's huge margin growth potential, not only they're not bad margins out of the gate, there's a lot of growth potential in those margins. And then our data business, we've been building those solutions, sometimes in collaboration with partners. But as we get more efficient with scaling those out, again, we expect the efficiency of the gross margins to go up. But we also -- there's things changing quite fast. So we wanted to be conservative and thoughtful there. But -- so that's why we reset it a little bit, but we still believe in the long-term margin potential here.

Chris Quilty. Okay, can we talk a little bit about the Owl fleet because you haven't really said anything yet in a public setting, and I'll try to ask a series of short questions. But is it fair to assume that the doves get retired over time and owls are wholesale replacement?

Correct. Yes. And it's backwards compatible, a bit like SuperDoves were from Dove.

Right. Got it. And it looks like you're adding propulsion onto these, which is different as well as the optical cross-link. Is that's an interplane or intra-plan or...

Well, we said we'd have backwards, it doesn't necessarily have to mean optical backhaul because it can be RF, but yes, satellite communications as well.

Got you. And that's just one optical cross-link per satellite?

We haven't specified that. Actually, yes, so we haven't gotten to that sort of level of detail, but yes, they do have satellite-to-satellite communications.

Got you. And Ashley, it looks like the long-term forecast is still 5% to 8% of CapEx, but these look like about 100-kilogram satellite, so I'm guessing more of a $5 million to $10 million cost versus $300,000 for a Dove. So to stay within that, does it mean it's a smaller fleet? Or are you assuming a bigger numerator or is it combination of all of the above?

The smaller fleet, bigger numerator.

Got you. And...

Robbie actually mentioned 40 to 50 satellites to get to the daily scan.

Got you. And I think you mentioned it's multispectral plus 6 other bands?

Yes. I mean, it's -- again, it's backwards compatible with the 8 bands that we have on the SuperDove.

Got you. And how do you think about in terms of the resolution, I mean, obviously, going from 3 meters to 1 meter is not 3x better.

It's 10x better, correct.

Right, what sort of applications do you open that you can't access today?

Well, I think it's -- there's huge applications of this. A lot of people are like, oh my God, that data scan is amazing. If it was even higher resolution, that will be better. And of course, the [indiscernible] they can just give you one example in disaster response, okay? That's a multi-hundred billion dollar market. But really, they want data as soon as possible to help the first responders, and they want building-by-building damage assessment.

So we can tell in the 3-meter data, yes, the building has been damaged at some level. But more details, we can't. And this would give us those details. It would help the insurance claim folks not have to send the people out. They can actually do that automatically. It can help the first responders, know where to go on that property in more detail. So that's a case. And so there's a hundreds of billions of dollar market opening up because of the resolution and the speed going from hours to minutes on top of that. Charlie, anything to add I mean from...

Yes, if you take MDA as another example, you obviously can see smaller and smaller vessels and you're able to respond operationally much, much faster. And then you're obviously integrating other assets on top of that. So you really move from a domain, which is really quite hard to manage and observe today to an area where there's a lot of money being spent, but you've actually got a really dynamic system that people operating within that region can make much faster decisions. So the market itself gets bigger. The demand for the data becomes more, the demand for solutions grows and then the demand for tasking integrated into that system also grows. So it's not a linear change in terms of the potential as you move from the Dove constellation towards that Owl capability.

Got you. And final question. I mean obviously, AI and optical cross-links give you reduced latency, but also getting it down to the ground is traditionally a big problem? Are you still sticking with that sort of X-band downlink or do you need, I mean, more capacity? Or does AI resolve some...

Mainly, we are upgrading our present fleet of ground stations to slightly faster radio equipment. It's a Ka-band, still using X-band and S-band for up. So we use most of the same, but we're adding some Ka-band capability on our ground stations to have faster downlink for the Pelicans and then we use that same system for the Owl.

We can be really quite intelligent over time when you have distributed compute that can happen in the cloud or a ground station or onboard the satellite, for where the data gets processed in order to then get into the workflow of the solution. And so we can be really quite.

And some people need it faster, other people need it slower, so you can dynamically move that.

Exactly.

Yes. And just the final add on Owl. It's -- we are producing 10x more data with this system. So it's incredible. We are also getting it down roughly 10x faster, right? So it is a really marked improvement on both of those fronts, which are both important for our customers. Yes. Next question.

Mike Latimore, Northland Capital. Just sticking with the Owl constellation. I think you talked a little bit about that potentially replacing some of the tasking alternatives out there. Like how meaningful could that be?

Well, maybe I can start again and Robbie can continue. So this is disruptive to the market for all the reasons we were just discussing on high resolution and higher -- lower latency in such a degree. We think that opens up new markets. But it is also a disruptive to the home market in the sense of the high-res position because if we've already collected an image and it's sufficient resolution, then you don't need to go and task an image as well.

So we think it's going to change the way you do the tasking. You still might need it. If you need really rapid response. You still might need it if you need that 30 centimeters versus the meter. But for a lot of use cases, it displaces that. And we think that's the right kind of disruption to go to next and we think it's exciting, opens up markets and it would disrupt our competitors. But Robbie, anything to add?

I mean, that's perfect. I mean at the beginning of this decade, very high resolution was 1 meter. And by the end of this decade, that will just be the common operating picture that everybody gets.

And then just -- you did some -- you were doing some interesting pilots with the DOD using large language models or foundation models. Any update on those pilots or potential for going to commercial...

It's still relatively early days, but so far, so good. Also had the pilot with NATO, semi. We feel confident in that. We are still developing these and making and refining them, a bit like you heard about in our collaboration with Ukraine. The more we can be integrated into their learning process, the more we can rapidly adapt those to exactly what they need. And that seems to be going very well right now. And indeed, those customers are learning from Ukraine, but they're trying to build those systems to be more permanently operational as opposed to the Ukraine somewhat scrappily putting things together as need must for that urgency. And so we're building these in more sustained product capabilities for ongoing monitoring of large areas for new threats. Charlie?

I might just add, it's really not a case of us just providing access to technology and seeing how they're getting with it. We're becoming integrated directly with the customer to kind of get their feedback to kind of optimize the solution specifically around their needs. So it's actually helping us develop the product that really make sure that it does align to get that product market fit. So that we can build it back. And obviously, we can scale that to other customers. Is probably the first place to go next, but there's no reason why a lot of that core technology cannot transfer into other markets as well. So it's quite exciting in terms of the future of some of the commercial applications that it can open up now.

[ Mike Derchin ], the oldest living space analyst and a major investor, long-term investor. So your subscription model and the new NVIDIA chips and the Owl make this a much more capital-light business than when I first invested a few years ago. I was wondering if you could talk about that in light of your forecast seeming to be quite conservative -- quite -- from my perspective.

Well, let me just -- by saying, I mean, we did say that our projections on CapEx is still maintaining that long-term target of 5% to 8% because, a, we believe that we can do this more efficiently than anyone else. We've launched all these satellites. Still remember, since you're a veteran of this area, we've launched all 650 of our satellites, but still less cost than the incumbent to this area launched one, a single satellite, all of them combined. So we have taken -- the cost reduction is really quite dramatic. But secondly, as Charlie and Robbie both explained, we're letting our customers pay for the CapEx to get extra advantage of sovereignty. And so that changes that model. So we still -- but anything to add to that -- Ashley as well. Anyone want to add anything to that?

The -- this is about rate manufacturing, right? Being able to leverage the investment on subsystem all the way across the fleet, it gives us economies of scale for when we are building satellites for ourselves as well. So -- but exactly what Will has stated, we will constantly iterate on the foundational research and development, employ new technologies, adapt them to work in the space environment. That's something that we have absolutely mastered and we'll continue to do so in order to get cost efficiency.

And I'll just add, as Robbie went into a lot of detail about the way that even the bus is designed, so it can be interoperable between fleets keeping those same concepts in mind with Owl. And so this is a team that is agile in pretty much every way you can imagine. So the vendor supply chain is constantly being iterated to make sure we're getting the best and the most cost-effective ways of building the satellites, and the way they are designed is for cost efficiency and scalability. And now the way that we're selling enables both rapid market capture because we're sitting in front of the customer and understanding their needs and then designing how we sell to them in a way that meets their needs, but also has the great benefit of making our own capital model much more efficient. Because we build out much greater capability with the working capital being funded and maintaining the ability to commercialize the rest of the fleet.

So as Will was pointing out, in some sense, that's our highest gross margin business because there's no DNA that, that satellite has been fully paid for by the build-up for the customer and then we're just monetizing on top of it. So I have a lot of confidence in this team in their way of being innovative across the board and how we do things agile, scalable and now capital efficiently.

Sam Brandeis, Wedbush. In the slide where you're talking about Rule of 40, you project that for FY '28? For FY '27, you projected 30%. In this year, you have around 16%. So for next year, are you expecting to see a strong acceleration in profitability or revenue? Or how should we think about that?

I think the latter, Ashley, let's go.

We're -- as I mentioned, we're right now very actively in FY '27 planning. There's a lot of excitement for the market opportunity in front of us. We've obviously got a strong line of sight to revenue growth acceleration from our backlog, but we also have a very strong pipeline. And so very much focused on revenue acceleration. But also, as I said, maintaining that discipline so that we continue profitable operations and cash flow positivity. So it will be a balance -- definitely a balancing act on my part. But right now, it's -- as everyone has described, this is a very dynamic and exciting market, and we want to focus on market capture with discipline.

We have time for 2 or 3 more before we're going to break for lunch.

Yes. On a separate note, over the past couple of years, you guys have announced partnerships with Anthropic, AWS, Microsoft, Google. I guess, is there any update or I guess, how those have been going? And I guess, is there any expectations you could see any financial impact on that?

Yes, for sure. You're already seeing that financial impact in the AI solutions that Charlie mentioned that are driving the big deals that we spoke about. As to the foundation work that we're doing, especially with Google and Anthropic on new models and our own teams efforts that you saw that little demo of. We believe that, that is less about a direct revenue opportunity with those companies. This is more about building an entire market opportunity together.

Our data, those foundation models fine-tuned for our data to enable customers to answer questions about the real world and that -- and probably sitting on some of those cloud providers, AWS or GCP or what have you. And I think the opportunity there is tremendous. So again, those models are doing very well for enterprise solutions, sitting on top of the cloud systems like bedrock on AWS, we can do the same with the geospatial version of that with our access to our data at the same time. So I see it as a combination market opportunity as opposed to a data sale.

Mariana Perez Mora, Bank of America. Also following on partnerships. How do you think about partnering with other constellations that provide different solutions SAR, RF that are up there today. So they can actually benefit from all these like years of data that you have, do better upgraded solutions on that and also you accelerated the solution because you don't have to put those solutions up there and you made the customer where they are. Are there conversations there? How...

Conversations, we're already working with other satellite providers in a number of ways, like AIS data combined with our data of a maritime domain awareness solutions. Some of that data comes in the space. We've worked with SAR companies on maritime solutions as well, where SAR is complementary, even in agriculture people use SAR in our earth imaging. But yes, so we always look on the lookout for how we can complement our data set together. We're not so focused on ourselves that we don't look out to other data sets. But yes, Charlie?

Yes. I mean, again, it's driven by the customer and the customers need these other capabilities to be able to power their solutions. And we know that. And if we can help them be that foundation layer and either working through platform partners or directly with the ecosystem, we will work directly with those customers to pull together a solution around their needs and that's already happening today. This is not something that might happen in the future. We know there's that demand. And our goal is like how do we build a more integrated system that solves the problem, and that will drive growth in the ecosystem, not just for planning.

Greg Pendy from Clear Street. Just what did you learn when you went from the Dove to the SuperDove? And what can you bring to that in terms of when you go to the next-generation Owl? And how long does it really take not just getting the satellites and space but the time to commission and then collect enough data for it to be relevant over time?

It's a great question. Yes, I mean, we learned a lot from every upgrade, and we've upgraded our satellites a lot more time than that, but then SuperDove to Dove upgrade. Although that was the one that doubled, as Robbie said, the number of spectral bands. It also went to a much bigger camera system. There was lots of other improvements. But the external user, the main update was the extra spectral bands. And look, backwards compatibility and similarity and quality of that data set. Our customers are very sensitive to that.

We need to make sure it's really smooth in that way that the algorithms still work using that upgrade data. Obviously, it's going to be increased resolution in this case. So making sure that it's backwards compatible in that way is the most important thing, I would say. And yes, it will take a few years, I mean Robbie mentioned with the first demo mission next year, and it will take a few more years after that to build up to the operational fleet, that's about, right? Right, Robbie?

I mean, yes, that's it on the technology side, but I think the main thing is to do with our customers is to really make sure that they have early access to the data. And then we deliver it through the same API through the same operational workflow. So that it then enhances all the internal things that they're using it for as well as our solutions as well. So that's critically important for us to not just flip the switch. This is something that we actually do with our customers.

And we design the requirements -- 100% with the customers. They were like, okay, we were asking our biggest customers, what do you want next on the daily scan? Well, it was primarily resolution, but also the latency, those are the 2 things. So that's where we went to task on improving.

So I think we're going to cut it off there.

Great. Yes. Well, thanks, everyone, again, for joining us today. I hope this has been helpful and educational. Yes, maybe just couple of closing remarks only to say that, again, we're excited about scaling the company here across those 2 business sectors that we've spoken about now, satellite services and AI-enabled solutions. And both of them are humming. You heard that from Ashley and we're very excited to continue to work with you in partnership to build out this company. So really appreciate your support. Thanks a lot.

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for joining us, and welcome to the Planet Labs PBC Second Quarter of Fiscal 2026 Earnings Call. [Operator Instructions]

I will now hand the conference over to Chris Genualdi, VP of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Thanks, operator, and hello, everyone. Welcome to Planet's Second Quarter of Fiscal Year 2026 Earnings Call. I'm here at the New York Stock Exchange joined by Will Marshall and Ashley Johnson, who will provide a recap of our results and discuss our current outlook. We encourage everyone to please reference the earnings press release and earnings update presentation for today's call, which are available on our Investor Relations website.

Before we begin, we'd like to remind everyone that we will make forward-looking statements related to future events or our financial outlook. Any forward-looking statements are based on management's current outlook, plans, estimates, expectations and projections. The inclusion of such forward-looking information should not be regarded as a representation by Planet that future plans, estimates or expectations will be achieved.

Such forward-looking statements are subject to various risks and uncertainties and assumptions as detailed in our SEC filings which can be found at www.sec.gov. Our actual results or performance may differ materially from those indicated by such forward-looking statements, and we undertake no responsibility to update such forward-looking statements to reflect events or circumstances after the date on which the statement is made or to reflect the occurrence of unanticipated events.

During the call, we will also discuss historic and forward-looking non-GAAP financial measures. We use these non-GAAP financial measures for financial and operational decision-making and as a means to evaluate period-to-period comparisons. We believe that these measures provide useful information about operating results, enhance the overall understanding of past financial performance and future prospects, and allow for greater transparency with respect to key metrics used by management in its financial and operational decision-making.

For more information on the non-GAAP financial measures, please see the reconciliation tables provided in our press release issued earlier this morning, which is available on our website at investors.planet.com. Further, throughout this call, we provide a number of key performance indicators used by management and often used by competitors in our industry.

These and other key performance indicators are discussed in more detail in our press release and our earnings update presentation, which are intended to accompany our prepared remarks.

At this point, I'd now like to turn the call over to Will Marshall, Planet's CEO, Chairperson and Co-Founder. Over to you, Will.

Thanks, Chris, and hello, everyone. Thanks for joining us today. It's exciting to be back at the New York Stock Exchange. In the 3.5 years since we rang the bell and went public, we've come a long way. We've launched nearly 200 satellites on 6 rockets, including our next-generation Pelican and Tanager satellites.

We shifted our data business towards selling solutions, leveraging AI to enable speed and scale. We've leaned into our strength in Agile Aerospace to bring to market our new satellite services offering, and we've more than doubled our revenue run rate while driving bottom line performance to reach adjusted EBITDA and free cash flow profitability milestones. In a world that has changed dramatically with heightened global security challenges and rapid adoption of AI, Planet's capabilities are proving to be more valuable to customers than ever.

We're eager to share the latest, so let's dive in. Planet's Q2 financial results reflect the team's excellent execution in 2 key initiatives: delivering integrated global insights through AI-enabled solutions the top our daily scan and rapidly expanding our satellite services business. To briefly summarize the financials, we generated $73.4 million in revenue, representing approximately 20% year-over-year growth, marking another quarter of growth reacceleration. Non-GAAP gross margin was 61% in the quarter, up from 58% a year ago. And adjusted EBITDA profit came in at $6.4 million, representing our third sequential quarter of adjusted EBITDA profitability. We also achieved our second consecutive quarter of positive free cash flow, delivering year-to-date cash flow from operating activities of $85.1 million and year-to-date free cash flow of $54.3 million, representing free cash flow margin of approximately 39%.

Our backlog increased to $736.1 million at the end of the quarter, representing a year-over-year increase of 245%, which provides us with excellent visibility to revenue over the next 12 to 24 months and gives us confidence in our growth acceleration into FY '27. We are delighted to share that with the strong Q2 performance, we are now expecting to be free cash flow positive this fiscal year, over a year ahead of our prior target and a major milestone for the company.

Turning to sales highlights. I'll start with the Defense and Intelligence sector, where Q2 revenue accelerated to approximately 41% growth year-on-year and up approximately 14% quarter-over-quarter, driven by strong performance with our core data and solutions business as well as our satellite services contract with JSAT. I'd like to share 2 wins from the quarter that are incremental to those we announced in our July press conference. First, we were awarded an additional 7-figure option by the Defense Innovation Unit, part of the U.S. Department of Defense under our hybrid space architecture pilot. This option expands the capacity of our existing hybrid space architecture pilot, which we announced over the summer. The short-term pilot is focused on delivering vital indications and warnings. This contract demonstrates how customers can leverage Planet's daily scan and extensive data archive to monitor sites of strategic interest for critical changes and threats.

Second, the U.S. National Reconnaissance Office expanded its contract with us under the EOCL program to include PlanetScope monitoring and maritime domain awareness in support of national security, counter-narcotics and disaster response efforts. This award is in addition to the contract option we announced in July, which extended Planet's provision of daily monitoring and high-resolution tasking data and maintained our prior EOCL performance level from June through October 2025.

To recap our July wins for our AI-enabled solutions, we announced pivotal contracts with customers, including NATO and the U.S. Department of Defense for use cases such as persistent space-based surveillance, enhanced indications and warning and critical maritime domain awareness functions. Similarly, our landmark collaboration with the German government for satellite services also includes a multiyear 8-figure ACV renewal for access to PlanetScope data and maritime domain awareness with our partner, SynMax. More broadly, we continue to see robust demand for downstream products that embed our capabilities into customers' operations, enhance situation awareness and support informed decision-making.

Turning to the civil government sector, where second quarter revenue was down approximately 4% year-over-year, largely due to the expiration of our partnership with Norway, NICFI and relatively flat quarter-over-quarter. We continue to see significant growth opportunities in this sector, especially for permit monitoring and enforcement and disaster response applications. To share a few recent highlights, we signed a 7-figure ACV renewal with the U.K. Rural Payments Agency.

The U.K. government uses Planet's data to support its environment land management program, which involves countrywide monitoring of a wide range of environmental and agricultural features. And earlier this year, we entered a new relationship with the Panamanian Ministry of Environment, kicking off our strategic collaboration to strengthen continuous monitoring of the province of Darién where illegal mining, deforestation and unauthorized land use as well as unpermitted road development are expanding.

Planet's broad area of monitoring solutions support the ministry in detecting illicit activities, generating actual insights that enhance enforcement, governance and protection of Panama's natural resources. Like I'll work with the Brazilian Federal Police, this application of our solutions so how Planet can help serve both security and sustainability challenges sometimes simultaneously.

Shifting finally to the commercial sector, where revenue grew approximately 6% year-over-year and approximately 13% quarter-over-quarter, driven in part by strong execution in the agriculture and energy sector. To share a couple of customer highlights. We announced a new 6-figure win with Farmdar, a global agricultural technology company.

Through this contract, Farmdar has access to Planet's deep archive of PlanetScope data, including base maps to inform its crop insights platform, enabling more precise crop detection and field boundary identification and Arable land mapping.

We also continued to partner with Swiss Re, a leading global reinsurer for innovative drought insurance solutions. To show our recent proof point, Swiss Re leveraged PlanetScope and NDVI data to create a new drought insurance policy in Syria, that provided early assistance to nearly 120,000 people and resulted in a payout of $7.9 million, demonstrating the power of Planet data in addressing food and essential needs in crisis situations.

Next, on to our growing satellite services offering. In July, we announced a EUR 240 million multiyear satellite services collaboration with Germany. This is our second win in 2025 in Satellite Services. The deal includes dedicated capacity on Pelican satellites, leveraging Pelicans which are already under development. The team is also continuing to execute well on our contract with JSAT, which contributed to our revenue upside in the quarter.

Overall, we're seeing very strong demand signals for satellite services, driven by the current geopolitical landscape and the desire for sovereign access to space. We're therefore aggressively pursuing strategic opportunities, and I'm pleased to report that our pipeline is maturing very well.

Turning now to the exceptional execution by our Space Systems teams. Just 2 weeks ago, we were very excited to have 2 of our high-resolution Pelican satellites launched into orbit. We have successfully contacted these satellites and they're now undergoing commissioning. More broadly, we're extremely pleased with the progress of our Pelican program. The production line is now fully ramped, and we now have 4 Pelicans in orbit and multiple Pelican launches slated for the next year.

In August, we celebrated the 1-year anniversary of Tanager 1, our first hyperspectral satellite. To date, our partners at Carbon Mapper have leveraged Tanager's powerful data set to detect methane and CO2 plumes across 3,000 sources. We're incredibly excited about the future of this program and to see what our partners and customers achieve with this powerful data set. Overall then, we're incredibly pleased with the strong results we delivered in Q2.

The business is humming for both our data and solutions and our new satellite services offerings. We're capitalizing on the ongoing AI revolution, for which we're extremely well positioned, and we've made excellent progress in our profitability goals and on building a strong cash flow generating business for the long-term. I'd like to take a moment to commend our entire Planet team on a phenomenal quarter and thank them for their drive and dedication to delivering for our customers. It is your commitment and teamwork that makes this all possible.

With that, I'll turn it over to Ashley to discuss our financials. Over to you, Ash.

Thanks, Will. I'll start by echoing Will's remarks and saying that Q2 was another excellent quarter with strong execution by our teams around the globe. Revenue came in at $73.4 million, representing approximately 20% year-over-year growth. Strength was primarily driven by key wins with defense and intelligence customers, higher-than-expected usage by some of our government accounts and steady progress against our new JSAT contract. During the second quarter, revenue from the Defense and Intelligence sector grew approximately 41% year-over-year. The commercial sector grew approximately 6% year-on-year and civil government revenue was down approximately 4% year-on-year, impacted primarily by the end of our contract with Norway for their NICFI program.

We're pleased to see the strong uptake of our AI-enabled solutions in the government markets as well as the health of our customer relationships in the agricultural and energy sectors.

Switching to our regional revenue breakdown. For the second quarter, revenue grew more than 50% year-over-year in Asia Pacific, more than 30% in EMEA while North America revenue was roughly flat year-on-year and Latin American revenue was down slightly. The strength in Asia Pacific and EMEA was driven by multiple customers in the defense and intelligence sector, while North America reflects the quarter-to-quarter variability and timing of pilot contracts with the U.S. government. As of the end of Q2, our end-of-period customer count was 908 customers, lower on a sequential basis, reflecting our direct sales team's intentional shift to focus on larger customer opportunities and leveraging our self-serve platform to provide access to our data for other customers.

As a reminder, Planet Insight Platform customers are not included in our end-of-period customer count. We continue to see strong revenue growth and thus a solid increase in average revenue per customer as a positive indicator that our sales team's focus on landing and expanding high-value accounts is yielding results. As we shift to some of our ACV metrics, I want to remind you that the JSAT multiyear satellite services contract is not included in our ACV metrics, although it is included in our RPOs and backlog, which we'll discuss in a moment. Recurring ACV was 98% of our end-of-period ACV book of business, reflecting our continued focus on selling subscription data contracts and solutions as opposed to onetime professional or engineering services. Over 85% of our end-of-period ACV book of business consists of annual or multiyear contracts. Net dollar retention rate at the end of Q2 was 107% and net dollar retention rate with win backs was 108%.

Turning to gross margin. Non-GAAP gross margin for the second quarter was 61% compared to 58% in the second quarter of fiscal year '25, demonstrating improvement year-over-year. This result is better than expected, primarily driven by the revenue outperformance in the quarter, in particular from our usage-based data subscription customers, which results in very high-margin revenue upside. Adjusted EBITDA profit was $6.4 million for Q2, better than expected, primarily driven by revenue outperformance in the quarter and disciplined OpEx spend. This marks our third sequential quarter of adjusted EBITDA profitability. Capital expenditures in Q2, which include our capitalized software development were approximately $21.5 million. This was towards the upper end of our guidance range, driven largely by the catch-up spending from Q1 that we discussed on our last earnings call, including for launch payments and procurements for our Pelican and Tanager satellites. As a reminder, we're currently in a growth CapEx investment cycle as we build out our next-generation fleets to capture the market opportunity in front of us.

Turning to the balance sheet. We ended the quarter with approximately $271.5 million of cash, cash equivalents and short-term investments, an increase of approximately $45 million sequentially. This marks our second sequential quarter of increasing our cash position. During the first half of the year, we generated approximately $85.1 million in net cash from operating activities and $54.3 million in free cash flow. Our focus remains on managing the business to enable sustainable cash flow generation through efficient growth across our data solutions and satellite services revenue streams.

At the end of Q2, our remaining performance obligations or RPOs were approximately $690 million, up approximately 516% year-over-year, of which approximately 32% applied to the next 12 months and 57% to the next 24 months. We estimate our backlog, which includes contracts with a termination for convenience clause, which is common in our U.S. federal contracts and occasionally found in other customer contracts to be approximately $736 million, up approximately 245% year-over-year. Approximately 35% of our backlog applies to the next 12 months and 59% to the next 2 years. We believe this backlog provides us with good visibility to sustain our revenue growth rate heading into fiscal 2027.

Now let me turn to our guidance for the third quarter and full year for fiscal 2026. In Q3, we're expecting revenue to be between $71 million and $74 million. As in previous quarters, when we've seen elevated usage patterns, our guidance assumes that we will see those customers return back to historical levels to manage consumption within their annual budgets. We expect non-GAAP gross margin for the quarter to be between 55% and 57%. Our adjusted EBITDA range for the third quarter is expected to be between minus $4 million to breakeven, reflective of the variability of our expenses quarter-to-quarter and our tight focus on cost controls and efficiencies even as we invest in strategic growth initiatives.

We are planning for capital expenditures of approximately $18 million to $24 million in Q3. For the full fiscal year 2026, we now expect revenue to be between $281 million and $289 million. This increase in range for our outlook reflects our strong performance in Q2 and the improved visibility for the back half of the year even as we continue to monitor the evolving landscape of U.S. government budgets. We expect non-GAAP gross margin for fiscal 2026 to be between 55% to 57%, unchanged from the guidance provided on our prior call. We expect our adjusted EBITDA loss for fiscal 2026 to be in a range from minus $7 million to breakeven again, reflecting the investments we're making in downstream solutions and our Space Systems capabilities. We are planning for capital expenditures of approximately $65 million to $75 million for the year, reflecting increased investments we're making in our Pelican, Tanager and SuperDove fleets to put us in a strong position to meet the accelerating market demand.

As Will referenced earlier, we also expect to be free cash flow positive on an annual basis this year over a year earlier than the target we previously shared. It's worth also taking a moment to highlight that Q2 represented our first rolling 12 months of free cash flow profitability, something our team should be very proud of given the work they all contributed to get us to this milestone.

Before we turn to Q&A, I'd like to let everyone know that we're hosting an Investor Day on Thursday, October 16, 2025, both in New York City and virtually. Please visit our Investor Relations website to learn more. We intend to cover our growth outlook, market opportunity and much more at the event. We hope you're able to join us.

Operator, that concludes our comments, and we can now take questions.

[Operator Instructions] And your first question comes from the line of Colin Canfield with Cantor Fitzgerald.

Maybe just starting out on growth dynamics. If you can kind of talk us through how much of Germany and JSAT is within the backlog that's posted today and how to think about kind of the growth mechanics within the DoD. So just kind of looking at like the contract award around naval maritime domain awareness and maybe pointing to kind of trends you see where Planet Labs can deal directly more with combat and command controls.

Maybe I can start with the latter point. I just actually came back from D.C. and leaders there on some of this -- we have a very strong partnership there and the government gains huge value and that expansion particularly leans into our maritime domain awareness and PlanetScope solutions, and that gives you a hint to the answer to your question, which is they're leaning more into this broad area of monitoring capabilities, whether that's our GMS solution or MDA solution. And you saw the wins, obviously, with the U.S. Navy earlier and our work with the Defense Innovation unit. So overall, we see them leaning into that.

In terms of the amount of those contracts included in backlog, the full amount would be in those numbers and obviously recognized over multiple years.

Got it. And then as we think about kind of not to preview Investor Day targets a little bit, but like multiyear free cash flow dynamics, if you can kind of give us a high level kind of concept of the working capital schedule related to those awards as well as the other international awards that I think we talked about last call around sizing the pipe as being similarly sized, maybe a little bit smaller than Germany and JSAT.

So kind of contemplating the working capital payments from those 2 customers as well as the other international opportunities? Is there a right way to think about kind of the conceptual free cash flow ladder from here given those working capital benefits?

Yes. Without getting too specifics, I'd say, generally speaking, what we see from the satellite services contracts is that they are positive for us from a working capital perspective and enables us to build out the fleet without needing to fund those build-outs from our balance sheet. The specifics will obviously vary quarter-to-quarter with a decent amount weighted in the early years of the contract and then later milestones as the contract progresses to more of the managed services component.

Your next question comes from the line of Trevor Walsh with JMP Securities.

Can you guys hear me okay?

Yes.

Terrific. Maybe just a quick one for you, Will. And you've talked about this in different ways before, but could you maybe just give an update on the pipeline of the services type of contracts? And really, I'm trying to kind of understand where are you ring-fenced or guardrailed, if at all, around those? Is it just the ability to get Pelicans out the door to service those contracts? Is it more just finding the right customers that want to kind of do it at a scale that kind of makes it economically viable for you guys?

Just maybe just walk through how you're thinking about not just the size of the pipeline, but what you can actually execute there, if that makes sense.

Yes. Look, I mean, we're just seeing a lot of strong demand there. I said last time, we're working with a number of strategic partners that we've often worked with for many years before. The deal in collaboration with Germany into that bucket as well. We've been working with them for many years. We have a trusted relationship. There are a lot of more opportunities we're going after, and it's across the world as well as the global demand. So we're feeling very good and we're leaning into that. I mentioned in my prepared remarks that, that pipeline is maturing very well. So we're very pleased with that second deal being done in satellite services later this year. And I just want to touch on how synergistic that is with the core business as well because these things enable us to build more satellites but then have more capacity and more revisit rates for the whole rest of our customer base. And so it really is a win-win for the prime customer ourselves and the rest of our customer base.

Great. Awesome. I appreciate the color. And maybe one quick follow-up for you, Ashley. Just with the good outperformance on gross margins. And I know you talked through kind of some of the elements there that helped to contribute to that. But how should we just think about that kind of heading into, obviously, not so much even the balance of the year, but just heading into next fiscal around, is that still going to have some variability around that gross margin number just based on kind of what you're doing with JSAT and others? Or can we kind of expect that now kind of hitting that plus 60% watermark to hold in the next, call it, year, 1.5 years?

Yes. I'd call out on Q2, as I said, that upside in gross margin was really driven by strong usage dynamics. And we see upside in the data subscription revenue, obviously, that's very high-margin business and drops to the bottom line. As we look forward on gross margin, as you called out, just the mix of revenue will cause margin to be different. Obviously, we feel very good about the ability to expand gross profit and continue to drive overall profitability on the business. But the margin number will likely vary as we see -- as we progress into the build phase of some of these satellite services contracts, which are lower margin than the earlier years and obviously Scan to be higher margin in the years to come.

And if I can just go back and add one other thing on satellite services, just to sort of -- I think we're competitively very well positioned to win this market because of our ability, our full stack integration ability to build satellites quickly. And just to give you a tiny sense of that, the partnership we did in collaboration with Germany, we already launched one satellite for them.

This was already in the planning, but the fact that we were able to get their own eyes that fast within a couple of months is unprecedented and no one else can do that. And so it really puts us in a strong position.

Your next question comes from the line of Mike Latimore from Northland.

All right. Yes. Great. Congrats on the strong results here. I guess, with regard to the usage levels, can you comment a little bit more on that? What do you see is driving that? Are any of your customers sort of, I don't know, discussing early renewals and maybe expansions early or anything like that? Or are they paying over? Just a little more color on the usage dynamic. And is it continuing so far in the third quarter to be strong?

Yes. Thanks for the question, Mike. Generally speaking, when we see an uptick in usage like that, just to be safe given the dynamics around government budgets, we don't assume that, that will continue into subsequent quarters, but instead look at historical pacing and try to adjust accordingly so that our overall assumption would be they stay within their annual budgets. But we have seen some dynamics where our customers have sought early renewals.

So there is always the potential that we could see that usage continue. But again, a lot of it depends on what their availability is to doing an early renewal, getting early access to budget, budget dollars, et cetera. So like I said in the prepared remarks, to be safe, we look at historical patterns and assume that in our guidance going forward.

Makes sense. And then on the EOCL deal, it sounds like you've expanded your opportunity there. Is there a new time frame for the renewal beyond October?

No. I mean, but we continue to be very proud of what we're doing there and seeing that expansion come in that one is leaning into our area analytics, like I said before. And so -- and we provide great value. And as I said, I just came from D.C. have meeting a bunch of the leaders there. And this administration is leaning more into commercial solutions and services overall. So we think that Planet is well positioned for that. And so yes, we'll obviously update you more on the EOCL as we know.

Your next question comes from the line of Ryan Koontz from Needham.

Great. On your satellite services deal, maybe just stepping back a bit, can you reflect on what percentage or maybe kind of range of those satellite capacities you have kind of nailed up with these deals for Japan and Germany?

What do you mean what percentage? Do you mean...

I mean these dedicated satellites you're building for them, what percentage of these satellite capacities included in your contracts. Is it 100% capacity?

Yes. Well, we mentioned when we did the deal with Japan that, that was a tiny fraction of our capacity because the majority of our capacity in the rest of world capacity is still continuing to provide to our other customers. So it really is a win-win in that capacity in the area, in that case, mainly around the Asia region and the rest of the world, we get start that is the significant majority. The new partnership in collaboration with Germany start to focus more in the Europe theater, so to speak.

And that, I'll just point out, again, it's slightly different from the Japan deal in that we're not -- we are leveraging existing build plans for Pelicans for that rather than new ones. And so -- it has a slightly different structure financially. But that, again, is a small fraction of the overall capacity because it's primarily just in the European context.

Yes. Great. And then on Maritime Domain Awareness, any updates there on your kind of solutions approach? It sounds like a really hot area. What type of partners you're working with? I know you've talked a lot about SynMax in the past. Any updates on your Maritime Domain Awareness solutions from a product perspective?

Yes. No, we're very pleased with the progress there. I mean you saw our expansion with the U.S. Navy. That was a marquee one. And we have mentioned previously that, that was sole sourced because they recognize also that no one else could provide that scan and they're looking across a large area of the South China Sea for indications of ships doing illegal things. And that just simply no one else has that scan of that large area. And so they sold source it to us.

And then we've seen it enter into a number of our other partnerships, including one with NATO and others. So we're very excited by the Maritime Domain Awareness. It is our most mature AI-enabled solution, and we have a strong pipeline of others that we're going after. It is also a part of our deal with collaboration with Germany that was in addition to the satellite services component of that is an 8-figure annual contract for data and solutions as well as part of that deal.

And that includes Maritime Domain Awareness as one of those solutions. So really, this gets our ability to scan large areas and look for unknown -- unknowns rather than just the known knowns that the intelligence community is really focused on to start with. It's getting their holy grail in a way. And is uniquely positioned because of our daily scan to do that.

[Operator Instructions] Your next question comes from the line of Daniel Hibshman, with Craig Hallum.

This is Daniel Hibshman on for Jeff Van Rhee. And well, Ashley, congrats on another really great quarter. I just wanted to start in on maybe if we could double-click on commercial, really strong quarter there, the 16% sequential growth. And I think the first year-over-year growth for commercial in about 2 years. So a really great quarter for that line and a little bit of an inflection for it back to growth.

Maybe we could just -- you said about energy and agriculture driving some strength there, but maybe if you could expand a little bit on what's happening and what you see kind of going forward for that business?

Yes. Energy and agriculture, but also insurance. I mentioned the Swiss Re partnership, which where a particular example that really created high ROI. I think overall, you're right that we're starting to see that turnaround. Remember, when we're building these solutions for D&I, they are often translatable to other areas. We were just talking about Maritime Domain Awareness, think about how that could be useful for the maritime sector, right, not just for navies and coast guards. And our ag solutions for civil government are also relevant for the commercial sector.

So we have, I think, tremendous value. One of the amazing things again about our daily scan is that rather than just tasking system is that it opens up these markets, right? That's -- we have that differentiation compared with the rest of the earth observation players that we can serve agriculture insurance, disaster response, so on because they need large area coverage to do that.

So I expect that to be driven even more as AI enables solutions in these areas because the traditional challenge has been extracting out the actual insights from our imagery and AI is making that easier and easier. So we're starting with our focus on solutions on defense and intelligence. But I believe there will be translations into the commercial sector, and we're beginning to see that.

Your next question comes from the line of Gregory Pendy from Clear Street.

Just was wondering, can you probably provide us a possible update on where the anthropic relationship is and how that's been developing and what we can possibly expect through the course of the year?

Yes. I mean, firstly, I'm really bullish on AI in general and incredibly important tool for data scan, speed time to value, expanding usability, scaling up capabilities. What we're doing with Anthropic, in particular, is helping to fine-tune the model on our data. Those models are pretty good out of the box. If you show them satellite imagery, these new multimodal visual language models are really good at describing the image, being able to do basic analysis on those images.

And that's without fine-tuning. Those models haven't seen much satellite data. So our thinking together as a collaboration is that if we expose it to far more satellite imagery, it will be much more accurate and scalable at that capability too. Remember our partnership with Anthropic is not the only one. We're also doing -- have a partnership with Google on a similar sort of collaboration. And then with NVIDIA on the chips that including the Jetson Orin platforms that we launched on both of the Pelicans that we just launched 2 weeks ago.

So both AI upstairs and AI downstairs, we're focused on. And it's just -- it really is -- we're in a unique position, and it's a very, very exciting time. I go as far as to say that really Planet is the only space company that's truly central to AI with space and AI company. So I think this is a fascinating time, and we're excited about those collaborations that we're doing with other companies and our own internal work.

Your next question comes from the line of Caleb Henry with Quilty Space.

Two questions. First was just about the Tanager fleet. I was wondering if there's kind of any more planning around how to monetize that going forward? And if you have any more visibility into what that might look like as a future constellation?

Yes, absolutely. So firstly, again, we're proud of our 1-year anniversary milestone and that important methane detection work that we do in collaboration with Carbon Mapper detecting our 3,000 sources of emissions. It's been fantastic to see the results of that in. We have 2 solid revenue opportunities already for that. One is with Carbon Mapper itself and the other is California as we've announced earlier this year.

And we think California is a powerful proof point of how other government, state and local can leverage this technology to monitor emissions and get ahead of those sort of climate goals that they have. We believe there's a strong commercial and defense intelligence application of this that we're only just beginning on to provide those data. And so it's early days still on that. It's a relatively new market, but we are very pleased with the performance of that instrument.

Okay. And then my other question is just about backlog. Forgive me if I missed the answer to this one already, but it's grown really fast. I was wondering if you could share anything about the kind of average length of how revenues are distributed from that backlog if that's more front-loaded or linear over the next couple of years?

Yes, we're happy to talk more about backlog right now, going up 245% year-over-year. We feel very good about that. Ashley, do you have anything to share on the...

Yes. In the prepared remarks as well as in our 10-Q, you can see the breakdown and what percentage is expected to be recognized over 12 months versus the next 24 months. But generally speaking, the large contracts that we've announced this year, both with our partner in Japan as well as in collaboration with Germany were big drivers of that backlog increase.

In addition, we announced in July as well as additional contracts on the call today that are 7-figure and higher contracts for some of the solutions that we are bringing to market. And it's the combination of those factors that's really driving backlog increase. Obviously, the larger satellite services contracts are recognized over multiple years. And so we do call out what percentage is in 12 to 24 months. And solutions contracts when we talk about 7 and 8 figures, we're typically referring to the ACV metrics.

Thank you. That's all the time we have for questions today. I will now turn the call back to Will Marshall, CEO and Co-Founder, for closing remarks.

Thanks, everyone, for joining. Look, overall, I would say our business is humming, and I feel very proud of the work of our teams to get us there, both on the core business is humming. You saw those deals with NATO and INDOPACOM. The constellation of satellite services business is humming with our second deal. And as a result, our financials are humming, the cash and backlog in particular, I'm proud of. And this all gives us confidence about solid growth acceleration locked in for FY '27. So we're feeling very good. Thanks for paying attention, and we're really proud of the work of the team to get us there.

And this concludes today's call. Thank you for attending. You may now disconnect.