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27th Annual Needham Growth Conference

Jan 14, 2025

Ryan Koontz
Managing Director and Senior Analyst, Needham & Company

Great. Well, welcome, everyone, to the 27th Annual Needham & Company Growth Conference. I'm Ryan Koontz. I cover the communications and space sectors here at Needham & Company. Thanks for joining. I'm really happy to be joined by Planet today. We have CFO Ashley Johnson. Welcome.

Ashley Johnson
CFO, Planet

Hey, nice to be here.

Ryan Koontz
Managing Director and Senior Analyst, Needham & Company

Great. Ashley, you know, let's start with some of the exciting things that are going on in 2024 for Planet. You've had your plans around the new Pelican constellation, as well as Tanager. Maybe you can walk us through some updates there from your new satellite plans?

Ashley Johnson
CFO, Planet

Yep. Well, it's exciting for us because we're still in last year. Our fiscal year ends January 31st, and so technically, we're still in our fiscal 2025 and very excited to announce that we have, so far, another successful launch today. We sent up 36 additional SuperDoves on Transporter 12 with SpaceX that launched out of Vandenberg not that long ago, like literally within the hour, and we also have Pelican 2 on that launch, which is the next tech demo, which could potentially be an operational satellite for us, which also includes the NVIDIA chip, Jetson chip, that will allow us to demonstrate being able to do compute at the edge and truly at the edge of the Earth's atmosphere or beyond, and so it's really exciting. Today's a really exciting day.

We'll be a little bit distracted with Cleo monitoring how the separation of our satellites from the rocket is going in real time. This is the second launch that we've had this year. In August, we launched again with SpaceX another 36 SuperDoves, which included tech demos. We're always thinking about what's going to come next for our monitoring fleet, as well as an additional satellite, same bus as the one that went up today, the Pelican bus, but it was our Tanager satellite. It included a hyperspectral satellite that was developed by NASA JPL. The IP was transferred to us in partnership with a third party called Carbon Mapper. The hyperspectral sensor seems to be the most sensitive of its kind, scientifically graded.

A lot of the work that we've been doing since commissioning the satellite is really demonstrating that the data that we can capture from space with that sensor can be validated with data that we've captured with that sensor with airplane flyovers previously and do global monitoring of methane and CO2 emissions.

Ryan Koontz
Managing Director and Senior Analyst, Needham & Company

Incredible.

Ashley Johnson
CFO, Planet

In fact, we had a really exciting, scary moment in the fall when they detected a leak of methane that was in the tons of methane emissions near a residential area in an area of Texas. We notified the authorities as well as the, with this sensor, we can do a point source detection, so we were able to contact the emitter and then demonstrate that, in fact, it had been shut off.

Ryan Koontz
Managing Director and Senior Analyst, Needham & Company

Wow.

Ashley Johnson
CFO, Planet

The rough equivalent is tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of cars being taken off the freeway with that one.

Ryan Koontz
Managing Director and Senior Analyst, Needham & Company

Equivalent.

Ashley Johnson
CFO, Planet

Yeah, equivalent with that one adjustment to methane emissions.

Ryan Koontz
Managing Director and Senior Analyst, Needham & Company

Did you get a thank you note?

Ashley Johnson
CFO, Planet

Yeah, from the Planet.

Ryan Koontz
Managing Director and Senior Analyst, Needham & Company

Yeah, from the emitter.

Ashley Johnson
CFO, Planet

You know, the interesting thing is what the energy market is seeing, and they're really changing the way we're thinking about the potential revenue streams from this fleet. We had thought of this as a tasking satellite because it is one of those satellites that you task over a specific area. But because of this partnership with Carbon Mapper, after 30 days, if they detect methane in those images, that becomes a digital public good.

Ryan Koontz
Managing Director and Senior Analyst, Needham & Company

Oh, wow.

Ashley Johnson
CFO, Planet

For research and enforcement use, but not for commercial use. And so if you want access to that before it becomes publicly available, and you potentially will be publicly shamed, if not worse, for having had this at your site, you want that data earlier. And so what we're getting is energy companies saying, well, I don't necessarily want to task over my operations, but I want to know if they have been tasked, and is that a subscription service that you've offered?

Ryan Koontz
Managing Director and Senior Analyst, Needham & Company

Oh, wow.

Ashley Johnson
CFO, Planet

Obviously, the answer is yes. Of course, we thought of that, so yeah, it's exciting for the planet. It's exciting for us, and it's an incredible demonstration of the capabilities of our space systems teams because taking a bus that we had built for one purpose and designed for one purpose and being able to adjust it to embed a different sensor, doing that with third parties as part of this research initiative and then demonstrating commercial value from it, just in the time frame that we're talking about here is like two to three years, not a decade. It's just really changing the game in space R&D and space operations, and it's a true testament to the foundations of Planet.

Ryan Koontz
Managing Director and Senior Analyst, Needham & Company

Absolutely. And back to Pelican 2, can you kind of walk us through some of the advances that are coming with the new Pelican constellation relative to your existing?

Ashley Johnson
CFO, Planet

SkySat.

Ryan Koontz
Managing Director and Senior Analyst, Needham & Company

SkySat?

Ashley Johnson
CFO, Planet

Yes.

Ryan Koontz
Managing Director and Senior Analyst, Needham & Company

That came over from Google?

Ashley Johnson
CFO, Planet

Pelican is designed to have much greater capacity than our SkySat fleet, to be higher resolution and much faster, so much lower latency. And then obviously, if we demonstrate the power of being able to do the compute at the edge, that could just take latency to a whole new level in terms of being able to communicate that data back down to Earth in near real time. So a lot of capabilities. We've talked about the fact that the next Pelican should have 40-centimeter resolution.

Ryan Koontz
Managing Director and Senior Analyst, Needham & Company

Yep.

Ashley Johnson
CFO, Planet

We continue to build towards getting to that 30-centimeter resolution. This is something that's very unique to Planet and that we will launch a satellite before it's all the way to the capabilities that we aspire to have so that we can continue to improve and introduce new capabilities as we go. We will learn from this satellite. As I said, we hope that it will produce commercial imagery. But regardless, we will learn from this launch what can go into the next and the next. Pelican 3, 4, and 5, we'll learn from what we learn from Pelican 2.

Ryan Koontz
Managing Director and Senior Analyst, Needham & Company

Wow.

Ashley Johnson
CFO, Planet

It's a lot, and we're very excited.

Ryan Koontz
Managing Director and Senior Analyst, Needham & Company

Super exciting. Let's talk about the model, the operating model a little bit, and what you guys have been able to do in terms of approaching that EBITDA break-even. You've had a long-term target to hit. So can you walk us through some of your accomplishments there?

Ashley Johnson
CFO, Planet

Yeah. I'm really proud of what the team has accomplished this year. And I think we've done it in a way that will make the business stronger from the changes that we've made. So we obviously did a reduction in force in the middle of the year, and with that, really changed our operating model to center our operations all the way through the company around the end customer.

These aren't separate P&Ls or we don't have GMs, but we've built this business group operating model that basically takes sales teams and product teams and marketing teams and even customer success teams specific to the various business sectors that we're in, so defense and intelligence, civil government, and commercial, so that we can, one, be more efficient and really understand what it takes to acquire those customers, what our cost of acquisition is, what our retention rates look like, and what's really driving them, and feed that loop back into our product roadmaps and product development in a much more customer-centric way. Even though we're leveraging the same satellite infrastructure, satellite data, and to a large extent the same software infrastructure, how we ultimately deliver that to the end customer is very different based on what the needs of that market are.

I think that change has, one, enabled us to operate better and really be more responsive to our customers and to really understand where we had inefficiencies and where we had conflicting inputs that can cause a business to be less efficient. If you're getting different signals from different markets as to what's important, it's hard to translate that into, okay, what do we do first?

Ryan Koontz
Managing Director and Senior Analyst, Needham & Company

Right.

Ashley Johnson
CFO, Planet

But in creating this separation, you can do prioritization in a much more effective way. And we're seeing that just overall in the operations of the company, as well as in obviously reducing the cost to serve, reducing the cost to acquire, and reducing the overall cost of our R&D structure. And all of that was a rallying cry internally where we just said, EBITDA profitability is the first step towards what true independence feels like. True independence is when we are generating enough cash flow that we are funding all of our CapEx. We can think about what new things that we want to invest in, and we're not having to also take into account what interest rates are or what our stock price is, what the market sentiment is, but rather we are generating that to be self-sufficient. And that was a rallying cry for the employee base.

This is step one. We still have a ways to go to get to that cash flow break-even and ultimately cash flow generative, but helping them understand what it takes to make progress against that journey and then making it, we're all working together to make this happen, as opposed to it feeling like it was just something that happened to them. The reduction in force was just something that happened to them. So it's been very empowering, and it's fun to hear employees continue to ask questions about what the key financial levers are in the business. So taking a bunch of people who'd much rather be thinking about space or saving the planet, but also teaching them to think about financial metrics.

Ryan Koontz
Managing Director and Senior Analyst, Needham & Company

Yeah. So OpEx efficiencies, you've seen some gross margin improvements too, I think some pretty meaningful ones. Can you walk us through that?

Ashley Johnson
CFO, Planet

Yeah, that's been also a cross-functional effort, so I will point out that part of that gross margin improvement is because of the reduction in depreciation and amortization, and I think it's always important to call that out because as we launch more Pelicans, there will be counterbalancing forces there that should drive revenue uplift, but that will also increase depreciation as we get new birds up, but a big part of that gross margin improvement was changes in the way we're using our cloud infrastructure and really intentional operational efficiencies, and I will say the team is very good at sandbagging. They told me it would be a quarter of investment at least, and then it would be two to three quarters before we'd see the payback, and lo and behold, Q2 and Q3 drove upside, so they're very good at what they do.

Ryan Koontz
Managing Director and Senior Analyst, Needham & Company

Yeah.

Ashley Johnson
CFO, Planet

Some of the changes that we also made in terms of how we're servicing our customers have made the cost to serve more efficient. So gross margin improvement off the board, that combined with our one-to-many business model means we're seeing a lot of operational leverage and want to see that continue. And was that the thumbs up? We've got separation. Yay.

Ryan Koontz
Managing Director and Senior Analyst, Needham & Company

Yay.

Ashley Johnson
CFO, Planet

The Pelican is officially launched. So yeah.

Ryan Koontz
Managing Director and Senior Analyst, Needham & Company

Very exciting. Let's talk about your cash balance and your use of cash and how you're trying to manage that relative to hitting your cash flow break-even. Can you walk us through your high-level view there?

Ashley Johnson
CFO, Planet

Yeah. And hopefully everybody has noticed that we've brought down cash burn. We're obviously in an investment cycle right now. We're launching these Pelicans. We're investing in the replenishment of the SkySat fleet.

Ryan Koontz
Managing Director and Senior Analyst, Needham & Company

Yep.

Ashley Johnson
CFO, Planet

And we've also had a lot of solar activity. And so we did two launches of our SuperDoves this year, whereas typically you'd only see one in a year.

Ryan Koontz
Managing Director and Senior Analyst, Needham & Company

I see.

Ashley Johnson
CFO, Planet

It's been a heavy investment cycle. We're counterbalancing that with being much more efficient. We've brought cash burn down. We've got over $240 million in the bank. We want to maintain a strong balance sheet. We have no debt. As we think about where we're making investments that will cause us to be cash flow negative, we're ensuring that that is paired with clear ROI. As I've said many times, we are living off the food that's in the pantry. We are looking for ways, like we did with the Tanager program, to do these investments in R&D that are paid for by third parties. We did the same thing in some of the comms infrastructure for the Pelican bus in partnership with NASA. It was a funded R&D program.

Those are very creative ways for us to get non-dilutive capital to continue to be very innovative, but in a responsible way with a strong balance sheet.

Ryan Koontz
Managing Director and Senior Analyst, Needham & Company

Yeah, outstanding. Let's talk about some of your segments here. Defense and Intel has been a real strong point. Can you kind of walk us through what the drivers are there, what kind of growth you've seen over the last year plus, what your general view of the market is, the opportunity?

Ashley Johnson
CFO, Planet

Yeah, so that's been a really interesting segment for two reasons. So one, you saw an acceleration in this market following the outbreak of kinetic wars in Europe and specifically in Ukraine. There was a changing dynamic where countries wanted to procure their own data. They don't just want to rely on what the U.S. Intelligence Department is telling them. They want to know for themselves. And so the prominence and prevalence of commercial data really came to bear in the outbreak of the war in Ukraine and has continued since then.

In fact, often when people first learn about Planet, they'll call me up and say, "God, I didn't realize how often your data is in the paper." You just don't notice the data from Planet Labs until you get that exposure to us, and then you realize how much we are present in anything of significance that's happening around the world. So that was an important moment in the D&I market, but I'd say that was still focused around high-resolution data by and large.

Ryan Koontz
Managing Director and Senior Analyst, Needham & Company

Okay.

Ashley Johnson
CFO, Planet

The way that I think we have really been at the forefront of shifting that market is saying satellite data is really, you really unlock the opportunity of it when you think of it as something not as a picture that you send to an analyst to look at, but a stream of data that you're feeding into a model to derive intelligence. And in a number of places around the world, we have been partnering with government customers to really show them how they can have much more understanding and situational awareness using that kind of data combined with ML models, AI models to do border monitoring or to understand the changes of patterns of life, of flows of traffic, of ships, and have the analyst not looking at an image to count the things, but to take that intelligence to derive what question to ask next.

Ryan Koontz
Managing Director and Senior Analyst, Needham & Company

Yeah. Is that from the Daily Scan?

Ashley Johnson
CFO, Planet

The Daily Scan really enables that because you don't have to know where you were looking.

Ryan Koontz
Managing Director and Senior Analyst, Needham & Company

Right.

Ashley Johnson
CFO, Planet

You think about the quadrants of high-resolution data is great for the known knowns. I know I want to monitor this nuclear testing site in Iran. And so I'm going to get a high-resolution, and they've got classified satellites that can image at much lower resolution or higher resolution than we can for the known knowns.

Ryan Koontz
Managing Director and Senior Analyst, Needham & Company

Right.

Ashley Johnson
CFO, Planet

But then there's activities that they know about, but they don't know that they know where they're all happening.

Ryan Koontz
Managing Director and Senior Analyst, Needham & Company

Yeah.

Ashley Johnson
CFO, Planet

That's where you can really train models to say, "Look for these kinds of things, but look for where else they might be." Then you have areas that are very broad that you know you need to be monitoring, but you don't know exactly what you're looking for. So you need that intelligent change detection, and you need the signals not to be overwhelming. So a great example is the work we do with the Brazilian government for monitoring the Amazon. We know that we need to see every time there are trees being felled and new roads being put in, but we don't want to look at all of them if we know that they were permitted. So get us the signal from that noise so that we can actually send the police out to deal with the actual problems to reduce illegal deforestation.

The magic quadrant, though, is the unknown unknowns.

Ryan Koontz
Managing Director and Senior Analyst, Needham & Company

Right.

Ashley Johnson
CFO, Planet

Where are the places that I don't know to be looking for the activities that I don't know to be looking for? And that's where the real excitement around AI exists because you can have the models just get smarter, keep adjusting the prompts to find the thing that you didn't know to be looking for. And we have demonstrated some of those things publicly, the pontoon bridge at the time of the outbreak of the Ukraine war, the spy balloon, Chinese spy balloon, right? So we have demonstrated the art of the possible. We've talked about some pilots that we're doing that's continuing to explore the art of the possible. And for us, that's really where we can have a real breakthrough moment as we demonstrate how you do that scale of analytics affordably with value at the other side that you couldn't otherwise achieve.

And nobody's got that Daily Scan or that historical archive to be able to validate those assumptions to continue to make the model smarter. So it's a real opportunity for us. We are continuing conversations with various players in the AI space to look at how we unlock that opportunity for us.

Ryan Koontz
Managing Director and Senior Analyst, Needham & Company

Is that consumption model, I'm sure, is very new?

Ashley Johnson
CFO, Planet

Very new.

Ryan Koontz
Managing Director and Senior Analyst, Needham & Company

To have access to that.

Ashley Johnson
CFO, Planet

Yes.

Ryan Koontz
Managing Director and Senior Analyst, Needham & Company

And how does that play into deals? You typically get a trial, you said, a proof of concept type of deal?

Ashley Johnson
CFO, Planet

We've been doing a lot of ways. So first of all, we've had to change the reputation of medium res data, right? Because if you're an analyst and you're used to looking at things, medium res data sucks. It's like, is that a missile or is that a smudge? Right? But again, it's not about what the human's looking at. It's what the analytics that get smarter and smarter can tell you. It's like, no, that's not a missile. That's a smudge. Or yeah, that is absolutely a missile. Right? So that's where you're shifting the paradigm away from what you look at to the intelligence that you can compute. So that's one piece of this equation is just changing the paradigm, changing the reputation of this type of scanning data. Then it's about bringing the technologies to bear. And all of these technologies are new.

Some of them can be very expensive. The compute can end up being very expensive, and so doing discrete applications, discrete pilots to demonstrate what's possible starts to indicate what is the value of what we are uncovering here, and so as one of our engineers said, data that's unique is not necessarily data that's valuable, but what you want to prove is that you have data that is uniquely valuable, and this is what we are demoing on a regular basis and demonstrating with these pilots, and the results have been very promising.

You've had real success with the U.S. federal government for many, many years. Are you starting to replicate that into other international domains now?

Absolutely. We talked about last year, at least in two separate cases, eight-figure contracts with international governments, both of which expanded last year. So those are discrete examples of D&I customers internationally that are spending large sums of money. We also talked about NATO doing a contract with us. We were the first under the new APSS facility that they've put in place. So absolutely, we have a large presence internationally. We have a lot of engineers on the ground in Europe, big presence in Berlin, Slovenia, Netherlands. We've got teams on the ground in Latin America and APJ as well, which are also fast-growing markets for us.

Ryan Koontz
Managing Director and Senior Analyst, Needham & Company

Wow. And these pilots are with the DOD. You've been talking about more recently these pilot wins, these DOD wins?

Ashley Johnson
CFO, Planet

Yeah.

Ryan Koontz
Managing Director and Senior Analyst, Needham & Company

Great. Let's shift to civil. That's been another really bright spot for you guys. Last quarter, you had some government-wide licenses, I think. Can you kind of walk us through those opportunities? And it really seems like an untapped opportunity globally to work with these civil governments on, I assume, largely enforcement. Is that the main push?

Ashley Johnson
CFO, Planet

I talked about two different types of growth opportunities for us in the civil in that vein. One is there are many governments where we are working with departments of that government. While Cleo and I were off visiting investors in Europe, we dropped in on one customer. I think it was four different meetings because we met with the different divisions that are actually customers of ours in independent contracts. What we're working with is a centralized procurer that can turn that into what we would call a countrywide or flat-rate contract. Think of it similar to what we do with NASA. Many of you will have noticed we renewed a $20 million per year contract with NASA where we're providing data to all of the researchers in their community. That is a great opportunity for us.

It's a bit more of a kind of all-you-can-eat for research purposes for these government entities. So we can do a government-wide procurement. It's almost like an enterprise license agreement for government. And so pulling all those together and then working with them to drive further and further consumption, different use cases, different applications. And so we can go broad and then we can go deep with them to continue to expand, land and expand those contracts. And we've done that very successfully in a number of countries. And this is one of the selling motions that we have focused our civil government sales reps around. The other one, as you said, is for agriculture subsidy monitoring or permit monitoring. So in agriculture subsidy monitoring, for example, in Europe, they have the Common Agricultural Policy where they want to incentivize certain sustainable tilling practices.

They want to pay out these incentives to farmers that are complying. They need to monitor a whole country at a smallholder farmer level that requires our resolution of data and the ability to do it at a broad scale. We have a solution that we've worked with various partners to be able to deliver to them that's something that Sinergise, the company we acquired, had made some early forays into. That is an opportunity for us. We're seeing that even more generically. There's a specific program under CAP, but actually in other parts of the world as well, there are interests from governments in doing this.

So agriculture subsidy monitoring is an area of opportunity for us in kind of solution delivery to these end customers, as well as working with governments for natural resource monitoring, disaster planning and recovery, and built environment monitoring. So making sure that development is happening as and where it should be.

Ryan Koontz
Managing Director and Senior Analyst, Needham & Company

Wow. So defense and civil have been two real strong areas for you for the last several years. Commercial has been a little more challenging. Can you kind of walk us through some of the changes you're making to try to get that business back to your growth targets?

Ashley Johnson
CFO, Planet

Sure. So some of these are just dynamics of that market that we need to accept and adapt to. So for example, agriculture is going to be a cyclical market. We were working with agricultural customers in a number of ways, but one of them was as a provider of data into their digital applications. Some of them have just moved away from that altogether. They've spun off or shut down that part of their business, or they are trying to transition those to paid models from free models. And so that is an area where we had some longer-term contracts. They've come to an end. They've shifted and changed. We've also worked with some of those customers to transition into more operational contracts where I think there continues to be a lot of opportunities. As an example, an application of informed scouting.

If you've got a limited number of truck rolls and boots on the ground, you can do, but you need to monitor all of your crops. You want to know where you should be focusing those resources on doing the on-the-ground testing where you could have indications of pestilence or blight or other things that you really need to get in front of, as well as compliance monitoring. Am I sure that I've maintained the requisite distance from these other fields so that I'm not resulting in cross-fertilization of certain seed varietals or all kinds of, you can tell I walked the grounds with some of our customers to hear these exact use cases and how we're getting embedded into their operational flows? That's a real opportunity for us because the agricultural market is going to continue to be under duress.

The commodity price is down, the input price is up. It's just a tough market for them. But if we can be driving that value to reduce their operating costs and improve their yields, we will be with them even through harder economic times. So it's that shift in agriculture that we've been making with our customers and adjusting our contracts and even how we sell with them to be more durable regardless of where in the cycle that market is. So that's just a reality of that market. For the rest of the market, a lot of it is there's a lot of exploration going on.

Ryan Koontz
Managing Director and Senior Analyst, Needham & Company

Other verticals and applications.

Ashley Johnson
CFO, Planet

New verticals, new applications. We work with insurance providers. We work in the energy sector. We've had some interesting outreach from the financial services sector and construction management. And the thing is, some of these are proven and can be repeatable contracts that will endure, and some of them are going to be just experimentation. And we won't know that going in. So the easiest way that we make that an attractive cost of acquisition to us is making it easy for them to buy the data with no human in the loop. So how do we automate that sales process? How do we enable them to experiment with the data? Some of that is we've enabled some sample data sets through the site so that you can do some experimentation.

We're changing our pricing model so that it enables a purchase at a lower data license in the experimentation phase and a usage-based model. And then an uptick when you move into that real commercial phase, higher data license cost, again, with the usage on top. So looking at ways that we can lower our cost to acquire, lower our cost to serve, but still keep open the opportunity that we absolutely believe is there in the commercial sector. And I think AI will accelerate that because what AI is really starting to do is enable people who weren't Earth data engineers to know, what do I do to work with this data? How do I interface with Esri? How do I work with these other applications?

It can even walk you through how to work with Sentinel Hub, which is now our Planet Insights Platform, and work with that data. It's just broadening the user base for us. That leaves open the opportunity for markets that we haven't even thought of for how our data can drive value.

Ryan Koontz
Managing Director and Senior Analyst, Needham & Company

Through a lot of partners, I imagine.

Ashley Johnson
CFO, Planet

Yes.

Ryan Koontz
Managing Director and Senior Analyst, Needham & Company

That's great. So as you think about this next fiscal year in 2026, I'm sure you have a pretty good idea of where that's headed. What sort of wins have you accumulated over the last several quarters that are going to be kind of key contributors to growth in 2026 as you look forward? Can you highlight a couple of those?

Ashley Johnson
CFO, Planet

Yeah. I mean, one of the exciting areas for us on the defense and intelligence side are the wins that we've had in the maritime domain awareness space. That's really unique to Planet. So again, this is using an application to understand movements of ships where they're spoofing their AIS data to try to go undetected or to make it seem like they're somewhere that they're not, where they're doing ship-to-ship transports out in open waters. We can see all of this. We've worked with a third party that's built.

Ryan Koontz
Managing Director and Senior Analyst, Needham & Company

These are for the dark vessels.

Ashley Johnson
CFO, Planet

Dark vessels and illegal fishing and name your Maritime Domain Awareness application. But they've built this application on top of PlanetScope. PlanetScope really is the only provider of this kind of open water data. And there's a lot of opportunity for us to continue to expand with them, not only to new customers, but also bringing in additional data sources like SkySat, like our archive to understand in finer-grained detail when we've got a detection of something that's happening, what other information can we bring to bear. So that is certainly one example of the types of partnerships that are really fruitful where a partner has unlocked a lot of value from our data that otherwise we weren't focused on. And we can co-sell into end customers globally. So that is the type of partnership and opportunity we want to lean into and to develop more of those.

The other thing I'd be remiss if I didn't point to how much we are excited about what the advancements in AI and just the pace at which that's evolving could really impact our business.

Like I said, it can be anything from just assistance out in the field that are making it easier for our customers or our potential customers to code in geospatial data when they might otherwise not have been facile and it might not have been trained in it, all the way through to making these models smarter so that we can move into that unknown, unknown arena and really make a difference in detecting where the next outbreak of famine might be, detecting where there might be movements that indicate hostile activity, the things that are really starting to impact or that really influence the major events that are plaguing our planet right now, whether that's just stability of countries and movements of people to the geopolitics that are creating a lot of.

Ryan Koontz
Managing Director and Senior Analyst, Needham & Company

Friction. Yeah. I was going to mention that particular partner I got a chance to meet at your customer conference on the dark vessels. And it was spun out from a hedge fund, I believe.

Ashley Johnson
CFO, Planet

That's right.

Ryan Koontz
Managing Director and Senior Analyst, Needham & Company

One of all crazy things.

Ashley Johnson
CFO, Planet

Really smart group of people. The founder is a guy named Bill Perkins who was an energy trader. And so they've worked with us from everything from tracking well pads to the dark vessel movement of energy or of oil for energy trading. So just really smart, creative people that move fast and push us hard.

Ryan Koontz
Managing Director and Senior Analyst, Needham & Company

Yeah. How about from a competitive standpoint? I mean, how do you think about the competition? Obviously, there's no direct competition for the daily scan, but tasking, there's probably a pretty big market out there. How do you assess the overall landscape at this point?

Ashley Johnson
CFO, Planet

Yeah. I mean, one, it's always great when you see competition coming into a market because it validates that this is a big opportunity. I don't see anybody who has really embraced the paradigm shift that we talked about, of there's still a lot of presence in the tasking market and high resolution space and much less competitive capability in that concept of the daily scan.

Ryan Koontz
Managing Director and Senior Analyst, Needham & Company

So that's a huge differentiator.

Ashley Johnson
CFO, Planet

It's a huge differentiator.

Ryan Koontz
Managing Director and Senior Analyst, Needham & Company

Can you trigger a task from the scan, so to speak?

Ashley Johnson
CFO, Planet

There's no reason why you couldn't. So change detection, that automated connection typically has a human at our customer in the loop validating that, yes, this is a true signal that I want to get more signal around. But there's no reason why you couldn't do that. And the more we enable that real-time information, especially from the satellite through kind of this edge compute, the lower the cost is to asking those questions and triggering that kind of feedback loop. So yeah, I think the key is Planet is never sitting still. I think sometimes our employees wish maybe we'd sit a little more still, but we always have something new that could potentially just make Planet's good data that much more valuable or that could bring new capabilities in through the next satellite that we're launching.

And so for somebody to play catch-up to us, they've got to be running pretty fast.

Ryan Koontz
Managing Director and Senior Analyst, Needham & Company

Yeah. There's a lot of excitement too, just generally, I think, with the new administration coming in, a lot of excitement about space. Can you talk about your perspective on what you think the new administration and new policies are going to drive as far as space investment?

Ashley Johnson
CFO, Planet

I'll say as much as anyone can say about what's likely to happen under the new administration. Obviously, Space Force was started under the first Trump administration. It is a priority for him, and that's great for us. We're excited. We've done a lot of work with Space Force, and there's exciting opportunities for us there. Just on the efficiency front, the concept of why would you build when you can buy much more cost-effectively, faster, cheaper, et cetera. If there is a shift from a mentality of, no, we have to build our own to, no, there's perfectly viable commercial alternatives out there, I think that is a trend from which we would benefit.

Ryan Koontz
Managing Director and Senior Analyst, Needham & Company

It's been going for a while, I think, too, right?

Ashley Johnson
CFO, Planet

At least the statements have, yeah. Yeah. And so if you can speed the pace at which these new innovations get adopted by just having more technology presence in the government, that would be a net benefit for us as well. So we're looking optimistically at some of the potential changes that come out of the new administration.

Ryan Koontz
Managing Director and Senior Analyst, Needham & Company

Great, and in terms of sustainability, can you talk about some of your programs there and how you snap into some of these efforts that governments are looking at in terms of sustainability?

Ashley Johnson
CFO, Planet

Yeah. We had a lot of really exciting announcements last year. Obviously, Tanager has a lot of opportunity for us in terms of biodiversity tracking. We launched a program last year where we're tracking biodiversity metrics in partnership with nonprofit organizations or NGOs in key biodiversity hotspots around the planet. And this is one of those, I believe we're doing that in partnership with Bezos Earth Fund. I'm tracking to make sure I'm getting my partner right. We work with a number of different partners, but it's called Project Centinela. And again, it's about making this data available so that we can really make a difference by making this data available to the researchers who can extract the information that will drive policy changes and have real impact.

The net benefit to us, as well as all of these researchers are getting more and more trained and skilled around Planet-specific data. While that data is freely available in those specific designated spots, there's a selling opportunity for other spots. Obviously, as a PBC, we're obviously very excited when all of this research can lead to policy changes that are actually going to have impact on the things that are very precious and unfortunately dying quickly.

Ryan Koontz
Managing Director and Senior Analyst, Needham & Company

How about there's a forest initiative too, right, for Forest Carbon mapping?

Ashley Johnson
CFO, Planet

That's right. Thank you. Our Forest Carbon product that we launched at the end of last year for carbon monitoring. So again, that can feed into a number of different applications, both for governments that are tracking precious natural resources all the way through to carbon trading markets.

Ryan Koontz
Managing Director and Senior Analyst, Needham & Company

Yeah. Great. Any questions from the audience? We just have a couple of minutes here. Anyone want to lob any questions in? Yes, sir.

Could you comment on just how much of the government and civil contracting is under a cost-plus model versus a price-accounting model?

The question was, how much of the government business is cost-plus versus competitive price?

Ashley Johnson
CFO, Planet

Yeah. Very little of what we do is cost-plus model because we tend to be our primary product that we're selling is not the consulting services, it's the data sale. And so that's a subscription sale, very high margin. To the extent that we're selling services, it really depends on the RFI and the government specifics. But we tend to work with partners for those types of opportunities where you're going to be kind of leaving someone behind, if you will.

Ryan Koontz
Managing Director and Senior Analyst, Needham & Company

Any other questions from the audience? Well, great. Just in terms of wrapping up, anything you want to say in wrapping up, Ashley?

Ashley Johnson
CFO, Planet

No, it's an exciting day. Thanks for having us here.

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