Planet Labs To Acquire RapidEye

I’m excited to announce that Planet Labs has entered into a definitive agreement to purchase the BlackBridge geospatial companies, including the RapidEye suite of core offerings. This acquisition welcomes BlackBridge into the Planet family and is a strategic move by Planet to expand quickly into new segments and gain access to a robust imagery archive.

Planet and BlackBridge have great mission alignment and have complementary capabilities. With BlackBridge, we now have access to an extensive network of over 100 distribution channels and customers globally; and RapidEye’s comprehensive archive of six years of global imagery – 6 billion square kilometers at 5-meter resolution – allowing us to bring one of the largest commercial satellite imagery datasets to the web.

RapidEye’s six-year archive of imagery can be “stacked” to enable analytics and change detection algorithms, to provide insights about our changing planet.

Planet’s goal is to provide universal access to information about our changing planet through a platform that includes the daily imaging data from Planet’s fleet of satellites, along with data from various other sources. With the recent incorporation of Landsat 8 imagery into our dataset, and soon RapidEye, Planet is proud to continue progress toward these goals.

The BlackBridge team is impressive and established in the industry. I am personally excited to work with Ryan Johnson, BlackBridge CEO, who I look forward to welcoming onto the Planet executive team. As Ryan says: “The combination of BlackBridge’s downstream knowledge and global reach, with Planet Labs’ strategy for agile aerospace, will create a long-term competitive advantage for the combined company. The ability to lead the industry and adapt quickly to changing needs will be the key to continued success.”

The biggest beneficiaries of this acquisition are our customers – who will be able to receive more data and, with Planet’s automated platform, acquire it with unprecedented speed and ease. Under Planet, Blackbridge will continue to operate the RapidEye fleet of satellites. This gives users in agriculture, energy & infrastructure, consumer mapping, government, business intelligence, environmental & social impact the information they need to be successful.

“Planet Labs is leading the pack of private space companies by combining innovative data analysis and agile aerospace technologies. With today’s acquisition of BlackBridge, Planet Labs has brought this agility to their business and identified a strategic opportunity to advance the market of geospatial data on the web,” says Steve Jurvetson, Board Member of Planet Labs, Tesla, SpaceX and Partner at DFJ.

Together we are stronger. We will provide new and improved services to our customers, who will soon see the benefits of this new alliance.

We’re thrilled to welcome the BlackBridge team to the Planet family.

The transaction is subject to customary closing conditions and is expected to close during the third quarter of 2015.

Read an open letter from BlackBridge CEO, Ryan Johnson. Learn more about Planet Labs.