Planet Exceeds Business Targets, Advancing Through 2020 with Momentum

Like all of us, Planet has experienced significant change in 2020. We’re working from home, we’re schooling our children, business travel has stopped, health and safety is a top concern, and we’re facing the most severe recession in 100 years. We’ve made changes to our business, but remain focused on our mission to get data into the hands of our customers to use space to help life on Earth.

In March, as we shifted operations and people to home offices and the economy seized up, we didn’t know what to expect in the second quarter of 2020 (Q2). For these reasons, we’re incredibly proud to share that Q2 was one of our best quarters ever, and we beat our targets. We doubled the amount of new business booked in the quarter compared to the same period a year ago. We’re seeing an increase of inbound interest and our results indicate that remote sensing data is critically important to numerous industries when in-person travel is limited and personnel health and safety is a top priority.

In the first half of 2020, Planet increased first-time customers by 21 percent, compared to the same period in 2019. We saw over 100 percent year-over-year growth across all of our product lines, with SkySat tasking achieving more than a 200 percent increase. We’re experiencing huge demand for our data by users in civil government, forestry, the U.S. federal government, academia and international government. These customers are using Planet’s data to remotely and safely monitor infrastructure, enforce code and permitting regulations and track assets. We also expanded our partnership with Esri, enabling users of the market-leading GIS platform–especially in state and local government–to purchase and access Planet’s data directly.

We’re happy our business is proving resilient in this challenging environment, and the good news continues with regard to our people. Our teams in Berlin and Europe have grown to support increased demand and we’ve welcomed talented new leaders to the company, including Ashley Johnson as our CFO, Rosanne Saccone as our CMO, and Wendy Tan White to our Board of Directors. Recognizing our role in helping to stop social injustice, we’re doubling down on our efforts to make Planet a diverse and inclusive environment. And on the space and product side, we’ve launched three more SkySats and released a suite of new capabilities to our market-leading high-resolution product line, among other product updates.

Planet is focused on finishing 2020 strong, making this our best year yet. We’ll be hosting our second annual user conference, Planet Explore, in October, continuing our work with journalists, researchers and academia, and launching more high and medium resolution satellites on multiple rockets. You can expect to see more product enhancements from us that help users capitalize on our capabilities and data now. We’ve learned from COVID-19 and these tumultuous times that solutions are needed daily, weekly and monthly, and a promise for next year doesn’t help you today.

This year will be hard for all, but we hope that by supporting each other and continuing to deliver for our users, we might be a bright spot in a bleak landscape, and play some small part in bringing about a better future. Ad astra.