Hello and welcome. I'm Jarrett Banks, Editor-at-Large here at IPO Edge. We've got another exciting Fireside Chat for everyone today. Today we'll be talking with the Co-Founder and CEO of Planet Labs, which is merging with a SPAC called dMY Technology Group IV. That's NYSE DMYQ. Before we meet our esteemed guests, we'll just run through a little bit of housekeeping. One of the great things about this event is that viewers get to ask questions to our guests, and you can do that by submitting questions via the Zoom portal or emailing at editor@ipo-edge.com. A reminder that the replay will be available about an hour after we finish the event at ipo-edge.com. If you can't watch the whole thing or you want to watch it again, it will be up. Let's just watch a quick video to give us an overview about Planet.
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Okay, very cool. Let's bring on Co-Founder and CEO, Will Marshall. Will, welcome to the program.
Hey, thanks for having us, Jarrett and Alexandra.
Great. Now, Planet is a data subscription business delivering insights about daily change on Earth. I wonder if you could give us a very high-level overview of what exactly the company does.
Yeah, absolutely. Happy to do that. I'm looking forward to this being a very open Q&A-type session. Let me just tell some basics about the company just in a couple of slides that will help to give the very top-level perspective. I really want to keep most of this just Q&A. This slide I think helps give people a bit of sense of where we're at as a company today. We're simultaneously a space company, a software company, and a data company. We have satellite backend. We build data on top of that and software services that enable analytics of that data. This slide gives you a little bit about Planet at a glance. We're 200 satellites in orbit today. It is the largest Earth imaging fleet in human history. Those image about 300 million sq km of area per day.
That's about twice the Earth's land mass. We image some land areas multiple times, and most of it we just scan once per day. Just to give you a sense of scale, that's about 100x more imaging in area coverage per day than any other Earth imaging player. About 100x . All of that we process to be what we call machine learning ready, analytics ready. Harmonize the pixels so that the user on top of that, the client just gets to have a seamless interface to build their tools, their ML code, or other analytics software. On the business side, just over $100 million in revenue last year, with January fiscal year end, FY 2021 was last year. That's last year, looking in the rearview mirror, just over $110 million in revenue. Most of that, over 90%, is recurring revenue.
We're really a data subscription business, and those metrics show. Also, those margins that just point out on this slide because I think it shows why we're a one-to-many model. We sell each image multiple times. Any image that comes down from our satellites, we can sell it to lots of users. We can sell it to an ad customer, the civil government customer, and so on. Every time, the incremental cost of selling our imagery to the next layer is, of course, really low. It's just the compute and egress costs of selling that image. All the analytics feed on top of that. It's very, very high margins. 62% is for our PlanetScope business, which is 73% of our revenue last year, and that includes the cost of the satellites. Most people think, "Oh my god, you're building satellites and operating satellites.
It must be terrible gross margin." That 62% is going up really fast and already includes the cost of the satellite. We've really made very efficient satellite systems. Just a couple more slides then. Next slide. This just is the video that just shows a little bit more how it works. We have 180 satellites in a polar orbit, sun-synchronous orbit it's called. They each take a set of images as they go down. It's just vertically a strip of image, but the Earth rotates underneath, so that by the time the next satellite comes, it takes a strip next to the previous one. They end up being like a line scanner for the Earth. Every day, because the Earth rotates in 24 hours, we scan the whole Earth.
We also have a set of SkySats, which are higher resolution images that can have resolution up to 50 cm and can take images on any particular place. We just did this really cool thing last year. We launched 2 sets of 3 satellites on two SpaceX rockets into two inclined planes that enable us to revisit any particular location up to 12 times per day. That's the fastest revisit system of any Earth imaging system on the planet, or off the planet in this case. Anyway, that's roughly how our system works. If you go to the next slide. That's a little bit about the backend, and of course, as a space geek, I could spend hours talking about that bit, but I'm not going to in the interest of time.
What I wanted to speak to very briefly is that what's exciting is what does this mean for the customer. What the customer looks at is something like this. It's like the imagery served up. It's a bit like Google Earth, you have today's image and yesterday's image and the day before, you have over 1,000, actually. You have 1,500 images for every point on the Earth's land mass on average. Just imagine a time series of imagery, you can set up your bespoke areas of interest and time of interest and feeds, analytical feeds. You can say, Just show me the boats in the ports in my area, just show me the agricultural output. We have those sort of analytical feeds.
In the end, the customers are subscribing to these data feeds, whether they're in agriculture, they're subscribing to agriculture farm feeds. If they're in civil government, they might be getting into feeds of all the new roads or buildings in the area, or the imagery itself. Like Google uses the imagery itself to then inform and improve the maps. However they're digesting it's data feeds. That's why we liken it to a Bloomberg Terminal. A lot of people are familiar with Bloomberg Terminal. It provides data feeds into people's workflows and helps them make smarter decisions. Whether that's the imagery itself or the analytics on top of it, we are doing the same. Just like Bloomberg, a data business is a high-growth, high-margins business, and it's high-stickiness.
That means when people have integrated this data into their workflow, it's very hard to switch because now they're calibrated to that and so on. That's why we think of it like Bloomberg. There are some differences with Bloomberg. Obviously, there's limitations to that analogy, and we're not certainly talking about a physical terminal, of course. We're talking about a web interface. The main differences are that whereas Bloomberg mainly aggregates open source data that's available, financial data, and provides data analytics on top of that, we have a proprietary data set from our 200 satellite fleet that enable this. We service multiple vertical markets, not just finance, although finance is a market we serve. We think of it as Bloomberg Plus- Plus. Obviously, that's a great analogy for us, that Bloomberg is a very successful business.
I really think in all honesty, it does look and feel like a Bloomberg data business and not a satellite business, right? We're not selling satellite, we're selling data feeds. There was one final slide I have just to tee up our discussion, just to talk just a tiny bit about some of the use cases that people actually get value out of our imagery. It's not just for shits and giggles. This is imagery that is really enabling smarter decisions economically and so on. In agriculture, our data enables improvements of crop yields. For each 3 by 3 meter box, we can actually tell with our spectral bands how well the crop is doing. Is it wheat or is it soy? How well is it doing?
That enables it, when we do that across the whole farmer's field, we can then determine this area's got blight, or this area needs more fertilizer, or this is when the crop is ready to be harvested. All that sort of intelligence helps what's called precision or digital agriculture, enables improvements of crop yields of tens of percent, which is a big deal with agriculture. We can do this for all the farmers' fields across the entire world every day. Big companies like Corteva and others are using our data across wide areas. Can't be done with drones. They just don't have the coverage. Can't be done with the higher resolution zoom-in satellites that everyone else has. Only we have the scan of the whole Earth every day, and agriculture is 25% of the land mass of the Earth.
Just to mention a couple of others, and I won't go in the same length of depth, but defense and intelligence, we enable countries to see new threats around the corner that they didn't know. We discovered a missile site in eastern Iran that people didn't know about. We found new threats, and that's super important for countries to know about what threats are emerging around the world. In civil government, we help countries respond to floods and fires, disaster response, and code enforcement. Just giving you a couple examples. We've been helping the German government recently with the floods that happened, with the California state, various counties with the Dixie and other fires that were happening here in California. The code enforcement is really fascinating.
It's where counties and states use our data to enforce code like we work with Humboldt County as an example, and they use our data to check on cannabis growing. Cannabis growing is actually legal in Humboldt, but you have to have a permit, and they check the permits using our satellite data. Other counties use it for checking building permission, road construction efforts, and so on. Mapping is companies like Google. Google does something incredibly sophisticated. Every time they find something's getting out of date in a map, they automatically task one of the satellites. The satellite takes a picture, they automatically extract out that new road, that new train station, whatever it is, and then update the map. They do that tens of thousands of times a year in a fully automated process.
I won't go through the rest of the vertical markets, only to say that the ones on the left-hand side are the majority of our revenue. It's roughly 25% of those fall on the left-hand side. It's not quite, but last year, sort of 25, 25, and then 15 or something on those left-hand four, and all the rest was that final bit. The ones on the right-hand side, however, are going to be big in our future. Finance, insurance, energy. Our data's super relevant, but those in a sector like finance, we have huge alpha on a lot of the world's commodities, like agriculture commodities, like output from all the world's raw material mines, all the world's shipping and transportation network. Those hedge funds don't want pretty pictures, they want time series calibrated data. We haven't yet got to that.
What we're doing in going public is exciting because for two reasons. One is that we're ready, and another thing is that we're filling this pull. We're having a lot of finance companies. What this going public means for Planet is we'll have the capital to put more boots on the ground to go after the huge market opportunities, especially the ones in the left-hand four, and more software to go up the stack for the right-hand vertical markets that need more analytics to enable them to get going. With that, I'll leave it there, but that's a quick overview of Planet and some of the use cases, and a quick snapshot of the financials, just so that people have a sort of level set.
It's absolutely incredible, and you could imagine if you were a commodities trader, you would really need a product like this. Going public, that's a great segue to my next question before I bring on our other panelists. Why a SPAC? Why now?
Great questions. Well, firstly, why now? The first thing is do a company sort of analyzes, do you want to go public? We have been analyzing that for some years, and we always thought that was the right thing in the end. The question was when. Ashley, our CFO, who has been with us for a year and a half, we've been preparing, we've had audited finances for three years. We were getting to the point where we felt we were ready. We had a mature satellite segment, over 200 satellites operating. We had a data business. We had clear product to market fit in those 4 left-hand verticals, as I was just saying. We were doing a serious amount of revenue, right? Over $100 million in revenue last year. We felt that it was at the right stage to go public. Why SPAC?
It's an efficient vehicle to do it. It was ideal for our kind of company because we could do it quickly. We could talk a little bit about the future. I think that we found a great partner in dMY, who've done this many times before, saw the real value of us, not just as a satellite company, as a data and analytics company, and saw the value proposition to sustainability. I would say that's the reason we chose SPAC. We found some great PIPE investors, with BlackRock leading the PIPE, with Marc Benioff coming in in a big way, Google coming in. We just upped the PIPE with CPP, the Canada Pension Plan Fund, which we're really stoked to have them in. Just one final thing about the SPAC process. We're also feeling this pull right now. Everyone wants our data.
Why? It's because the whole planet is trying to transition to a sustainable economy. ESG targets for companies, emissions targets for countries. What do they need when they're transitioning to a sustainable economy? The first thing, they set these goals, and then they're like, "Well, we need to measure it." That's the very next thing because otherwise they can't manage it. We can measure those ESG targets, we can measure those emissions. We're feeling the pull of the market. This is the right time to go public for us. The market pull is there, and so we're leaning into it.
That's a great answer. I'm going to bring in my colleague, Alexandra now, and Ashley Johnson, the CFO. Take it away, Alexandra.
Yes. Great to be with you both. We would encourage our audience to keep submitting questions. We already have a few going, but hope to foster a really great discussion. Ashley, tell us a bit more about Planet's one-to-many data subscription business model. Will alluded to the fact that your incremental operating costs become very low as more users are added. Tell us about that.
Yes. Thank you, and it's great to be here. When I joined the company about a year and a half ago, what struck me is that while from the outside, everybody's really focused on the fact that Planet has totally revolutionized how to build satellites and design satellites through its agile aerospace. The business model is actually very similar to a data infrastructure SaaS company. Any company that's building software solutions on top of complex data center infrastructure, that business model looks very similar to our own. We've built proprietary data and analytics on top of our data center, it's just that our data center happens to be in space. When you look at the business model, the metrics are very similar. We have 90% recurring revenue. Our customers are subscribing to these data feeds over multiple years.
On a dollar-weighted basis, 70% of our contracts are multi-year. On average, about 2.5 years. Our customers are embedding our data into their business intelligence, so they want to lock in pricing over multiple years. Actually on the commercial side of our business, the non-governmental side, our contracts are skewing closer to three years on average on a dollar-weighted basis. When you look at these types of metrics, net dollar retention rate greater than 110%. These types of metrics are very analogous to SaaS companies and other data as a service companies.
Yeah. There are so many potential end user opportunities for Planet, from agriculture to sounds like military intelligence. It just seems endless. Can you talk about which of these vertical markets will drive the most growth in the future and potential tailwinds?
It's interesting. As Will mentioned, in the near term, we see a lot of the growth coming from the core markets, which have historically been users of geospatial data. This is the agricultural industry, civil governments, defense and intelligence, and mapping. As we ramp up our sales team globally, we expect a lot of the near-term growth to be in those markets. The exciting inflection for this company is as new markets understand the value of the data that we're bringing and are embedding it in their business intelligence systems. That's like financial services companies that are trying to understand land use for their commercial loan portfolios, that are trying to assess insurance risk related to wildfires and flooding. They're trying to model out the impact of climate change on their overall municipal bond portfolios.
They're trying to predict commodities prices as a result of global agricultural production of different commodities. Then also, a lot of pull across all markets because of the heightened focus on ESG and environmental impact. The ability to really measure the E in those ESG scores and understand what is the true environmental impact of that supply chain footprint and have consistent scoring across companies. All of these are indicators of the types of inflection that we expect to see in our business in these new markets that are just really opening their eyes to the power of our data sets.
Yeah, just along those lines of questions of privacy or legality issues, are you able to anonymize this data so that individuals aren't ever individually identifiable? I guess the reference that comes to mind is almost like "The Truman Show," Big Brother is watching you. What would you say to critics that bring those kind of issues up?
Will, why don't you take this one?
Yeah, I'm happy to. Look, remember that we're about 500 km up, this is not right over your head. This is like us taking a picture with our telescope from here in San Francisco to Los Angeles and seeing things, right? We can't see a person in our medium resolution imagery, and even in a high resolution, very difficult. Maybe you can start seeing crowds of people. You certainly can't identify a person from space. It's just too far away. Even the big satellites can't do that, even the big government one. Drones can, because they could be 5 meters above your head or 5 km above your head. Even there, we're still 100x further away than if they were 5 km up, right? Where a plane might fly. You remember the distance.
Really what satellites are good for is wide-scale scanning, right? That's why our applications are things like agriculture, because that's 25% of the land mass of the Earth. You just can't do that with drones. We have sufficient resolution to provide precision agricultural benefits, right? Sub-field understanding of crop health. Similarly, on the military side, it's more like scanning for new threats. On disaster response, it's finding all the fires across the whole of California, or helping floods, because we automatically scan the whole world. We have the day before and the day after for a flood, and that's really important to have timely information and that scan before you've been able to fly airplanes or anything else. It's wide-scale effects like that that affect, and help our use cases. The use cases are sort of focused on that.
The advantage satellites have is they're going eight km per second, so they cover vast territories that planes and drones and other things can't, right? The good thing about that is that they're so far away, they don't touch, really, personal privacy so much.
That's great. Ashley, how does Planet's business model, how is this transforming the earth observation industry at large?
That's a great question. When you think about historically, the earth observation industry, specifically around satellites, has been about building very big, very expensive satellites that can capture images, but really on demand. When the fundamental capacity of those satellites is limited, they're looking in very specific places. From that end, the satellite manufacturer has to be thinking about how do they optimize the revenue per satellite, which typically translates into the highest bidder, which typically translates into a government buyer. That's how the historical industry has really been focused is very big players that are servicing a government customer. In some cases, you can see in the public filings, the U.S. government, for example, may represent as much as 80% of revenues. That's a very different value proposition than what Planet has built.
Because we are scanning the Earth every single day, we're effectively taking images of what anybody might want to look at. We don't have to be tasked on demand. We already have that image, and we can sell that data multiple times over, and every incremental customer is really just dropping profits to the bottom line for us that we can then reinvest in the capability of those satellites. It's a fundamentally different proposition when you're talking about a one-to-many subscription model versus a one-to-one tasking model. Now, we do have 21 high-resolution satellites. We have the highest revisit rate of any point on Earth of satellite providers in the earth observation industry.
What that enables us to do is to combine the two datasets to increase the capabilities of the analytics and the robustness of those analytics, as well as to scan for the things that our customers may not know they need to look for, and then task the satellites to zoom in and learn more. The multimodal fleet that we have is also very unique in the industry. We think we're fundamentally transforming the way the market thinks about accessibility too, and usability of satellite data.
Yeah. Talking more about those vertical markets and kind of the scope of Planet's end users, can you give us a bit more along the lines of the revenue breakdown for government usership versus commercial?
Yeah. Will mentioned we have four core markets today that make up the majority of our revenue. Our largest market is civil government, that last year, our fiscal 2021 was 24% of our revenue. Here we go. Nice slide to break it down. Second largest market was agriculture, that's one where we're seeing a lot of growth this year as we've really been attacking that market as we've expanded our commercial sales team. Defense and intelligence, another sector within government, represents about 22% of our revenue as of last year. As Will mentioned, mapping is kind of a close fourth, about 17% of revenue last year. That 14% other is really where we see opportunity over the long term to expand the reach of our business.
That's opportunities in financial services, insurance, forestry, and the energy markets, which really are nascent markets for us today.
Yeah. Then let's talk a bit more before we get into some of the financial nitty-gritty, about kind of new markets and growth forecasting. What analytics and solutions and products are going to be deployed to address new markets, new customers?
It's really building on top of the platform that we have today. Today, our customers can access our data a couple of ways. One is through our own web-based interface, which we call Planet Explorer. They can use subscription APIs to ingest our data into whatever systems they might be using on their side. We have partnerships with Esri. We integrate into Google Earth Engine and other tools that may be in use by our customers on their desktop. As we think of the opportunity going forward, it's really building on top of that solution stack. Building more APIs to be able to integrate into other analytic solutions, as well as building our own analytic solutions inside of Explorer to enable our customers to interact with the data however they are most comfortable and using whatever tools they're most accustomed to.
I don't know, Will, if you have anything to add on the platform side.
No.
No, obviously, there's a significant area of focus. Our main areas of focus with this capital that we're getting through this process are in sales and marketing and then going up the software stack, and that's a lot to do with adding analytics that enable our new vertical markets. It helps our current vertical markets because even, say, the big ad companies are asking us, "Hey, can you just do this image processing step? Can you just do this analytics piece for us because we prefer to focus on the farmers?" Great. We can do that, add that value and go up the value proposition there, and gain more share for Planet. It also opens out, the going up the stack opens out the new vertical markets that aren't addressable until you get to a certain stage, like the finance one that I mentioned.
Great. How is Planet measuring results in the growing ESG market? What is Planet's strategy to build, buy or partner to quote unquote "move up the stack," as you just had alluded to, Ashley?
A lot of different ways for our data to be used for sustainability purposes. For example, we have partnerships underway to look at incorporating Planet's data into ESG scores. We're working with Fortune 100 customers so that they can understand their global supply chain footprint and the impact of the minerals that they may be sourcing for their own products and what type of environmental footprint are those mining practices having on the planet. Being able to track that measure and report out on it as part of their own sustainability commitments. Will, do you want to talk a little bit about just kind of the relevance of Planet data to UN SDGs and other larger global efforts?
Very much so. Look, we think of Planet data as enabling this sustainability transition, right? I mentioned that the whole world is trying to do that. We looked at the UN's Sustainable Development Goals and found that our data is relevant to measuring 13 of the 17 SDGs, from food security because of our agriculture, water security, all these things. What does that mean? It means that every one of those things, whether you're a company or a government that's trying to transition to a sustainable practice, you have to measure that piece. Our data set is really foundational to measuring the natural capital, which we have to take into account. We're presuming it's all for free. What is natural capital? It's the trees, it's the water, it's the pollution, it's the air, it's all these things.
Planet is a daily snapshot of where we at with our natural capital. When companies are trying to measure their ESG targets, the E is, of course, environment. It's in supply chain. It's like understanding risks of assets to disasters. It's about floods or fires. It's about understanding, do their supply chains come from sustainable sources? We can help them to measure that. Does their paper come from a sustainable forest? Et cetera. It is all about measuring natural capital, and our data set, we think, is foundational to that transition.
Awesome. Ashley, let's get into a little bit more of the Planet's financial model. Can you go over some of the KPIs?
Sure. As I talked about earlier, some of the things that we manage from a financial KPI is very similar to what you might see from a SaaS company. We're reporting out on what percentage of our revenue is recurring. As of the last quarter, it was 93% of our revenue is recurring in nature. We're tracking our average contract length. As this metric shows, over 70% are in multi-year deals. As I referenced earlier, on a dollar weighted basis, we're trending around 2.5 years, on average, for our average contract length. Net dollar retention rate is a really important metric that we manage as a business. We start with a book of business at the beginning of the year, and we look as the year goes along, how that business is renewing and expanding to measure the net dollar retention rate.
We also have a supplemental metric that we provide to investors, as disclosed in our S-4, around net dollar retention rate, including win backs. A customer that may have lost budget in prior periods or might have taken longer beyond the renewal date to navigate the renewal, we factor that in in a supplemental metric, which is the net dollar retention rate plus win backs. That as a metric increased 14% points year-over-year from our fiscal 2020 to our fiscal 2021. That's a metric that we report out on regularly. We're looking at how many customers we have. We do have a bit of an 80/20 rule with a large concentration in our largest customers in terms of revenue. A broad array of customers with whom we're engaging and really looking to drive expansion of that footprint.
The land and expand sales motion is one that is very familiar to our enterprise sales reps around the world. The more customers we have, the more opportunity we have to drive expansion in our core customer base.
Yeah. That's super interesting. Can you go over the margin profile and CapEx requirements of Planet?
Yeah. Will talked about in the beginning that we have 2 fleets of satellites. One is our medium-resolution satellites, our PlanetScope satellites or Dove satellites. They cost on approximately $300,000 per satellites, including the bill of materials, labor, and launch costs that get capitalized. They typically have a useful life of about 3-5 years. In our financial model, we assume at around three years. We're roughly assuming we're replenishing a third of that fleet every year. Our high-resolution satellites are more expensive. We acquired them from Google a few years back. We are still amortizing the cost of those satellites through our cost of goods sold. As we look at our next generation high-resolution satellites, we anticipate that those will cost more in the order of magnitude of about $4 million per satellite.
Have a useful life of, we assume five years, although our SkySat satellites have actually achieved a useful life greater than six years, and we estimate nine years. If you use that five-year useful life, you assume you're roughly replenishing that fleet about a fifth every year. That's kind of how we factored it into the model, and that results in CapEx as a percentage of revenue really trending down as our revenue scales. Last year, our satellite CapEx was about 18% of revenue. This year, it'll be closer to 10%. I think our total CapEx as a percentage of revenue in Q2 was around 9%. Our steady state for CapEx as a % of revenue, we model around 5%-8%, and that's inclusive of our satellite costs, as well as any capitalized software or other capitalized expenditures.
Again, as you think about what businesses are most analogous to Planet, it really does look like a data center SaaS company in terms of CapEx as a % of revenue on a steady state basis.
Yeah. In addition to Planet's Dove constellation, you recently announced the new satellite Pelican. Can you talk about how this fits into your financial model and revenue acceleration?
Yeah. I'll touch briefly on financial model, then Will can talk about kind of how we think about it from a market perspective. This is effectively our next, as we think about the next generation of our high-resolution satellites. As we think about replenishing the SkySat fleet, it's really with greater capabilities, and using that agile aerospace model to drive down our overall cost of maintaining the fleet. As we drive those costs down, we increase the capabilities of that fleet. Will can talk a little bit about what we've been sharing on that front.
Yeah. Pelican's really exciting. It's our next generation high-res, as Ashley was just saying. What this is going to have is even higher resolution. Our current system is 50 cm, and this is going to go significantly higher than that. Higher revisit rates. We're already imaging up to 12 times per day in a particular location, depending on latitude, and we're going to increase on that. We haven't released all the specs because we want to have some fun secrets for later. It's going to be exciting, and there's some really, really cool technology aboard. This is all, by the way, going to cost even less than the previous satellite iterations, about 3x less. We as a company have something that's important, that is, we have all of our satellite capabilities are designed and built in-house.
Yeah.
Something also distinguishes us from most of the competitors in the arena, that makes a big difference. If you go and buy your satellites from Lockheed, say, it's a very sort of government process because they're used to doing government contracting, you'll buy your billion-dollar satellite. In fact, the last satellite from Maxar, for example, costs over $800 million for a single satellite. That's more than we've spent on all of our satellites combined, right? By having it vertically integrated in-house, we can design, build satellites much faster, much lower cost, iterate the capability to what the customer needs. Just last year, we increased our Doves by 5x data rate per satellite per day by adding spectral bands, adding faster radios, adding more larger sensor. We went from a 29-megapixel sensor to a 47-megapixel sensor, so on and so forth.
As the technology improves, we call it strapping space to Moore's Law. As the technology underlying gets better, we want to constantly put that in space. Our goal is to constantly improve and that Pelican is the next evolution in our high-resolution fleet.
It's all very exciting technology and outlook, and we've got some really great, very informed questions coming in. I'm going to throw this back to my colleague, Jarrett Banks, and to start fostering this what will be, I think, a very robust discussion from our audience.
Thanks, Alexandra, and we promise we will get to as many of the audience questions as possible. If we can't get to them all, we will pass them on to Will and Ashley, so don't worry about that. Let's start here. Here's one from Roberto: How many satellites would you say you will need to be as efficient as you would like, and approximately, how many satellites do you think you will have for next year?
Actually, I think the quick answer to this is that we're done building the fleets that we wanted to build that enable us to operate the core parts of our business. The 180 Dove satellites is complete. It does the daily scan. Last year, which was actually a very busy year, we launched 89 satellites on five rockets, and all during COVID. Space did not slow down for COVID. The final set that I said, the 2 sets of 3 satellites on the two SpaceX launches of the high-resolution system, completed our high-resolution system. With those two systems complete, we are now in maintenance mode, largely, right? We're constantly refreshing as we need every year, but it's basically maintenance mode.
Which is why, and Ashley can talk to this in more detail if anyone's interested, the CapEx that we're talking about as a percentage of revenue is now, it was 18% last year, it's projected to be just under 10% this year. We're going down and maybe to even the long-term range is going to be 5%-8%. We're really a capital-efficient business despite having, and that's because we're now in maintenance mode. We have a fully scaled and operational satellite fleet. Now it's mainly around go to market using that data to service all the vertical markets and adding analytics to enable others.
Fantastic. Here's a question about when the SPAC transaction will close. That hasn't been given out yet, but I would just like to point out that if you do buy shares of DMYQ, they will automatically convert into Planet shares once that SPAC transaction does close.
Yeah, that'll be PL on the New York Stock Exchange afterwards. Yes, DMYQ is.
PL.
Is the SPAC ticker.
Got that. No need to worry. Okay, moving on. What's on the roadmap for the coming years in regards to hardware and software?
Well, there's lots of exciting stuff. As I mentioned, this last year, we increased the amount of data per satellite 5x. We also increased our resolution from 70 cm to 50 cm on our high-resolution system and increased the number of revisits from 2 or 3x a day to up to 12x per day. We are going to continue on those sort of high growth vectors in better and better data. The first thing on the hardware side is constantly investing in those next-generation satellites that enable the better and better data sets. Better data means higher resolution, more spectral bands, and more frequent revisits, so more cadence. I think even more important is what we're doing on the software side.
I was asked the question on the software side. As I said, the main thing is going up the stack, as we call it, to enable us to service different vertical markets and get more value out of the existing ones. That means things like adding better analytics, adding more bespoke analytics, building up more towards indicators. Like if we could do crop soy yield for the whole world per day, that would be very interesting to a lot of players, right? We haven't got to that sort of aggregated analytics or statistics yet. That's going to take some time and calibration and so on. We've got the raw data for it. Now we need to add some of the analytics layers. These are a lot of the growth areas in software.
In fact, I think our software team is projected to grow about 300% over the next five years, whereas the space team, which we'll continue to invest in, is only growing about 30% or 40% over that similar time frame horizon. Just to give you a sense of the scale. Yes, we're investing in space, but we're investing even more on the software side.
Right. Next question. Are there any restrictions for imagery for certain countries or locations on Earth? Do you foresee any future restrictions arising?
Roughly speaking, no. There's an international treaty that enables any country to take pictures of anyone else from space. Unlike planes, where you have to fly in a plane in their air territory. In space, you're above any country's territory, so you can take a picture. We are restricted from supplying data to certain parties. There's an embargo list of entities, both countries, organizations, and people that we can't service our data to under U.S. and EU law. We have an ethics committee to check any of our prospective customers before we take them on to ensure that there's no issues to do with ethical bad uses of our data. I think that's pretty unlikely, we do keep a check on it because we do really think it's important to use our technology for good.
For the most part, our technology is bent towards good and we can supply it to most people, and we think that's a great thing. The more people that access this information, the better.
Right. Now, you touched on this at the beginning, but I want to go back to some of those verticals. We have a question here. You're diversified across several verticals, but are there one or two that investors should watch closely for the most growth in coming years?
I would say agriculture is really exciting because we've got so many ag customers. I think we will grow that market significantly. We've already got a couple of customers that are in the sort of $10 million a year kind of range, and we expect them to grow. There's 30 or 50 more ag companies that scale. Well, that's a big growth opportunity for us. Long term, as I already mentioned, I'm most excited about finance because of the alpha that we have. That's a longer-term play. Ashley, anything to add on that?
No, I think you hit the right core markets. Obviously, civil government is also a very big area of growth for us. We've done a lot of expansion contracts with these civil governments that have understood how our use case can help them provide better services and infrastructure to the people to be able to monitor sustainable development and those types of practices, and to provide emergency and disaster response. A lot of civil governments to target around the world, and that's another area where I expect near-term growth.
Okay. Let's turn to competition for a little bit. Now, in your investor deck, you point out that you've got a big head start over would-be rivals, but are there any serious competitors investors should be aware of?
Well, look, firstly, I think competition is good for everyone. We've got a huge lead in this scanning system that no one else has, and it would take many years for them to catch up, and that is just as big markets. Let me just touch on that just a little bit again. We have 200 satellites operating. They collect about 100 times the area of any other player per day. That is what enables us to service these big new markets like agriculture, forestry, maritime, and so on. I think a couple of things that people When you look on the surface, there's a few companies, of course, that have satellites doing imagery. Basically, all the other players are tasked, so they task their satellites to take targets that customers ask for.
That makes it inherently more like a one-to-one model because they give that imagery then to that customer, but it's rarely of interest to other players. Our scan is automatically of the whole Earth, and we don't provide it exclusively to any one customer, and we in fact, we clip and ship it to multiple customers, and that means that we have this one-to-many model. I think the summary sort of is that we've got this unique daily scan which no one else has and can touch. That's what services the most of the vertical markets that we're excited about and that we think most of our vertical markets today but also where the growth areas are. It would take many years for anyone to build such a system.
It's very hard to get to what we've built and almost impossible to catch up because we're, of course, we're not going to sit on our hands there. Also it is impossible to go back and get the archive. We now have 1,500 images for every point in the Earth's land mass, and that is where all the training happens. Machine learning, if you ask any machine learning expert, they will say the most important thing is the data archive or the training data, right? That you can train your algorithms. We've got this stack of data, and as far as I'm aware, and I'm a physicist, so I've thought a lot about this, no one's invented a time machine yet to go back in time and erect a satellite fleet to collect the data that they need to do all the training.
That archive is super important for all the analytics that we're building now on top.
Right.
Just if I can layer on top of that. You can see the difference in our business model also in the financials. Most of the other vendors or suppliers in the market calculate their gross margins excluding the cost of the satellites, so excluding the depreciation and amortization of that significant investment. When you do that for Planet, our gross margins would be roughly 75% today. We are already a very high gross margin business. Our incremental cost to serve a new customer is extremely low. Our direct margins, we calculate around 94%-96%. When you look at others, they have much lower gross margins, which is indicative of really building bespoke solutions for a single customer, which by definition is going to be a much more expensive value proposition and a much less scalable model.
I do think that technology is a huge differentiator for us. We have a substantial lead, but our business model is also a significant competitive differentiation.
Great. Ashley, staying with you, when will you be cash flow positive? Will the SPAC deal provide enough cash to fund the biz until it's cash flow positive?
That is the intention. As I mentioned, we do have very high gross margins, so our investments are really in the building out of our commercial organization, so growing our feet on the street, and increasing our marketing spend, as well as the investments that Will referenced in our software team. Really investing in hiring the engineering team to build that platform capability and enhanced analytics to expand our share of wallet with our customers and expand our market share. With those investments, we anticipate we'll need approximately $200 million to fund the company to cash flow breakeven. Again, these are projections that are contingent on a lot of things happening, which we've described in the S4. I do encourage everybody to read and understand the assumptions underlying that model.
Nonetheless, we anticipate that the capital that we've raised from the PIPE investors should fund the company to cash flow breakeven, which leaves the capital that we receive from the SPAC that's in trust as effectively dry powder to enable us to have a stronger balance sheet, pay down some of the existing debt that's on the business. We have about $65 million of bank debt on the business, as well as to enable us to have capital for consolidating in the industry as we see appropriate.
Right. Okay. How do you consolidate your place in the emergent and fast-changing, on the tech side, new space industry?
Well, this is a fun one. Look, the space industry is undergoing a bit of a renaissance, but all the excitement is in the rockets and the billionaires going up and their rockets and all this stuff. I think the true excitement, the true upshot, is all these new datasets. Really, that's the excitement. There's been about a 4X reduction in launch costs, but there's been about 1,000-fold increase in capability performance of satellites.
That's a revolution, right? That's not like the Model T Ford moment. This is more like the mainframe to desktop computers moment for IT. Aerospace is undertaking a big revolution. Of course, Planet and SpaceX alone have about half the satellites in orbit, so it's producing lots of new satellites, right? Planet and SpaceX are sort of pioneering the way in communications and Earth observation respectively.
What's the main upshot of those satellite fleets? It's either producing or transporting massive new datasets about the Earth. That has huge implications for the Earth economy and for transitioning to a sustainable economy. People think of space and this renaissance, and they're thinking rockets and billionaires and the Moon and Mars. I think of the data economy, the Earth, and all the applications that are happening here. I'm excited about the rockets too, but I think I'm even more excited about how this data is relevant to the Earth's economy. I think that's the trillion-dollar opportunity here, not the rockets. That's what we're going after.
Great. I think that's a great way to end it. Very positive note. My thanks to our guests, Will and Ashley, here today. This has been a great discussion. I promise we will get those questions over to Planet, and they can certainly respond. Thank you to the audience members and my co-host, Alexandra.
Thanks very much, folks. Thanks for having us. We're really excited to go public, and thanks for having us on the show.
Thank you very much.
Thanks a lot. Signing out.