Folks, good morning. Am I coming through all right? Okay. Hello. We're so glad you could join us. Welcome to Planet 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 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 in 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. Morning, everyone. How's everyone doing? Good. Well, really welcome to Planet 2025 Investor Day. Thanks to all for coming. Thanks especially to you guys for coming in person. Thanks also to the New York Stock Exchange for hosting us today. It was a delight. 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 yeah, in all seriousness, thanks for joining us today, and thanks for joining in online for those online.
Planet's a fast-moving business, and so there's a lot changing, and there's a lot changing in the world as well, so there's a lot to discuss today, and so let's dive in. I'd like to 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 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-over-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 changing 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 only 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 landmass 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 we'll talk about that intersection, but basically, it's helping us to unlock the value of data for our customers.
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. Let me dig back into the history of Planet and start with a big-picture perspective. 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. 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.
This is the 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 it financially at a glance, right? So we've truly built a unique vertically integrated company that combines the most advanced 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, and it's 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 eight years, and this has resulted in an 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 this is a large addressable market across three major areas: defense and intelligence, civil government, and commercial. The market size is huge. The World Economic Forum estimated that the Earth observation sector entirety will enable over $700 billion of economic value by 2030. And 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, you know, 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 that 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 a unique data set, serving a massive market with a great business, with significant traction and fast growth, and a financially profitable position, a 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 eight-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 not least, last week, we announced Owl, our next-generation monitoring mission, which is upgrading to be faster and sharper, moving to one-meter daily scan. Very exciting system, and Robbie will provide a bit more details on that in his section. And that builds on a generally exciting and landmark year of acceleration for Planet.
And here's 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 INDOPACOM, the U.S. Navy. All of those are AI-enabled solution wins that are really large. And then we have added, have got to add a bit to this for the new NGA award. And then on the satellite services side, we did our two big partnerships, the $230 million partnership with JSAT, our colleagues in Japan, and our 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 timeline. So it took us seven years to build up towards completing our Mission 1 of daily imaging of the Earth.
There were lots of components to this, putting up a large fleet of satellites into orbit, building and automating a mission control, building ground stations around the world, and so on and so forth. And then it took us another seven years to get us where we are today, with this 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.
Let's not forget, we've been working closely with customers for years now to tailor all of this 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. Let's take a quick look under the hood. This is the satellite fleet that is powering our business today. You can see in the middle a 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 at three- to five-meter resolution. On the right, you can see our Tanager mission, our hyperspectral satellite. Robbie will detail a little bit more about that shortly.
On the left, you can see our high-resolution tasking system, the SkySat, and that's been upgraded with a Pelican, as you guys know. We've launched four of those so far, and we've got two more, along with 36 more SuperDoves on the launch pad in Vandenberg Space Force Base right this second, awaiting launch. Then, of course, we're very excited to have added Owl, which is the follow-on to the SuperDove fleet. This mission is an upgrade. It'll be smarter, faster, and sharper, as I have already mentioned. That's our fleet. This, once again, is how it works. I always like to play this because I think it's useful for those new to just understand how it works. Again, these Dove satellites are in a polar orbit. Each one takes a strip of images as it goes over the Earth's landmass.
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 sq km of land, coastlines, and open water every day. The Earth's landmass is 150 million sq km. That is orders of magnitude more than our nearest competitor. I'm not exaggerating. And it's vastly greater coverage. This vastly greater coverage unlocks the value proposition that opens up our markets in agriculture, which is a third of the area of 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 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, we call our satellite system our first moat, and this software stack is our second moat. It builds up an 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 the answers to their questions, and it flows deep into their workflows. And here you can see our three 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 was 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 the 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 science 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 agriculture 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.
For example, Maritime Domain Awareness is focused today on defense and intelligence, but also could have great benefit for commercial maritime shipping or civil agencies like Coast Guards looking for illegal fishing and things like this. We haven't deployed into those areas yet, but they could and are easily extensible into those areas. There's simply no better example of how all of this comes together than the work that we have done in Ukraine. 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. Bringing it to a close in my penultimate slide here, at Planet we say we have two A-plus-plus 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 the 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 the eight 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. I'm just going to give you a teaser here. You can't give 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 this presentation, it should be that Planet is sitting at the intersection of both the space revolution and the 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 are merging and melding. So to recap overall, we have two key business areas: selling data and AI-enabled solutions, selling our satellite services. Both are humming, and they're synergistic. Then the changing 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 Planet's story. So Planet is the only company that images the planet daily. And we've been doing this now for eight 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.
Having designed, built, and launched over 650 satellites, our constellations don't just live in investor decks. They are a reality. 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. Eighteen months ago, we restructured our go-to-market operations around three 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 three 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 AI 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 tip and cue 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 roadmap. 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 customer's operations. So today, as Will mentioned, we have three AI-enabled solutions that use Planet data to uniquely cover areas such as Maritime Domain Awareness, Global Monitoring, and Area Monitoring. And these solutions have three things in common. Firstly, they require that broad area coverage at 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 offerings. 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%-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 sq km of ocean imagery every day, and we're expanding this capability. Our MDA solution provides excellent insights to governments and to agencies. As Will mentioned previously, a competitor provided the U.S. Navy with tasked images over open water, delivering perhaps hundreds of thousands of sq km per year. Planet now delivers over 13.5 million sq km 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 a 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. 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 scene 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 are seeing such strong demand for our data and our analytic 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, as 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, classifying 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 two months, which tracked Russian vessels transporting cargo from North Korea. No ships had 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 one or more of these three 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 feeds for wide area ship detection. And both these feeds can be ingested either into in-house custom 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 PlanetScope to expand our coverage and reduce latency, and with Pelican, rapid high-resolution data, and in the future, AI. So you have 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.
To do that, you need eyes. Global Monitoring leverages Planet's unique data archive and a 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. Let's take a closer look at the Global Monitoring solution. 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 the 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 aware of activities happening 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 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 and warning that our customers are looking for. And we do this through our global near-daily imagery, looking back through at least four 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 and 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 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 and 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 is we deliver 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 a 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 tasking 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, bases, 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 daily 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 our final solution that we'll 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.
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 E.U. Common Agricultural Policy is perhaps the most comprehensive and ambitious of all these efforts. With EUR 50-60 billion per year, it is one of the largest line items for spend for the bloc. Planet is already working with payment agencies across Europe, including the Netherlands, Slovenia, Germany, and the U.K. 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 agriculture, 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 and 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 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, but 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 three ways, so we have the Planet Insights Platform.
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 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 anyone at Planet. Now, as Will mentioned, 2025 has been a landmark year for Planet with major contract wins globally across Europe, the 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 insure 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.
Now, 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. And 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 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 the 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 dedicated alliance, 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've 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. 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. 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 a customer evolves from buying data to AI solutions and then adds dedicated capacity from our satellite services. 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 10:00 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.
When the day that lies ahead of me seemed impossible to face, when someone else instead of me always seems to know the way, then I look at you, and the world all right with me. Just one look at you, and I know it's gonna be a lovely day.
When the day that lies ahead of me seemed impossible to face, and when someone else instead of me always seems to know the way, then I look at you, and the world all right with me. Just one look at you, and I know it's gonna be a lovely day. Oh, I bet you think you're John Wayne, showing up and shooting down everybody. You're classic in the wrong way, and we all know the end of the story because everyone knows someone who killed the buzz every time they open up their mouth. Yeah, everyone knows someone who knows someone who seems too cooler than everybody else, and I think that we've seen enough, seen enough to know that you ain't never gonna come down, so why don't you get it up, get it up and ride straight out of this town?
You ain't your house, you ain't your house. I bet you think you're first place. Yeah, someone should give you a ribbon and put you in the hall of fame for all the games that you think that you're winning. Because everyone knows someone who killed the buzz every time they open up their mouth. Yeah, everyone knows someone who knows someone who seems too cooler than everybody else. And I think that we've seen enough, seen enough to know that you ain't never gonna come down. So why don't you get it up, get it up and ride straight out of this town? You ain't your house, you ain't your house. Darling, you take the high roads and I'll take the high road. If you're too good for us, you'll be better riding solo.
Yeah, I think that we've seen enough, seen enough to know that you ain't never gonna come down. So why don't you get it up, get it up and ride straight out of this town? You ain't your house, you ain't your house. You ain't never gonna come down. You ain't never gonna come down. Do you remember when it was high? September, love was changing our minds. Tonight, while I'm chasing the clouds away, I'm on the ringing in the key that our souls are singing as we dance in the night. Remember all the songs for the night away? Oh, something in the rhythm of the party. Dancing in the rhythm of the party. Never le t the time be dead.
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.
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 was also the Chairman and Co-Founder of the Analytical Center Dream Hub. But he was 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 of 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, a peace settlement, and cemented him as one of Ukraine's top lawyers. And he received the nickname Peacemaker, an apt title for the, of course, conversation we have today.
On a personal note, I've known Oleksii for four 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's playing. And I'm immensely proud of the work that we've been doing for him and his country for over three and a half 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. A nd now we had sent Oleksii a few questions, said, "Who would be prepared to answer this?" and he said, "Well, I'll prepare a little opening remark," so, Oleksii, would you like to go ahead and again, welcome to the stage and do you 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 it the tools that ensure security and how the nature of war has changed.
Wars today are fought not only on the land, in the air, or 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 Ukrainian 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 officially according to the law: we had 261,000 servicemen in the Armed Forces of Ukraine. Today, we have more than one million only in the Armed Forces, plus Border Guards, National Police, National Guards, etc.
It means that a lot of civilians come to be soldiers. And it means that they became the game changer in the 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 startup can change the course of a battle, because normally the generals in all armies of the world, they're trying to prepare for the future wars, sorry, 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 meaning of military intelligence at this moment, at this period of time, because today 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 West, 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 both by Western military satellites and by numerous commercial Earth observation companies. Even without our own military satellite constellation, Ukraine rapidly integrated commercial space infrastructure: Starlink 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 combined this intelligence with modern 155-millimeter artillery of NATO standard and HIMARS and other types of MLRS systems using precision GMLRS rockets with a range up to 90 km, Ukraine achieved a decisive fire advantage in the second half of 2022. This enabled precise long-range strikes that complicated Russia's logistics and operations, and in this new environment, data and intelligence became as critical as weapons, and concrete 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 assets. 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-on-Don, 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 Russian territory, plus unfriendly territory of Belarus, their 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 once scaled to global markets. You will have a system combat 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 civilian needs, data infrastructures, 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 you know, in this fireside chat, which almost feels like I'd say this is a private conversation, after all, I'm 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 six. In Ukraine, things are simpler. We just call it MI, military intelligence, and your 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 learn 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 System was particularly differentiated and how it helped Ukraine with our broad-scale scan and tasking system? You were talking about the 50,000 tasks. Can you talk a little bit about what Planet 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 Labs comes in time. According to your service in 2022, we used your service plus NATO weaponry on the ground, and it became a game changer.
According to the operations using your imagery, it was liberated Kherson district, I mean, right bank of the Dnipro River, and a lot of other successful operations on the battlefield. Plus, we are getting from your side 24 hours, seven days per week, the full information from the Russian territory battlefield line plus unfriendly territory of the allies. As I heard from the team, which provided the cooperation with you, they are really satisfied and absolutely happy. Today, at morning in Kyiv, it was night in your location, I met Commander General Budanov. He's the head of this military intelligence in Ukraine. He asked me to say hi to you, to your audience.
And I told him, "Well, your guy from your side yesterday, information about the dedicated satellite." And he asked me to say that he really believed in Planet Labs in former 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 peace 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 no any doubts that your service would be very, very efficient and needed to provide security, operational awareness for Europe at minimum if we are talking about Russia. But globally, if we are talking about the allies like Iran, China, North Korea, and other countries of the allies. Because the last meeting in Russia in Valdai, when their leader, President Putin, tried to explain to his audience that President Trump called Russia during his speech in the U.N. General Assembly that Russia is a paper tiger, the response of Putin was, "We are not paper tigers because we are fighting with the NATO countries." He didn't mention Ukraine. Russia is 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 dream to restore the Berlin Wall again, and you see the threats in the Suwalki corridor near the Lithuania in direction to the Kaliningrad. We see the threats in Narva. It's a Russian-speaking territory of Estonia because after the joining when Sweden and Finland became full-fledged members of the NATO allies, Russia got the more unfriendly borders, thousand kilometers, and I'm calling that Baltic Sea became an internal NATO lake, and Russia doesn'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.
A nd that's the point I was trying to get at. You said maybe this sort of service can help de-escalate 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 to de-escalate. Can you say a little bit more about that? How might we use these sort of capabilities as a deterrent to stop conflicts from occurring in the first place?
I would think that, first of all, you can see what is going on on the ground, online, using your capabilities. And this is not the interception of the radio communications. This is not the intelligence special operations forces which are crawling in the forest. You can see it from the sky and in the moment inform leaderships of all countries or command posts of all countries.
And if you will see the movement of their troops, they will see that they try to accumulate something else on a concrete place or location. If you will inform the civilized world or Western world, they will react. And maybe they will stay and stop. This is one of the points of how to deter them. Second, after the Second World War, Germany as a country became a pacifist country according to the last verdict of the International Tribunal, which is called the Nuremberg Process. And I'm absolutely sure as a lawyer that if you want to have a pacifist Russia on the globe, we need to provide the International Tribunal with a verdict against the war criminals from the Kremlin.
For that reason, we need a lot of evidence about the mass graves, about massive massacres which were done by the army of orcs, of looters, rapists, and looters and murders. 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 Russian territory, I hope.
Absolutely. And that's part of our mission with Planet. Why we care about security as well is that 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? Do you have any advice for what can we do more to support Ukraine?
My understanding is that we are living in one house or in one building. If you're talking about the security in the West, in Europe, first of all, in the West, not only in Europe, we need to invest in security. The best idea to invest, first of all, in the Eastern Wall. Ukraine is in the Eastern Wall of Europe. Because we are staying between the orcs country and the West. 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. We will have a very serious product. I would like to remind you, friends, the very, very, very, very old story, Bible story. David, a small, young guy, deterred and defeated the monster Goliath. He was brave. He was creative. He used technology. Sling was technology in that period of time.
So we have to be David, and we will win this war for 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 conflicts. So thank you so much for joining us today.
Thank you, Will, that you invited me. And we'll be online. We'll be on time.
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.
Thank you, Will. 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 when we put 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, 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 two new contracts with existing customers for our satellite services. These are long-term contracts, and they deepen the relationship with our customer, and they're 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 toward 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 there are 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 quite some time. And Planet is uniquely equipped to provide.
As Charlie mentioned in his section, entering into the satellite services market represents a significant increase to Planet's TAM. I think he mentioned $139 billion for satellite manufacturing. It deepens our long-term operational engagements with our most important customers. We are meeting our customers where they are. 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 five years to build. They would be operational for more than a decade. 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. In the 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 the second thing that happened last decade that changed the economics of 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 network in space.
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. That's really empowered by our daily scan. Let's take a look at how our constellations in space work today. Will talked about this in the morning. He showed the video of the SuperDove satellite. That's a monitoring mission. It just looks down, takes a picture, and indiscriminately captures four million pictures of the planet. There is another way of operating spacecraft, and that's with the tasking missions. SkySat and Pelican and Tanager are the three satellites that are tasking missions.
And the tasking mission is important because you have to actually just look either left or right rather than straight down. So the SkySats are 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 four launches every year, we continuously upgrade capabilities on orbit, resulting in more, better, and faster data. Our in-house design of satellites is designed for manufacturability. We have a steady, high-rate manufacturing capability, which allows for unit costs 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 one 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 requires 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 increase 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's satellites into our automated multi-mission operations. And when we develop a breakthrough in one 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 lifecycle. 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, 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 five months, something that would normally take five 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 five years, we have continued to innovate with our agile space missions. In 2020, during the height of COVID, we actually had five different launch campaigns, including two 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 four bands to eight bands with backward compatibility for the archive, giving our customers more and higher quality data.
On this slide, you'll actually see Carbon Mapper twice. In 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. This is now being realized with a 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. 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 three Tanager satellites that will be launched over the next couple of years. With the work with Carbon Mapper became the genesis of our satellite services offering.
Finally, we signed another funded research and development contract in 2022 with NASA. NASA is the end user. What they wanted to do was to leverage the investment that is happening in satellite communications. NASA, like ourselves and our customers, they want satellite-to-satellite connectivity. We are demonstrating real-time connectivity for both Ka-band as well as optical inter-satellite links. 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. This meets our customers where they are. It's 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 two satellite services deals for Pelican, one for JSAT to support Germany and one for Japan and one 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 of the common bus, enabling cost efficiency and scale.
What you see here on the left is our version one modular architecture. 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. NASA JPL builds the world's most sophisticated instruments for hyperspectral data for both science missions and national security missions. We learned how to build this instrument from them, pulled it into our agile space mission stack, and successfully launched and calibrated Tanager- 1. This is a science-grade mission at approximately 50x the cost reduction in manufacturing production compared to NASA's estimated cost. This is fully built by the Planet team and delivers high-quality, science-grade hyperspectral data. 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 what something looks like, while a spectrum helps you understand what it is. A photograph is about observation, where 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 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.
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. 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. In this slide, I'm going to build it out and explain to you what our new constellation services offerings are. 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.
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 a cost-effective and 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 in orbit.
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. Our new satellite services offerings range from dedicated capacity all the way to constellation ownership. Let me explain where our existing satellite services contracts fit into this spectrum. Carbon Mapper represents dedicated capacity for California with Tanager. Our JSAT contract is a customer-owned fleet, far right. It's constellation ownership, but we operate it for JSAT. 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. 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 mission's flywheel. So with satellite services leveraging our rapid 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 buildout 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 four 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 phase them from dedicated capacity all the way to satellite ownership. Our scaled Agile Aerospace missions also enable continuous upgradeability 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 I think 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 three-meter class imagery to one-meter class. This one-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 40-50 Owl satellites that will be launched over the following several years. And this will deliver a daily global scan at one-meter resolution. So combining this with our tasking missions will 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 it for 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 three 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 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 two 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 launch five new Pelican satellites a year. With a lifetime of five 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 rapid and responsive manufacturing capability, we can offer premium services to governments that have urgent need to task satellites and/or rapidly build and deploy spacecraft to support co-production 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 in space is largely underway. Massive reinvestment by governments and new entrants are moving new digital services into orbit.
These actors need it fast, securely, and future-forward. We meet this need by demonstrating that we're a proven, scaled space partner. 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. Right now, we do have a video from our long-term partner at JSAT. JSAT, for those that aren't aware of them, they are a geostationary telecommunications company. They've been around for about 40 years. They operate the world's largest telecommunications satellite in geostationary orbit over Asia. 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.
[Foreign language] 私、坂川ジェイサットなんですけれども、もともと通信と放送の事業を生業にしてきましたが、今、非常にリモートセンシングのエリアについて力を入れておりまして、宇宙のアセットを使ってお客様により良いものを届けるというところに力を入れておるところでございます。その一つの取り組みがPlanetさんとの協業でございまして、今、私たちも非常に成長領域として期待しておる分野でございます。今年の初めには、我々が所有する衛星を調達するという非常に大きな契約を結ばさせていただいてまして、今後さらに関係性を深めていきたいなと思っております。Planetのデータやソリューションの利用の仕方ですけれども、そうですね、主に2つのタイプがあるかなと思ってまして、1つはPlanetさんからいただいたデータをそのままお客様に提供するケースもございます。それとですね、あとはソリューションをつけて提供するケースもございます。Planetさんを我々の衛星調達のパートナーとして選んだ理由ですけれども、Planetさんとは10年以上のお付き合いがありましたし、それを通して非常に技術的にも会社としても信頼のおけるパートナーさんだなというのがありまして、Planetさんを私たちの初めてのトライとなる衛星調達のプロジェクトのパートナーに選んだことは自然な選択だったのかなとも思っております。もともと坂川ジェイサットは我々でJEO静止衛星を持っておりまして、それを使った通信と放送のサービスを主な生業としてきました。昨今、Planetさんとも一緒に開拓してきました日本のリモートセンシングのマーケットの盛り上がりを非常に感じておりまして、もともと私たちはPlanetさんからデータを調達してご提供してたんですけれども、自分たちで衛星を持つことによってよりフレキシブルにお客様にサービスを提供できるのではないか、我々の事業がさらに拡張できるのではないかなと思っております。今後、Planetさんが提供いただけるデータの質というのはどんどん上がっていくと思っております。ですので、これまで見えてこなかったマーケットも見えてくるんじゃないのかなと思ってるところもあります。例えばですけれども、今、既に利用させていただいてる画像のデータから解像度がどんどん上がってきますし、そうしますと新しくご提供できるソリューションサービスというのも多種多様になってくるんじゃないのかなと思っております。ですので、これまでご利用いただいていたお客様に関してはさらに付加が上がるような付加価値が上がるようなサービスをご提供するとともに、新しいマーケットも新しいデータプロダクトの提供ができることによってさらに拡張できるんじゃないかなと思っております。Planetさんと一緒にどうやってお客様にサービスをさせていただくかなんですけれども、今、Planetさん、データの提供、もちろんデータの質もすごく上がっております。ですけども、ソリューションのサービスのほうにも非常に力を入れていただいてると聞いてますので、お客様が生のデータをそのまま利用することにハードルを感じてるお客様もいらっしゃるんですけども、ソリューションサービスを一緒にご提供することで非常に使いやすい形、お客様が利用しやすい、便利な形でサービスをご提供できるとさらにマーケットも広がってくるんじゃないかなと思っております。1つ、OwlっていうPlanetさんの新しいプロダクトがあるんですけれども、それは全球を非常にいい解像度で満遍なく取れるというサービスで、そちらのサービスも非常に期待しております。Owlの有用性についてなんですけれども、まず全球を満遍なく取るプロダクトっていうのが非常にユニークなものだと思っております。そういったデータを提供できる会社さんっていうのはいないですし、Owlになりますとさらに解像度が上がってくると聞いておりまして、非常に期待しておるところです。全球を満遍なく取るというのは、なんて言うんですかね、スクリーニングという言い方をするとよろしいのかもしれませんけれども、何かあったときの兆候を察知するために非常に有用なものだと思っております。ナショナルセキュリティ系、ガバメント系、さらにはコマーシャルのユーザー様にも非常に有用なプロダクトだと思っておりまして、そのOwlも使ってさらにマーケットを一緒に開拓したいなと思っております。
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's the AI slides? I have to do the clicker. All right, so the AI stuff. 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 and 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. 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 into 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 one, we've been strapping space to Moore's Law, putting the latest sensors and chips and processors in space, and now we're doing that with AI in that we are leveraging, just like we were leveraging the better chips into our satellites as they got better and better, our satellites got better and better. We're leveraging better 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. Because we're vertically integrated between everything from building the satellites all the way up to these AI answers, we know what, 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 firstly, let's touch on the space renaissance. Robbie talked a little bit about this, but just put it in perspective.
A lot of people know about the first trend in space, which is rockets coming down four-fold 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 have increased in cost performance about 1,000x. What that means is we've taken school-sized 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 applied 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 so stuffing more capability in every kilogram in the rocket is a big deal.
1,000x is, of course, a huge change to this industry. But the upshot of all of this is nothing to do 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 is 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 it didn't all happen overnight. It took years of advancements in AI to arrive at the moment we're here today.
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. Starting on the left, we have our imagery, the raw imagery, the pixels. We have simple derived indices like we call pixel mass, like NDVI for agriculture. We deploy those at scale. We have analytics that pulls those together to regions. We spend a lot of time on convolutional neural networks. Those are the systems for doing object detections in imagery. They take a lot of training. 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. 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 CNNs. But now we're in this new era of large language models. You've obviously all 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. First example of that for us was these balloons. And 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 had flown across the United States and all the way back to its launch site in China, but all of this is now building towards something even greater, I believe. Something more like planetary intelligence or Earth intelligence with profound implications for the Earth economy, and it's Planet's data. No one else, no one else in the Earth Observation business or any other player in the space business writ 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 this 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 into where 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 are using it for marketing. But there's really three 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 onto the Owl spacecraft as well.
And this means that we can both capture an image and then automatically extract insights that are useful for the customers. 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 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 workhorse of our daily scan. And we're doing that 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 zero to an answer, even if it's rough, getting from zero 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 user base, so you don't need teams of people with PhDs in satellite imagery processing in order to get answers out of that 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 the guiding light for Planet for many years. But 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 their 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 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, 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.
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. 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. Planet is the foundational data set to do that vision. That is the only one. 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 2026 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 2026 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 to the next 12 months' revenue, based on guidance and consensus estimates, has stepped up considerably in the last two quarters as this backlog has grown.
So just to take a minute, because it's not a 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 in 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's 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 and 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 for 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 and 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 one or two-year commitments.
So our traditional data and AI solutions contracts are typically one to two years in length, which is why you see the step down, FY26 to FY27 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 constellation 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.
That's not illustrated on the slide, but it's important to understand how this is evolving. You can see this illustrative model envisions trending towards approximately two-thirds of our revenue coming from data and solutions over time. As we have increased capacity and capabilities, it 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. In short, we forward fund the constellation build. More satellites equates to more data. More data leads to even greater insights and capabilities. 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. As we continue to execute the 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 three quarters and for the trailing 12-month period. In addition, we've generated very strong positive cash flow in the first half of fiscal 2026 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 the 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. 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 2027 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 2028, exceed a Rule of 40 of 40 by fiscal year 2028, and we're defining Rule of 40 here as revenue growth plus Adjusted EBITDA margin.
Based on the midpoints of our most recent guidance, we expect to achieve a Rule of 40 in fiscal 2026 of approximately 15%, which is a significant improvement over prior years. With our current backlog, we have a strong line of sight to continued revenue growth acceleration, which allows us to target a Rule of 40 of at least 30% in fiscal 2027, 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 ensures strategic and disciplined focus on execution and market capture. 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 and 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 focuses on the largest opportunities while we leverage our platform for long-tail ecosystem 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 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%-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 industries, 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, oops, 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.
How sweet it is to be loved by you. Whoa, yeah. You were better to me than I was to myself. For me there's you, and there ain't nobody else. I want to stop and thank you, baby. I just want to stop and thank you, baby.
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. We'll now take your questions. Before we start, we will bring a microphone to you, so please wait for that. Before asking your question, please say your full name and institution. Thanks so much.
So can we get them? Oh, there they are. The mics go. Great. Edison.
Edison, you from Deutsche . So I wanted to ask about AI first. I think the vision makes total sense. You can democratize it. You can open up to a big user base that isn't super expert, 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?
Yeah, it's a good question. So yeah, 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 four million per day, so we have a lot.
But in terms of the multimodality, 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 collects between our SkySat and our SuperDove fleet, and there were over 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 used 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 I think models will take that into account more and more with time. But just one more thing, so 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, what's the normal number of ships in that port? What's the normal number of planes in that airstrip? 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 data is the most valuable, but if you like, the signal in the whole archive is needed to know what that means. Does that answer your question?
And the computing?
And what about the computer part?
Do you need someone to provide or we go out and procure? Did you require a lot of it to get the training?
We have a lot of compute. I mean, 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 processing as well. Yeah, 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 to key in, I mean, yeah, 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, yeah, do you want to speak?
Yeah, I was going to say the same thing. It's not restricted to one region, actually. We're seeing demand across all of the areas of the world. So I think there's good opportunities here in Europe and in Asia as well.
Thank you.
No worries. Yeah. Who's next? There's one over here. Oh, you've got the mic. Yeah.
Colin Canfield, Cantor Fitzgerald. If we can go back to the slide with the visual stack of the new and basically the AI and hardware models, and just compare that. Oh, yeah. Yeah, super helpful.
Yeah, I got it.
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 have behind you looks like revenues perhaps doubling or tripling over a three to five-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 revenue growth targets in particular, and you look at this chart, there are 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 is 20% plus.
Got it. And then just in terms of the gross margin target, harkening back to 2021 Investor Day, 70%-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 standalone 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 timeline of realizing those TCV? And essentially, as we think of the tranches like South Korea, Australia, Poland, the feedback we got from the army shows that they were kind of looking at Germany as the demonstrator, but that once Germany was up and running, you would see the follow-on contracts from the other kind of F-35 friends and family. Is that a fair way to characterize the timeline of that, or does the risk environment suggest 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 of urgency, that may not be exactly the timeline we expect on all of these things, but that level of urgency is great. And this was a comment on the gross margins 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 Planet is really great.
Firstly, when we put those margins out, of course, in 2021, we didn't have the satellite services piece. But we also think the 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 there's huge margin growth potential. Not only are there 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 and gross margins to go up. But there's things changing quite fast, so we wanted to be conservative and thoughtful there. So that's why we reset it a little bit, but we still believe in the long-term margin potential here.
Thank you for the thought.
Hi, Chris Quilty. 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?
Yes. Okay. And it's backwards compatible, a bit like SuperDoves were from Doves.
Right. Got it. And it looks like you're adding propulsion onto these, which is different, as well as the optical crosslink. And that's an interplane or intraplane or?
Well, we said we'd have backhaul. It doesn't necessarily have to mean optical backhaul because it can be RF, but yes, satellite-to-satellite communications as well.
Gotcha. And that's just one optical crosslink per satell ite?
We haven't specified that. Actually, yeah. So we haven't gotten into that sort of level of detail, but yes, they do have satellite-to-satellite communications.
Gotcha. And actually, it looks like the long-term forecast is still 5%-8% of CapEx, but these look like about 100- kg satellites, so I'm guessing more of a $5 million-$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 a combination of all the above?
A smaller fleet, bigger numerator.
Gotcha.
Robbie actually mentioned 40-50 satellites to get to the Daily Scan.
Gotcha. And I think you mentioned it's multispectral plus six other bands.
Yeah. I mean, again, it's backwards compatible with the eight bands that we have on the SuperDove.
Gotcha. And how do you think about in terms of the resolution? I mean, obviously, going from three meters to one meter is not three times better.
Three times better.
Yeah. What sort of applications do you open that you can't access today?
Well, I think there's huge applications of this. A lot of people are like, "Oh my God, that daily scan is amazing. If it was even higher resolution, that would be better," and of course, the temporal resolution. Let me 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 three-meter data, yes, the building's being 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, more detail, so that's a case, and so there's $hundreds of billions of dollars market opening up because of the extreme resolution and the speed going from hours to minutes on top of that. Charlie, anything to add? I mean, from your perspective?
Well, yeah, 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 our capability.
Gotcha. And final question. I mean, obviously, AI and optical crosslinks give you reduced latency, but also getting it down to the ground is traditionally a big problem. Are you still sticking with this sort of X-band downlink, or do you need, I mean, more capacity, or does AI resolve?
So 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 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.
But Chris, 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.
A nd some people need it faster, other people need it slower, so you can dynamically move that.
Exactly.
Got it. Thank you.
No worries. Yeah. I'm just the final add-on now. We are producing 10 times more data with this system, so it's incredible. We are also getting it down roughly 10 times faster, right? So it is a really marked improvement on both of those fronts, which are both important for our customers. Yep. Next question. There was one. Yeah.
Hi. 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. 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 higher resolution and lower latency. To such a degree, we think that opens up new markets. But it is also disruptive to the whole 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. It opens up markets, and it will 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 one meter. And by the end of this decade, that will just be the common operating picture that everybody gets.
And then just 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. It was with a pilot with NATO SME. We feel confident in that. We are still developing these 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 more into sustained product capabilities for ongoing monitoring of large areas for new threats. Charlie?
I might just add that 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 makes sure that it does align to get that product-market fit so that we can build that back, and obviously, we can scale that to other customers as 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.
No worries. Yeah, the back.
Mike Derchin , the oldest living space analyst and major investor, long-term investor.
So your subscription model and the new NVIDIA chips and the Owl make this a much more capital-like business than when I first invested a few years ago. I was wondering if you could talk about that in light of your forecasts seeming to be quite conservative, quite from my perspective.
Well, let me just kick off by saying, I mean, we did say that our projections on CapEx is still maintaining that long-term target of 5%-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 for still less cost than the incumbent to this area launched one single satellite, all of them combined. So 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. But anything to add to that? Actually, Ashley as well. Anyone want to add anything to that?
This is about rapid manufacturing, right? Being able to leverage the investment in one subsystem all the way across the fleet gives us economies of scale for when we are building satellites for ourselves as well. 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 will 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. 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 downside 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 in how we do things agile, scalable, and now capital efficiently.
Sam Brandeis, Wedbush. The slide where you're talking about Rule of 40, you project that for FY28. For FY27, 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?
More than ever. All right, Ashley? Let's go.
Yes. As I mentioned, we're right now very actively in FY27 planning. There's a lot of excitement for the market opportunity in front of us. We've obviously got 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, 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 two or three more before we're going to break for lunch. Yeah. 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?
Yeah, 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 team's 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 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. Yeah.
Mariana Pérez Mora. There. Mariana Pérez 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 out there today so they can actually benefit from all these years of data that you have to better upgrade solutions on that? And also, you accelerate the solution because you don't have to put those solutions up there, and you meet the customer where they are. Are there conversations there? Where are the conversations?
We're already working with other satellite providers in a number of ways, like AIS data combined with our data for Maritime Domain Awareness solutions. Some of that data comes from space. We've worked with SAR companies on maritime solutions as well, where SAR is complementary.
Even in agriculture, people have used SAR in our Earth imaging. But yeah, so we're always 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 yeah, Charlie, go ahead.
Yeah. 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, how do we build a more integrated system that solves the problem, and that will drive growth in the ecosystem, not just for Planet?
Thank you.
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 in space, but the time to commission and then collect enough data for it to be relevant over time?
It's a great question. Yeah. I mean, we learned a lot from every upgrade, and we've upgraded our satellites a lot more times than that, but then that 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 were lots of other improvements, but to 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 their algorithms still work using that upgraded 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 yeah, it'll take a few years. 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, Robbie and him?
I mean, yeah, that's it on the technology side, but I think the main thing is to do it with our customers is to really make sure that they have early access to the data and that 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 a switch. This is something that we actually do with our customers.
And we designed the requirements, I must say. 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 two things. So that's where we went to task on improving.
So I think we're going to cut it off there. Great.
Close this out?
Yeah. Well, thanks, everyone, again, for joining us today. I hope this has been helpful and educational. Yeah, maybe just a couple of closing remarks only to say that, again, we're excited about scaling the company here across those two business vectors 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.