Good afternoon. Thank you for attending today's Planet Labs PBC Fiscal Year 2023 earnings call.
My name is Hannah, and I will be your moderator for today's call. All lines will be muted during the presentation portion of the call, with an opportunity for questions and answers at the end. If you would like to ask a question, please press star one on your telephone keypad.
I would now like to pass the conference over to our host, Chris Genuardi , Vice President of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.
Hello, welcome to Planet's Q4 and full fiscal year 2023 earnings call.
Before we begin today's call, we'd like to remind everyone that we may make forward-looking statements related to future events or our financial outlook. Any forward-looking statements are based on management's current outlook, plans, estimates, expectations and projections. The inclusion of such forward-looking information should not be regarded as a representation by Planet that future plans, estimates or expectations will be achieved. Such forward-looking statements are subject to various risks and uncertainties and assumptions as detailed in our SEC filings, which can be found at www.sec.gov.
Our actual results or performance may differ materially from those indicated by such forward-looking statements. We undertake no responsibility to update such forward-looking statements to reflect events or circumstances after the date on which the statement is made or to reflect the occurrence of unanticipated events.
During the call, we will also discuss non-GAAP financial measures. We use these non-GAAP financial measures for financial and operational decision-making as a means to evaluate period-to-period comparisons. We believe that these measures provide useful information about operating results, enhance the overall understanding of past financial performance and future prospects, and allow for greater transparency with respect to key metrics used by management in its financial and operational decision-making. For more information on the non-GAAP financial measures, please see the reconciliation tables provided in our press release issued earlier this afternoon.
Throughout this call, we provide a number of key performance indicators used by management and often used by competitors in our industry. These and other key performance indicators are discussed in more detail in our press release.
Before we jump in, I'd like to encourage everyone to reference the slides we have posted on our investor relations website, which are intended to accompany our prepared remarks.
At this time, I'd now like to turn the call over to Will Marshall, Planet CEO, Chairperson, and Co-founder. Over to you, Will.
Thanks, Chris, and hi, everyone.
I'm excited to share with you our results for the Q4 of FY 2023, which cap off an incredible year for Planet. We'll also share some recent wins, discuss the progress we're making towards building an Earth data platform, including our announced acquisition of Sinergise, and provide an outlook for FY 2024. Let's dive in. During Q4, we generated $53 million in revenue, representing 43% year-over-year growth. For the full year, revenue was $191.3 million, up 46% year-over-year. Our non-GAAP gross margins expanded to 58% for the Q4, an improvement of 16 percentage points year-over-year, demonstrating the positive leverage that we have in our business. For the full year, our non-GAAP gross margins were 53%, an improvement of 15 percentage points year-over-year.
We ended the Q4 with over 880 unique customers spanning across government and commercial markets. Before I cover our recent commercial wins, let me first summarize the key takeaways for today's call.
For fiscal 2023, we exceeded the range we laid out at the beginning of the year, nearly tripling our revenue growth rate, as well as expanding gross margins by 15 percentage points. I'm incredibly proud of this growth acceleration as it reflects the execution and dedication from our teams across the entire company. Nearly two years ago, as we were going public, we outlined a plan to accelerate growth through systematic investments across product, go-to-market, as well as in M&A. In the last year, we've witnessed the positive effects of those investments in our financial results and KPIs. We are carrying that momentum forward into fiscal 2024. These results tell us three things.
First, we believe the market for Planet's data remains robust. While the macroeconomic climate remains uncertain, we are fortunate to serve a customer base that is diversified across government and commercial sectors. As shared previously, we've seen some caution from our customers in the commercial sector as they navigate the current environment. We've also seen strong demand in the government sector, and our expanded product capabilities and go-to-market reach are continuing to generate new opportunities for Planet at pace. Second, our business is on a steady trajectory towards our long-term model.
We outlined our long-term targets at our Investor Day, which you can find on our investor relations website. You'll see that our business is more aligned with a technology SaaS business, not the traditional space industry models. Third, our strong finish positions us well for FY 2024, despite the challenging macroeconomic environment.
As you'll hear from Ashley, over 60% of our revenue forecast for the year is already committed before factoring in renewals, new business or revenue through the Sinergise acquisition. We expect the secular tailwinds of digital transformation, sustainability transformation, as well as global peace and security to continue to drive demand in FY 2024. These are monumental transitions that Planet is uniquely positioned to serve. Therefore, as you'll hear today, we're forecasting strong growth that balances the macro environment while also becoming more judicious on spending as we chart our path to profitability. Okay, we've got a lot to cover, so let's dive into some of the specific highlights from the quarter.
During Q4, we closed another multi-year deal with an international ministry of defense customer for more than $10 million per year. We continue to gain, share, and expand the defense and intelligence market as customers see how our data supports fact-based and real-time decision-making.
Last week, the National Reconnaissance Office, NRO, awarded Planet a contract for our hyperspectral capabilities. This aligns with Planet's existing and planned commercial capabilities for Tanager, our hyperspectral constellation, designed as part of our partnership with the Carbon Mapper Coalition. The contract will allow us to work directly with the NRO to explore how these capabilities align with the agency's national space security architecture. On the civil government side, we won a contract with the Philippine Space Agency. They're using our data for multiple use cases, including disaster impact assessment, environmental monitoring, and scientific research.
This is a great example of how countries can save time and money by leveraging Planet's data instead of building their own Earth observation constellations, enabling them to concentrate on serving their constituents. We're also delighted to share that Norway's International Climate and Forest Initiative, NICFI, has been extended for the calendar year 2024. The success of the program has exceeded all expectations. We now have over 18,000 registered users on the platform representing 158 countries.
This program makes data available, covering all of the world's equatorial tropical forests to governments, UN agencies, NGOs, scientists, and others, enabling the monitoring of tropical deforestation and powerful programs and policies to reverse it. These four wins point to a larger trend we're seeing with the governments worldwide. Firstly, we're seeing strength in those markets, both civil and defense and intelligence.
Second, they're also increasingly partnering with commercial providers like Planet to support their needs rather than building all of their required infrastructure themselves.
Turning to the commercial market, Pacific Gas and Electric Company or PG&E, one of the U.S.'s largest utility companies, recently signed a multi-year seven-figure contract for our new Planetary Variables product, Vegetation Encroachment. This helps them to determine locations along electric utility right of ways where there is a high likelihood of tree fall and risk. I'm particularly proud of this win as it's a direct result of the recent acquisition of Salo Sciences that we announced in our last call. PG&E plans to use our vegetative encroachment product to monitor their entire distribution and transmission grid, totaling over 100,000 line miles or 160,000 line kilometers.
This also includes assets and grid risk modeling and public safety power shutoff analysis to drive better grid performance and safety. In the financial services industry, we expanded our contract with Manulife Investment Management Timberland and Agriculture, the world's largest natural capital investment manager.
They're using Planet's data within their forestry division to monitor their global timber operations. Our wins from the quarter showcase the diversity of customers and use cases we serve. We provide a capability that hasn't existed previously. In doing so, Planet is creating an entirely new market, bringing the power of geospatial data to customers that have never had it before. We're particularly excited about the value that artificial intelligence can unlock with our customers. The buzz around AI has clearly become louder in recent months, and data is critical as an ingredient, the essential foundation upon which AI models are built, trained, and operate.
Let me share two recent examples that highlight this.
Firstly, in response to the devastating earthquake in Turkey and Syria, you may recall our partnership with Microsoft and our joint work on developing a building damage assessment, which we deployed over large regions of Ukraine for the United Nations.
This solution was developed by training an AI model to assess building damage in satellite imagery. It took a couple of months to develop and deploy. In the wake of the earthquakes in Turkey and Syria, we worked with Microsoft and other partners to quickly deploy the same models in this new region, producing a building damage assessment solution to assist the Turkish government's emergency response efforts. This time, it only took a couple of days to deploy, and going from months to days is significant progress and critical in situations like this.
This solution can be used for many kinds of natural disasters: floods, fires, hurricanes, etc., and for every country around the globe helping to save lives. Last month, the public watched as a high-altitude Chinese balloon traveled across North American airspace. We received intense interest from the defense and intelligence community for our ability to track the origin of that balloon. AI startup Synthetaic was able to quickly train an AI model to search and locate the balloon on our imagery.
Once the model was trained, it only took a matter of minutes to find balloon sightings. Synthetaic was able to track the balloon back to its original launch point. Our proprietary archive, going back over 7 years with approximately 50 petabytes of Earth data, is now a deep treasure trove with immense value that can be unlocked when combined with AI.
The archive now contains on average 2,400 images of every spot on Earth landmass, as well as some key maritime areas. The depth and consistency of this data set makes it uniquely suitable for AI applications. We can enable a totally new type of planetary forensics, searching for objects around the globe and back through time, even searching for objects that our customers didn't know themselves in advance that they needed to find, like this high-altitude balloon.
The revolution we're experiencing in AI has the potential to increase the value of our data and the speed at which Planet and our partners can turn it into solutions. Moving to something really exciting. Today, we announced our intent to acquire the business of Sinergise with their leading developer platform for Earth observation data.
I'd now like to invite Kevin Weil, our president, to talk about how we expect this acquisition to accelerate our plans.
For those who don't know Kevin, he has a proven track record in building successful multi-billion dollar software platforms, having led product at X for many years as they scaled from zero to over $1 billion in revenue and at Instagram to over $10 billion. He joined Planet two years ago to lead the advancement of our software platform. Kevin, over to you to tell us about this exciting acquisition.
Thanks, Will, and hello everyone. As we discussed at our Investor Day, Planet's Agile Aerospace capabilities allow us to generate data with a combination of spectral, temporal, and optical resolution that the world has never seen before. That's the foundation of the company, and until recently, data generation and distribution was our entire focus. Our strategy has expanded in recent years for the simple reason that making our data easier to work with allows us to serve more customers and partners, enlarging our TAM and the impact that we can make in the world.
We're doing this in two ways. First, we're moving up the data pyramid from imagery towards more refined data, which is our Planetary Variables strategy. We already have a range of offerings, including products from VanderSat and Salo Sciences, as well as our AI-driven products like Road and Building Change Detection.
Our partners, including startups like Synthetaic, also deliver complementary solutions, as Will just highlighted in the balloon example. Across all of these efforts, we're delivering insights to our customers with focused, relevant, and easier-to-use data sets tuned to broad customer needs.
The second is where Sinergise fits in. We're making our data easier to work with by enabling customers to analyze data and create applications directly on our platform. Sinergise has long been a Planet partner, and I'm excited that we'll be joining forces to support their team, their platform, and their substantial user base. Over the last 15 years, Sinergise has developed world-class data access and analysis capabilities, leveraging Planet's data, other commercial data sets, including optical SAR and more, and the public data sets from sources like Sentinel and Landsat.
Their technology powers a cloud streaming platform called Sentinel Hub that allows customers to process, analyze, and extract insights from Earth data, all without needing to build their own systems. Let me illustrate this from a customer lens. I was speaking recently with one of our large agricultural customers who's doing innovative work using multiple Planet products. They mentioned that they were having to devote significant engineering resources to building their own pipeline to ingest and analyze Planet data. With Sinergise, much of their analysis can be done on the fly through powerful APIs and streamed directly into their platform, saving them time and money.
Another example is Sinergise's area monitoring solution, which combines multiple data sources and algorithms along with a front-end application to allow EU governments to monitor sustainable agricultural practices.
European farmers make commitments in exchange for subsidies. Sinergise's solution is used by multiple governments to monitor compliance and determine payouts. EU governments don't need to do their own analysis or build their own processing pipeline. They can use Sinergise's area monitoring product, leveraging Planet data, AI, and Sinergise's powerful APIs. As we shared at our last Investor Day, we're on a journey from being a satellite company 5 years ago to a data company today to becoming a platform company in the next 5 years.
We believe that Sinergise has the potential to meaningfully accelerate that journey. It's not that we're leaving behind the satellites and the data. We're augmenting them, moving towards bigger markets and greater impact. Together, Planet and Sinergise will make integration of our data and other data sources much simpler than it is today.
We can enable customers and partners to build more within Planet's environment rather than outside of it. We plan to sell compute-based services alongside our data subscriptions, which we believe will make our platform stickier for customers. Sinergise powers a large developer ecosystem that will be able to access, analyze, and build applications on Planet's data. Most importantly, this acquisition will make Planet's data easier to use, which speeds customer time to value and expands our total addressable market. Hopefully, this gives you an idea why we're so excited about the acquisition we signed with Sinergise and how it accelerates our software roadmap.
They're a Planet partner today, and already our go-to-market teams have found that our joint capabilities are resonating with customers. I'm thrilled to welcome the Sinergise team to Planet, as well as their ecosystem of partners and customers. Back to you, Will.
Thanks, Kevin. Before I hand over to Ashley to go through more details on our financial results and guidance for FY 2024, I want to touch on our outlook for the year ahead, especially the core levers that drive sustained top-line growth and the priorities we're investing behind.
First, our sales force is really focused in on proven use cases in core industries with solutions that can drive the highest ROI for our customers, where we can deliver proven economic outcomes. This approach has enhanced our sales team's win ratio, which improved year-over-year in every quarter last year. We also continue to hire top-notch sales talent. Second, we're also accelerating our go-to-market strategy with partners that help us to extend our global market reach. Our aim is to power our customers with the tools they need to get value from the data, as exemplified by Sinergise.
Third, we're investing in R&D to develop the solutions that customers need. You've heard from Kevin how we continue to build our software platform, enabling customers to reduce time to value and expand TAM.
We're also investing behind our next-generation satellite fleet, which will help power our platform for the next decade. With three deals signed last year with over $10 million in ACV anchored by our high-resolution SkySat data, we're feeling the market's pull. Development for our high-resolution Pelican satellites is ramping up this year, and we're excited to be launching our first tech demos. We'll also launch the first of our tech demos of our hyperspectral fleet, Tanager, which supports our partnership with Carbon Mapper and NASA's JPL. We're doing all of this while staying focused on driving efficiency and profitability.
As since our founding, we've always practiced a faster, cheaper, better approach to aerospace. So efficiency is in our DNA. As an example, we recently became more streamlined with our SuperDove monitoring mission, resulting in greater efficiencies in fleet operations, data downlink to Earth, and even in data storage without any degradation in global coverage for our customers.
Overall, I want to emphasize that efficiency and driving to profitability are critical focus areas for this year, particularly against the current economic backdrop. We remain thoughtful and disciplined with capital allocation as always. Ashley will speak to this in more detail shortly. I want to underscore that we are fully committed to our path to profitability. To briefly summarize, we successfully executed against our plan for FY 2023, nearly tripling our revenue growth rate year-over-year.
Market demand for our solutions remains robust despite the broader and macroeconomic environment. Our strong finish to FY 23 as well as the secular tailwinds driving demand sets us up well for the year ahead. I'm excited for the year and confident in the team's ability to execute. Over to you, Ashley.
Thank you, Will, and thanks everyone for joining us today.
I'll start with a quick recap of our most recent results. As Will mentioned, our revenue for the Q4 of fiscal 2023 ending January 31st came in at $53 million, which represents 43% year-over-year growth. For the full fiscal year, revenue came in at $191.3 million, representing 46% year-over-year growth. Our end of period customer count grew to 882 customers, representing 15% year-over-year growth. Customers representing over $100,000 in ACV was our fastest-growing customer segment last year, growing 31% year-over-year. As you've heard today and on prior calls, our sales teams are prioritizing higher value accounts with the opportunity to expand over time.
We've seen the average annual contract value of our customers grow year-over-year during each of the last four quarters. As of the end of Q4, over 95% of our book of business consisted of annual or multi-year contracts. Our average contract length continues to be approximately two years, weighted on an annual contract value basis. This provides us with high visibility to future revenue. Net dollar retention rate at the end of fiscal year 2023 was 131%, and net dollar retention rate with win backs was 134%, compared to 108% and 116% respectively in fiscal year 2022.
We're very proud of the progress we've made on our retention rates, which has been directly correlated with high customer satisfaction, as reflected in an NPS score of 63 in our last reporting period.
Continued investments in our customer success and product teams have made this improvement possible and will remain a key area of focus for us. Turning to gross margin, we expanded our non-GAAP gross margin to 58% for the Q4 of fiscal 2023, compared to 42% in the prior year. We consistently expanded our gross margins quarter-over-quarter and year-over-year throughout the last year. Non-GAAP gross margin for the full fiscal year was 53% compared to 38% in the prior year.
The expansion of gross margins continues to be driven by the growth of revenue, the efficiency of our industry-leading Agile Aerospace approach, and our one-to-many data subscription business model. As a reminder, we include the depreciation and amortization of CapEx in our cost of goods sold, mirroring the practices of public SaaS businesses.
Adjusted EBITDA loss was $17.7 million for the quarter. For the full year, Adjusted EBITDA loss was $56.8 million. Better than we'd expected at the outset of fiscal 2023, driven by revenue upside and effective cost management. As you have heard from Will, we are increasingly focused on driving efficiency and profitability across all of our teams.
During the last year, you've seen how upside in our revenue flows through our gross margins and drops to the bottom line. We're approaching a scale where the leverage in our model enables us to consistently drive bottom-line improvement, and we are targeting quarterly EBITDA profitability no later than the end of fiscal 2025 or calendar 2024, while continuing to invest to maintain our competitive lead in the market.
Turning to the balance sheet, we ended the quarter with $409 million of cash equivalents, and short-term investments, which we continue to believe provides us with sufficient capital to invest behind our growth accelerating initiatives without needing to raise additional capital. We also continue to have no debt outstanding. Capital expenditures, including capitalized software development, were $2 million for the quarter and $12.8 million for the year, or approximately 4% of revenue for the quarter and 7% of revenue for the full year. This is lower than we had anticipated, primarily due to the timing of procurements.
At the end of Q4, our remaining performance obligations, or RPOs, were approximately $152 million, of which approximately 75% apply to the next 12 months and 98% to the next two years.
A $21 million increase versus last quarter, driven primarily by large contracts entered into in Q4. As a reminder, RPOs may fluctuate quarter to quarter as multi-year contracts come up for renewal. Please keep in mind that our reported RPOs exclude the value associated with the EOCL contract, as well as other contracts that include a termination for convenience clause, which is common in our federal contracts. Our government contracts are often multi-year and provide us with a high degree of visibility to future results. I'd like to echo Will's and Kevin's excitement in welcoming the Sinergise team. Sinergise brings to Planet a team of approximately 80, the majority of which are software engineers.
We see significant upside potential from revenue synergies over time. We expect to offer Sentinel Hub to our existing Planet customers and to drive the attach rate of high-margin processing solutions sold alongside Planet's data.
We view this deal as financially compelling, neutral to Planet's EPS in fiscal 2024, and accretive in fiscal 2025. It is subject to closing conditions, and we expect it to close during Q2 of this year. As we turn to guidance, the overall macroeconomic climate remains uncertain. While our products often help customers boost efficiencies and address critical global issues, we don't consider ourselves immune to macro pressures. We believe we have factored these considerations into our guidance, including possible impacts on renewals and timing of new business, particularly on the commercial side.
As we enter fiscal 2024, our book of business and visibility has improved year-over-year, driven primarily by multiple multi-year government contracts that we signed last year. Our committed revenue represents over 60% of our revenue guidance before factoring in renewals, new business, and any revenue from the acquisition of Sinergise.
To underpin our forecast for new business, we have a strong pipeline for fiscal 2024, including 45 qualified deals with annual contract values of over $1 million or greater. For the Q1 of fiscal 2024, we expect revenue of $51 million-$54 million, which represents growth of approximately 31% year-over-year at the midpoint. We expect non-GAAP gross margin for Q1 of 53%-55%, up from 45% in Q1 of fiscal 2023.
Our adjusted EBITDA loss for the Q1 is expected to be between -$21 million and -$18 million. We expect capital expenditures of approximately $10 million-$13 million, primarily related to procurements for the Pelican program, some of which were rolled over from the prior quarter.
Our outlook for lower revenue seasonality in Q1 reflects expected caution on the part of commercial customers as they navigate economic uncertainties and the conclusion of a previously significant legacy contract early in the quarter. We are discussing new and evolved opportunities with this customer and will share more at the appropriate time. For the full fiscal year ending January 31st, 2024, we expect revenue to be between $248 million and $268 million, or growth of 30%-40% year-over-year.
As we have discussed in the past, we build our forecast assuming new business signings are back-half weighted, which results in revenue weighted toward the second half of the year. The high end of our guidance also assumes we close our acquisition of Sinergise in Q2. Our non-GAAP gross margin is expected to be between 57% and 61%.
Adjusted EBITDA loss is expected to be between negative $47 million and negative $37 million, reflecting continued investment in enhancing and expanding our core products while also maintaining our path to profitability in fiscal year 2025. We expect CapEx to be approximately $45 million-$55 million or approximately 18%-21% of revenue. As we discussed at our Investor Day last fall, we have the ability to flex CapEx based on market demand, thanks to our Agile Aerospace approach.
We believe this is a competitive advantage and a significant financial advantage of our business model. As with Q1, the step-up in CapEx for the year is driven primarily by investments in our Pelican program. Given the levels of demand we're seeing for high-resolution data, we're continuing to invest behind our Pelican fleet and its related infrastructure.
This year, we plan to build and launch our Pelican tech demos, order components for our first block of operational satellites, and upgrade our ground stations. We also anticipate launching our first Tanager demo satellite for the exciting Carbon Mapper program. We continue to focus on capital efficiency and target a payback period of less than one year for all of our production satellites.
We're confident that the enhanced capabilities of our Pelican fleet, as well as the unique data captured by our Tanager fleet, will capture market share, grow addressable market, and advance our leadership position. To close, I'd just like to say that it was a strong year for Planet in a tough economic landscape. I'm proud of Planeteers around the globe and the contributions they make toward building an amazing mission-aligned and high-margin company.
We're executing on our path to profitability thanks to their focus and dedication. We remain confident in the demand for our market-defining datasets, feel the effects of the market tailwinds across peace and security, sustainability, and digitization of end markets, and believe we're well positioned to continue capturing the vast opportunity ahead of us. Operator, that concludes our comments. We can now take questions.
Certainly. If you would like to ask a question, please press star followed by one on your telephone keypad. If for any reason you would like to remove that question, please press star followed by two. Again, to ask a question, press star one. As a reminder, if you are using a speakerphone, please remember to pick up your handset before asking your question. We will pause here briefly as questions are registered.
The first question of Michael Latimore with Northland. You may proceed.
All right. Thank you. congratulations on the strong year. In terms of the Sinergise acquisition, I guess, did you say that the upper end of guidance assumes it closes on time? Maybe can you talk a little bit about how much revenue you would expect from Sinergise in guidance?
Great. Thanks for the question. In terms of the guidance, basically we have given ourselves flexibility in terms of how much revenue once we have a chance for getting to the closing balance sheet on the day of actual close and understanding the deferred revenue balance that's remaining, as well as the timing of that revenue recognition. We can achieve the midpoint of our guidance, assuming no close, obviously.
The amount of upside from there really depends on a lot of different factors, including timing of new business outside of Sinergise, as well as the timing of closing that transaction.
Okay, great. Makes sense. In the past, you talked a little bit about fully ramped sales headcount. Kind of where does that stand now, and where might you expect that to be by year-end?
We're obviously very pleased with the hiring that the team's been doing across the board. We're above the numbers that we had set for ourselves as a goal of the year. We're over 50 and continue to bring new team members on because we continue to see strong market opportunity that we want to set the teams up to capture.
If I can just add, the strong execution of the go-to-market team has been fantastic. You're seeing that in the NPS score that Ashley mentioned, our win rates increasing. It's really great to see the execution. It's not just obviously about the number of reps, it's across the board.
Great. Thanks a lot. Thanks very much.
No problem.
Thank you.
Thank you, Mr. Latimore.
The next question is from the line of Ryan Koontz with Needham. You may proceed.
Hi, thanks for the question. congratulations on a great year, particularly on the gross margin expansion. It's really great to see that the one to many really working out. On the guidance, it looks like Q1 is a little light in terms of the linearity there in the year. Ashley, you mentioned there was a renewal there that was kind of hanging in the balance. Can you give any more color on that? I might have missed some of the detail you shared there in your prepared comments.
Thanks for the question, Ryan. Yes, Q1 seasonality is impacted in particular by a legacy contract from many years back that reached its completion in early Q1. Just to provide a little bit of color, this contract contributed approximately $3 million per quarter in fiscal 2023. We remain engaged in continued conversations with them and still have a very positive relationship, given that we have not renewed that contract, and really are not anticipating it renewing at that same magnitude, we've only included the tail of the contract in our guidance for the year, which was relatively small.
Got it. Super.
Customer into the NDRR. It's a combination of what we talked about, investing in the customer success team, investments in the product, really driving stronger gross renewal rates. Then our focus on landing those customers, we receive strong opportunity to expand and see significant expansions. Some of the larger contracts that were referenced in his prepared remarks, were expansion contracts. That obviously has a tremendous effect on our NDRR. It's across the board both, you know, the sourcing that we're doing up front and focusing our sales team around customers where we know we can drive value, and then the execution of the teams on the back end on delivering that value.
If I could just add to the very first point you brought up about the gross margins expansion. We're very pleased with that as well. 15 percentage points year-on-year is really meaningful. we set our long-term sort of, ideal financial profile, which looks like a SaaS company, not a space company, and we're really getting meaningfully towards that. I hope people have can see that progress as being really positive.
Absolutely. That's really great. That's all I have. Thank you.
Great. Thank you.
Cheers.
Thank you, Mr. Koontz.
The next question is a question from the line of Jeff Van Rhee with Craig-Hallum. You may proceed.
Great. Thanks for taking my questions. I've got several. I wanna circle back a second to Sinergise, just a few more questions there. Customer count, number of users, price paid, cash deal, can you fill in a few more gaps there? Then if you would, just spend a second longer on the cross-sell, maybe a little clearer example of an existing customer and how you're gonna come into them, why they would want these products, and what they're using now.
Maybe I can just kick it off by saying that, you know, there are thousands of users on this platform already, and it really helps us to get to that longer tail of smaller users, easing the ability and speed to get your first application. Ashley, maybe you can talk to the financial pieces. Kevin's here, maybe you can talk a little bit to the other pieces too.
Just financially it's a roughly approximately $45 million deal with a mix of cash and stock. We expect it, as I mentioned, to be neutral to EPS in fiscal 2024, and, you know, accretive next year.
As far as customers attaching to Sinergise, we see a meaningful opportunity for Sinergise to speed time to value for our customers in general, as well as make Planet products stickier. I gave the example of the agriculture customer in my prepared remarks. That is currently having to devote meaningful engineering resources to building their own pipeline to leverage the work they're doing with Planet data. In a combined Planet plus Sinergise world, they would be able to do all of that and stream it directly into their platform just using Sinergise APIs.
Our plan is to offer Sinergise solutions to both new and renewing customers. We'll be looking to drive a high attach rate of their high-margin compute solutions alongside Planet's data. There are already a number of joint customers. I'm looking forward to seeing that expand as we join forces.
Okay. two other questions, if I could. It sounds like as you're reflecting on what you're gonna do here with Pelican, you talked about a tasking constrained world. What's going on in Ukraine, I guess I would ask, how broad is the constraint? Clearly, everybody that can get imagery over Ukraine is probably very busy right now. Talk about, like, the breadth of the constraints on tasking right now.
Broadly, that system, we are building it more and more to be a one-to-many system. Yes, it's a task satellite system, but we've now got a tasking aggregated such that when there's many users in one area, actually, they take one strip of images that covers many of those tasks in one go, actually concentration becomes back into our advantage again. It's a nuanced thing. Obviously Pelican is aiming to relieve and add more capacity to that. Presently, we still have the potential in many regions, and we're seeing a lot of demand for that. As I mentioned in my prepared remarks, we did 3 deals last year, over $10 million in ACV each, which were driven by SkySat.
That just gives you a sense of the pull that we're feeling. Many of our customers, of course, are using both SkySat and the PlanetScope data. Don't know if anyone's got anything to add to that. No?
Does that answer your question?
It does. I guess just last with pipeline. Just, you touched on the numbe of.
Yeah.
Seven figure deals. If you could, maybe just contrast kind of what the pipe looks like now, maybe 6 or 12 months ago in terms of just the vertical sort of target markets that are seeing the most uptake or improvement and those that might be fading.
I would say the quick answer is stronger and more robust, bigger. I mean, you mentioned the 7-figure deals. That's right. We've got 45 of those, and they're all qualified deals. I'm really excited about that and it cross commercial, civil government, and defense and intelligence. Kevin, you've been around the world a lot. Anything to add to that?
Just to add briefly, I've spent a bunch of time on the road this year. I've been in Asia. I've been in Europe twice. I've been in D.C. a number of times and around the U.S. We're seeing broad-based demand in our core verticals in areas like agriculture, civil gov, defense and intelligence because of the unique data we have. As we go up the data pyramid, as we provide Planetary Variables, we're opening up new verticals, and with insurance as an example, we have both AXA and Swiss Re now using our Soil Water Content Planetary Variable to create a drought insurance product for farmers. Will talked about PG&E now using the Vegetation Encroachment Planetary Variable. That's new demand. Those kind of products aren't just for new customers.
They're also, they also open up new opportunities with existing customers. Just imagine defense and intelligence, for example, monitoring large areas that you can't do without, artificial intelligence. Now with the advent and the acceleration of AI, we're seeing expansion opportunities with existing customers and existing verticals as well.
If I could just add to that, though we've noted some caution in the commercial business, we're still seeing a lot of those deals come in at pace. You know, the couple of areas that Kevin was just mentioning are really strong one. AXA, the CEO, was here just this week, and we were talking about this drought insurance and expanding our partnership there. We mentioned PG&E. We didn't mention that we signed another Fortune 500 utility company out this year, this quarter, sorry. We're expanding into that sector. A s Kevin's saying, as we go up the stack, we start to open up these vertical markets outside our core ones.
Mm-hmm. Very helpful. Thank you.
Thanks, Jeff. Thank you, Mr. Van Rhee.
Once again, to ask a question, press star one.
The next question is from the line of Noah Poponak with Goldman Sachs. You may proceed.
Hello, everyone.
Hey.
Hey, Noah.
Ashley, what, can you speak to the customer count growth that you are anticipating or embedding in your in your outlook for this year?
Yes. That's a tough one to predict. Obviously Sinergise brings a different element in terms of, you know, our ability to service smaller customers at greater scale or with greater efficiency. What really I think the relevant question is how do we think about the, you know, what part of our business is gonna be coming from expansions within our, within our base versus new business?
I think in that sense it's really less about how many logos we're adding, but are we adding the right logos with the right opportunity to expand to set us up for continued growth next year? I would expect the same type of growth where a lot of the growth is coming from expansion from these very large multi-million dollar deals from our existing customer base, complemented by continuing to bring on new customers that have this potential in some of both the existing core markets, like civ gov and defense and intelligence, as well as all these new commercial markets that Kevin outlined, and then seeing those accounts just grow quarter after quarter. Kevin, anything to add?
I agree with all that. Just to maybe build on it for a second. At our last Analyst Day, Charlie Candy, who's our CRO, spent some time talking about how we're really trying to focus on use cases where we can deliver great ROI and proven economic outcomes, opportunities that we're going to then renew and expand. There's a lot of focus within the commercial team on saying no to good leads in order to say yes to the best leads. That's reflected in the pipeline numbers that you see here with 45 deals over $1 million in size.
I guess, I appreciate all that, and that all makes a lot of sense. You want the right customers. You want sticky, long-term, profitable, recurring customers that can expand the wallet over time. I guess on the other hand, you know, just given where you are in the life cycle of the company relative to the aspirations for longer term size of revenue base, why should I not be concerned with the somewhat slower customer count growth last year versus total revenue growth
I can, Okay.
Agree with everything you just said, but you need to have, still would need to have significant customer count growth to get much better.
Yeah. No, I mean, there's no question that we need to continue that e-expansion of number of customers. Again, we're focusing on the use cases that really work and expanding deals within the ones that we have and that's working really solidly. No doubt in the long term, we have to get there. We believe that a lot of that sort of growth expansion will come from with this, as we get better and better on our platform side as well.
Look, it's really about focus, as opposed to, you know, I mean, there's a lot of opportunities, but we are now focusing on the ones that really makes the most sense for now because we can get really strong growth on, from them.
I think we've also been very disciplined in our marketing spend.
Okay.
As we talked to before, a lot of our pipeline is inbound, and we're just shifting this year to more, you know, leaning in more into what we're seeing as market opportunity and investing more in our marketing. We've obviously got our Explore conference coming up, where we'll have a number of prospects. It's that leaning into the opportunity set that we see, but also, you know, making sure that we're always being very prudent with the amount that we're spending.
Okay. Ashley, is your forecast now to be break even or positive EBITDA in fiscal 25 for the year, or just on a quarterly basis exiting the year?
The focus is on ensuring that we get to it at least on a quarterly basis in fiscal 25.
As Ashley often says, we've got a lot of levers in here and pushing a telecom program faster or slower and things like this. A lot of that is in our control.
I guess what's the bridge between that, or even the 2024 EBITDA and what the plan was during the stack process? Is it really just that, you know, there's kind of just a fine line at that tipping point of positive based on exactly where the revenue and margin lands in a given year?
Obviously the world is dramatically different than it was two years ago when we put our model out there, and I think we're proud of the fact that we've been executing very well against those numbers. You know, at this point, we are looking at both, you know, the economic environment that's in front of us, the really strong execution that we're seeing from the team, the opportunities to invest in new market opportunities, and giving you the guidance that, you know, we have high confidence in.
That's right. I really believe Planet as a team is executing really well, and we continue to see this strong demand even on the commercial side, despite the deliver, of course, on that, and certainly on the government side as well. So that's why we're putting what we think is a very strong growth forecast which we feel confident in delivering on this year.
Okay.
Yeah.
Just one last one. Are there a lot of inorganic opportunities on the data analytics platform side of, you know, within that effort or are those hard to find?
Well, look, we said we would look always, diligently around, and we'll continue to be open to new acquisitions, but we're gonna be very selective and very diligent in it and frankly, mainly focused on our internal, work, for the time being.
Okay. thanks very much.
No problem.
Great. Thank you, Noah.
Thank you, Mr. Poponak.
The next question is from the line of Edison Yu with Deutsche Bank. You may proceed.
Thank you for taking our questions. First off, I want to ask about some industry developments. Obviously, we've had a bit of time to digest the Maxar take private. I'm wondering, from what you're seeing, have you witnessed any changes in the, you know, competitive dynamics in the customer feedback? Just kind of curious what you've seen kind of three or four months after now that's been out there for a while.
I don't think that has changed the macroscopic opportunities we're seeing. We have been seeing continued improvement in our win rates where we have head-to-head competition.
The main thing is that we offer something completely different, right? Which is our PlanetScope provides the daily scan of the Earth. I think we estimated it as about 100 times more collection area than any of the other commercial providers. 100x, right? It's a totally different system. It's the scan of the Earth versus a task model. We also have the task system, but that scan is what is enabling a lot of these AI applications, a lot of the defense and intelligence applications we're seeing looking around the corner. It's allowing the broad scale agricultural applications. It's allowing the broad scale civil response to disasters and things like that.
A lot of the use cases, and including the exciting new ones with AI, are backed off the daily scan, which is completely unique still.
Understood.
Did that answer your question?
So in relation, you know, we've also seen, I think, several pretty prominent EO satellites, basically just not get deployed properly, right? You had Airbus lose two high res ones. I think Japan lost, you know, a $200+ million one. Does that perhaps give you some more incentive to, you know, deploy Pelican faster? Or do you think, or is the timeline still kind of where you initially thought?
Well, look, I mean, you know, it just reminds us that space is really hard. These, these challenges do occur. Our approach is a little bit different than most of those other players in the sense of deploying many more satellites. So the risk associated with any particular launch tends to be lower. You know, the broader point is that how we use Agile Aerospace, which is this sort of early release offer, enabling us to get to much, much better cost or capabilities per dollar on our satellites than others have ever been able to achieve.
I thought this was a really interesting McKinsey report that just came out today highlighting where that transition is and pointing to the fact that that transition, again, you know, on satellites is with several zeros, right. It's 100x or 1,000x, whereas very few industries go undergo that sort of transformation. Planet has this unique approach that makes us a little bit less dependent on any one particular launch. Yeah, I mean, we're certainly encouraged to your other point about Pelican to push that program fast because we are feeling that demand, as I said in my remarks.
Yeah. I think the shift that this is also pointing to is just commercial markets and the availability.
Right.
of that kind of commercial data is the future of the Earth observation industry. You know, the activity, the events of last year really pointed to that.
Yeah.
I think this just underscores that.
Got it. If I could sneak one financial one in there. I know you mentioned, you know, the macro softness, you know, having some impact. Any way you can quantify that to or drill further into how much is embedded into the outlook as it pertains to that macro uncertainty?
Here's the way I'd say it, Edison, is, you know, we build our model the same way every year. We start with the book of business that's committed, and then we look at what's coming up for renewal. You know, really by the nature of our business, we can do that almost on a, an account by account basis and get a very strong sense of, you know, what are our customers going through, who's likely to be in those budgetary pressures, where do we know we've delivered a lot of value and we have an opportunity to upsell. That kind of drives our assumptions around our renewal rates and then our expansion opportunities.
We just try to layer on conservatism on around the timing of new business, just given, you know, that there are a lot of factors out there, even though what we actually see more than anything is what Kevin described, the pull from, you know, the need for our data. Balancing that with the caution of just a generally uncertain macroeconomic environment.
Maybe just to add a bit from the perspective of the customer, we talked about commercial deals that we closed, like PG&E, AXA, Swiss Re, that are leveraging some of our new Planetary Variables. We see a resilient commercial market even beyond that. Just during Q4, we also won contracts with one of the largest global management consulting firms. Will mentioned the Fortune 500 energy and utility company above and beyond PG&E. There's also a large multinational technology company in Japan, multiple large customers in the agricultural industry, so I could go on. Certainly there's some degree of caution, we see a lot of strength in the commercial market even despite that. Great. Appreciate the insights.
Thank you, Mr. Yu.
Thank you.
Once again, to ask a question, press star one. The next question is from the line of Katherine Knop with B. Riley. You may proceed.
Hi there. T hank you for taking the questions today. I don't know if I've missed this or potentially you may not even give this information, but do you have any percentage breakdown in terms of customer type in your backlog?
Not in the backlog. We do talk about it in the revenue. slide 17 on the deck that we shared, it gives the rough breakdown. Ashley, anything you wanted to highlight on that?
As Will said, we have a lot of these kinds of details in the deck that we share on our investor relations website.
Okay. Then just nothing in terms of the backlog breakdown?
No, we do not.
Okay. Sounds good. Thank you.
Thank you.
Katherine?
Thank you, Ms. Knop. That concludes the question and answer session. I will now turn the call over to Will Marshall for any closing remarks.
Well, thank you everyone for joining. Look, I'm very proud of our achievements this year. A really strong execution by our team, especially the nearly tripling our revenue growth rate, and the gross margins expansion that was highlighted. Look, I think the market for Planet's data remains strong and robust. The secular tailwinds that we talk about, digital transformation, sustainability transformation, peace and security are strong. That's why we're putting forth a strong growth plan this year, despite the macro, and I'm confident in the team's ability to execute. Thanks very much for tuning in.
That concludes today's Planet Labs PBC Fiscal Year 2023 earnings call. Thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect your line.