Sure, we're ready to go. Great. Welcome to Needham's 20th Annual Growth Conference. I'm Ryan Koontz. I cover the space sector here at Needham. Real excited to have Planet with us here today. Planet is a leading provider of global daily satellite imagery and geospatial solutions. We're joined by President Ashley Johnson and CFO. Ashley Johnson? They're both here. Welcome, Ashley.
Thank you. Thanks for having us here.
Nice to see you. And what a great year it's been. We'll talk about that. But first, we had some news this week with your new big customer win, a new sovereign government win. Can you walk us through what you announced, briefly?
Yeah, we were really proud to announce this week a partnership with the Swedish Air Force. They will be procuring a bundle of services from us, which include everything from sovereign satellites that they will purchase from us, as well as access to our Daily Scan, other data services, as well as analytics. So it was announced as a low nine-figure deal. We expect it to be over roughly five to seven years. But importantly, it's a signal of the urgency that you're hearing from nations around the world for the need to have their own intelligence capabilities, their own eyes in the sky, to understand what's going on, to make sure that they have the proper preparedness, as well as to optimize the assets that they're procuring as they continue to enhance their own defense capabilities.
Yeah, incredible. That's a third. We'll get back to it, but that's a third major brick to fall, so that's fantastic.
Hits keep coming.
Excellent. Love it. Let's look back first at 2025. You had two other big deals here with Germany and JSAT serving the Japanese government. As you mentioned, the sovereign solutions are a critical part of your TAM going forward. Can you walk us through those deals, how they're similar, how they're the same relative to Sweden, and what they do for Planet as a company, giving financial strength?
Yeah, I'm happy to. These deals are meaningful. We talk about them as a win-win-win, and I genuinely mean that, in that, for one, for Planet, it enables us to access hardware budgets within governments, which tend to be much bigger than services budgets, or especially data budgets. Two, it enables us to align the cash inflows with our own expenses on building out the constellations. And you've seen that represented in the fact that we achieved free cash flow positive a year earlier than we anticipated. And for our customers, one, it enables them to move very quickly towards having their own intelligence capabilities. If it's important to them, they can say they have a sovereign satellite, so they're effectively putting their flag on the satellite. I'll talk about the different types of ways that we structure these.
For all of our customers, it means we're getting faster to that 30th fleet of Pelicans. With 30 Pelicans, we can deliver 30 cm imagery at 30 x a day revisit rate and 30-minute latency. That is a huge competitive advantage. It is a huge intelligence asset to our partners. In terms of the different ways that we're selling them, it's effectively we're meeting the customers where they are. If a customer wants to just buy tasking credits and utilize our commercial satellites, obviously, that is still a primary offering of Planet. For procurers, sometimes it's just easier to access these hardware budgets or access services budgets. These are structured in that we're still using our own design. These are our satellites, our standard satellites. We're designing and building them ourselves, and then we are operating them on behalf of the customer.
So in terms of deal structure, they can buy it as a sovereign satellite. In that scenario, from an accounting perspective, it's like hardware revenue recognition and hardware expense recognition. We don't capitalize the assets. It's expensed as revenue is recognized, and that revenue is aligned to delivery milestones. In some cases, though, a customer wants dedicated assets. They want primacy in a certain area. They want exclusivity in a certain area for a certain number of satellites, but they don't need to own it. And in fact, being able to move more quickly and getting dedicated access in satellites that are already in space or ready to launch enables them to achieve this capability faster and still get everything that they are looking for. So we call those dedicated capacity contracts. Again, it's very similar in offering to selling tasking credits or selling the satellite from an accounting perspective.
It's ratable revenue recognition over the term of the contract and effectively aligns our data sales to the lifetime of the satellite. So again, it's great for Planet in having long-term visibility, having a lock-in with these customers, using this as a tip of the spear to upsell other services like our Daily Scan and analytics. And for our customers, an incredible value proposition of being able to stand up an intelligence capability quickly, cost-effectively, and guaranteed to get all of the improvements that we build into the next and the next and the next Pelican. So again, win-win-win.
How about for your balance sheet?
It's been great for our balance sheet. Our backlog has grown nicely. So as of the last quarter, I think the stat was year over year close to 300% growth. It's been incredible for us to have that long-term visibility to the revenue streams and be able to give forward year color in terms of growth rate as early as we were able to do it this year. And cash flow positive is a fantastic place to be, and it's where we intend to stay and grow. So as we, again, build out this fleet of constellation in a much more cash flow positive manner, we're also continuing to monetize it. We retain the license rights to sell rest of world capacity, which again gets us to that 30-30-30 very competitively advantaged capability, which we can then sell to commercial customers, government customers, other D&I customers.
In fact, we could sell it to other dedicated capacity customers, and that is very cash flow positive and very high margin revenue streams.
Yeah, incredible. Maybe we'll just reflect on the evolution of Planet from a satellite operator to a data company now to a solutions and AI platform company. Maybe can you walk us through a little bit of history on that transformation that we've seen arrive?
Yeah. I mean, it really is a case study that should be a business school class. But the founders came out of NASA, and they saw an opportunity to disrupt the way things were done because, frankly, they were frustrated by it. Why would you want ancient technology on something as important as observing the planet and understanding what's going on? You wouldn't even want that for your cell phone for taking pictures of your dog. So in order to bring the latest technologies into the satellites, you have to reduce the cost, shorten the useful life, and have a much more agile approach. Distributed architecture has a lot of advantages from a capital risk profile all the way through to defensibility with things that can go awry in space, either human-generated or nature-generated.
And so that was the first innovation of just changing the paradigm of how you put satellites in space. And you've seen that's now been adopted across other industries.
You brought agile development.
We brought agile development and distributed architectures to space. And then the idea of this is a commercial service, so it doesn't need to be a very exquisite classified asset, one, because it's not as expensive. So it's actually commercially viable from a cost perspective. But also, there's a lot of benefits to that, even to our government defense customers, because if it's classified, they can't share it with allies in most cases. But if it's a commercial asset, they can easily share that. So the ability to quickly disseminate information where it needs to be, when it needs to be there, the service that we offer has a great advantage. And from a business model perspective, the one-to-many model is obviously much more profitable than when you have a finite capacity that you have to sell to the highest bidder.
So disrupting the business model around Earth observation was kind of the next step that we did. And then the final step is really that crossing the chasm from the early adopters who were fascinated by the science and fascinated by what you could do if you could see change on Earth every single day. If anybody's ever watched, or I should say, if anybody hasn't seen Will's TED Talk from 2013 or 2015, somewhere like that, where he says, "What would you do if you could see changes on the Earth every single day?" Well, now we answer that question for our customer with solutions.
We come in and we say, "You have this problem statement." And it used to be, "You could solve that with satellite data." And if we bring a partner in and we work together, we build a solution, we can make that happen for you. We did a great example of that with monitoring the Brazilian deforestation with the Brazilian government and working with a partner, SCCON, to build a solution to understand what's permitted and not permitted, reduce the signal-to-noise, or improve the signal-to-noise ratio, rather, and build something that has been renewing and expanding and is a really proud achievement of that government.
Now we can, over the weekend, build a demo using AI that would take publicly available information about permitting and what we can see in our daily data about what's actually happening, marry those two together, and show the customer, "If you're not collecting all the permit revenue that you're owed, or if things are happening in places that they shouldn't be, we can show you this in an initial meeting through a demo. Imagine what we could do if we work together." We're crossing the chasm to talking about what-ifs, to talking about value propositions within customers across defense and intelligence, civil government, and commercial. That has been incredibly focusing for us as a company, and it's been a growth accelerator that we see really rapidly expanding the TAM in front of us.
Yeah, a couple of years ago, you announced a strategic shift to double down on defense and intel, and boy, it's paid off in spades. So big props for that. Can you kind of walk us through where you got to in that point and the bets you made and changes in go-to-market and how they're paying off?
Sure. I mean, part of it was just understanding where that very clear product-market fit and competitive differentiation was, so if you think about what we're offering, one, it's satellite imagery. So where is satellite imagery having a competitive advantage over others? Well, one is when it's very broad, and two is when you're not exactly sure where you need to be looking. Our Daily Scan has a competitive advantage, certainly over drone, airplane, or other similar assets, but it has an advantage over high resolution and other tasking assets because if you don't know where to look, you don't task there, and you certainly don't have the information from yesterday once you realize you should have been. But with our Daily Scan, we have that information. Well, where is that clearly a strong value proposition? You take a look at recent global events.
If you could have predicted that something had happened ahead of time, could you have taken different actions? And we're able to demonstrate that, again, showing activities that were happening inside Russia's industrial base that could have been early warning indicators of military buildup. Obviously, once you see military in motion, everybody sees it. That's not news. But what if you could have known that was happening before it actually happened and intervened in a different way? And that's the what-if that has a really strong value proposition because the what-if is incredible.
Like rewinding time.
Connectedness, policy, diplomacy, etc. The clear opportunity for us is to demonstrate the differentiated value of the Daily Scan, especially in a moment where defense budgets are increasing and global insecurity is on the rise. There is a clear opportunity for us, and focus made a lot of sense. At the same time, we do continue to build out in parts of civil government where we know we have been solving problems, and it's just a matter of unlocking budgets. In certain sectors of the commercial market, although I will say we've throttled that a little bit, we reduced our go-to-market investment as we build out these solutions, and as it becomes easier to build them out with AI, we can then choose the spaces within the commercial landscape to now start to increase our investment.
And again, we see that as an acceleration opportunity in the relatively near term, but probably more like FY28 and beyond.
Yeah, and your defense business is up like 50%.
Defense business is doing very well, and we're really proud of the impact we're able to have.
Yeah, incredible. On the civil, you gave a good example of permitting. Can you walk us through some other civil-type use cases that's been another area of strength for you?
Sure. I mean, it's disaster responses, one that immediately comes to mind. Again, when you think about having information about the areas that you didn't know to be looking and then using that to understand, well, where else do I need to be looking? Obviously, emergency response, natural disasters, movements of people. We work in some civil agencies in understanding concentrations of people for things like understanding pandemic outbreak risk, malaria tracking across Africa. So we work with European governments on their Common Agricultural Policy . They have a policy around sustainable tilling where they want to issue subsidies to farmers that are doing sustainable tilling practices. Small horticultures across an entire nation-state is very hard to monitor using boots on the ground or even airplanes.
But with satellite imagery, we're actually able to create those field boundaries and have markers that say yes or no effectively to, is this practice being followed or is it not? And then they can appropriately pay out subsidies without worrying about it, but also enforce where it's not happening. So those are examples of the type of work we're doing with civil government, and the use cases can extend into all sorts of branches.
In the commercial side, I think you backed off on building a lot of your own solutions and using more partners to go after the commercial sector.
Yes. So we do have strength in the agricultural sector, insurance sector, and energy. We're looking at places where either working with partners or, as I mentioned, leveraging the speed at which you can build out new capabilities with AI, we can start to tap into things like global supply chain monitoring on behalf of any company that's got a complex global supply chain that they need to make highly resilient. So there are a lot of new areas that we can see opportunities in front of us. As a relatively small company, though, we're focused and staging how we make those investments.
Yeah, great. And relative to these sovereign deals like Sweden, you talked about a decent-sized pipeline of opportunities there.
Yes. At our analyst day, we talked about we had about 20 opportunities in the pipeline with an average ACV of 100, or sorry, TCV of $170 million. And on the last earnings call, Will had mentioned that roughly half a dozen of those that are in kind of active pursuit, and Sweden is an example of one that we were able to close.
Excellent. Right before our.
We tried to make sure that we timed that press release appropriately.
Nice job. Relative to your balance sheet here, you got, I think, Japan and Germany were pre-payments. So that was a nice boost to your balance sheet there.
Yeah, payments aligned to milestones.
Yep, and then you also had a raise, a funding raise, a convert. Can you walk us through that and why it's important?
Yeah. It's one of those things I mentioned repeatedly that we were very focused on being self-funded and very committed to that. And there are times when market dynamics shift in a way that you have to say, well, there are reasons to make exceptions. And the convertible markets were obviously very hot last summer. And the terms that started to be put in front of us were quite attractive. And we were able to make those terms even tighter. So we ultimately went out to raise. I forget where we started. I want to say $300 million, ultimately upsized it to $400 plus a green shoe, so $460 million at a 50 basis points interest rate, very attractive cost of capital. We used part of that to offset dilution by purchasing a capped call, which puts the effective strike price at $18.04. So very strong capital raise.
Why was that important? I think you've got some next-generation constellations coming along you want to fund and.
Yeah, although, as you've noticed, we've found ways to fund that without needing to deplete our balance sheet, and we are very focused on maintaining a cash flow positive business, but if you think about it from a competitive perspective, if you're standing in front of a government that's looking to make a very long-term bet on you as a partner, showing up with a balance sheet like we have, as well as very strong financials and a diversified customer base, makes us a much more attractive partner and makes that decision-making a lot easier, so it was a competitive asset for us. It also just gives us some flexibility as we think about strategic moves we might want to make as we see opportunity. We have that capital available to us while the markets were open. Markets aren't always open.
So it was a very strategic move, very proud of the team that executed it. And yeah, we're excited. It also had an ancillary benefit of attracting new investors to our story. So we weren't on a lot of radar screens, and that put us on the radar screen, and I think that's helped our institutional shareholder base as well.
Definitely, definitely. With regards to your satellite constellations, you've got the Daily Scan, the SuperDoves, and you've got your tasking fleet out there, constellation out there today. You've made some announcements of next-generation constellations as well. Can you walk us through those?
Yeah. So I want to make sure we don't miss our hyperspectral fleet because that was also funded by a third party and ultimately effectively a similar pre-buy or satellite service buy from the state of California to do monitoring of methane emissions. But yes, we made an announcement in the fall about the opportunity for Owl. So Owl would be the upgrade to the Doves, so the Daily Scan. Daily Scan is currently three-meter class imagery. What the Owl is designed for is one-meter class imagery. So that opens a lot of new markets for us. It provides capabilities certainly that nobody else has. Nobody else has a Daily Scan. They certainly don't have it at one meter. It widens the competitive moat. It introduces a lot of new analytic capabilities that we can perform, especially at the edge. So super Doves are relatively small satellites.
This would be a bigger satellite that would have the onboard compute and satellite-to-satellite communication. So think about improvements in latency and onboard analytics. And part of having that announcement out there, even while it's still in the development phase, is to get feedback from some of the customers, especially in some of these new market opportunities as to how valuable and differentiated this might be in ways that we might design it that would meet the market.
Can you remind us how you sell your product, how you package it up typically on a subscription basis and usage and how that kind of flows into your revenue?
Yeah. So we sell committed contracts. So even on a quote-unquote usage contract, a customer is buying a commitment typically to an annual or multi-year agreement. In the case of tasking of the high-res satellites, they buy tasking credits. And so as they use those credits, that translates to revenue. So you'll hear us from quarter to quarter talking about higher usage than anticipated, which can drive upside. We typically try to forecast that relatively conservatively. On the Daily Scan, we sell, we call it our monitoring product. So you buy access to a particular area. And then how you're using that data then will drive an increase in the price from that. So computations that you're running, analytic services you might be using, crop biomass and surface temperature, as well as the recency and frequency of that data that you require.
And then we have the ability to sell subscriptions to analytics on top of it. So our agricultural monitoring service or Area Monitoring Service that we sell to European customers, maritime domain awareness for tracking ship activities and open waters, as well as our Global Monitoring Service, which is looking at correlations of activities across sites in a broad geography. So these analytic services are very similar to very high-value SaaS sales.
We see some big changes in AI, obviously affecting the entire tech industry, but maybe can you expand on how it's changed your business?
Yeah, it's multidimensional. So on the one, we're consumers of AI. We're all using it internally, and we have regular learning days across the company to teach ways that our employees can make their jobs better, easier, faster, utilizing AI, kind of reduce the threat of AI from day-to-day employee life. It's not to replace jobs. It's to enhance them. We use them in our products. So as I talked about, we use analytics or AI to perform a lot of the analytics that we're doing. We made a small tuck-in acquisition of a company called Bedrock Research, which was doing some very interesting analytics that we had embedded in our global monitoring service product. And so that is an area that I'm very excited about.
We're looking at ways embeddings can change the way we store and process data, make it faster, lighter weight, more cost-efficient to store, and faster to calc or to compute, and then we're also looking, as we said, at how we embed it in our satellites themselves, which can do anything from real-time insights all the way through to just optimizing the fleet, so if it was a cloudy image, we know we need the next satellite to task it. We don't need to downlink that image, wait, and then run it again, which introduces latency and customer sat issues, but instead, right away, we know we need to do a recapture or the opposite. We caught it. We don't need to do it again, and it actually collected what we needed for three customers, not just one.
So there's a lot of ways that AI is making us better, stronger, both from a growth and a cost perspective.
Yeah. One of the latest buzz in the space industry has been putting data centers in space.
Oh, yeah, that. I heard about that.
How are you guys involved in that? And is it in your roadmap now to think about how you would interact with that opportunity?
Yeah. Funny you should ask, so Google announced that they're doing what's called Project Sun Catcher, which is to harness the power of the sun to potentially move data centers from terrestrial to space, and we are part of this Moonshot initiative and an R&D program. So it's an R&D project, which means it's not revenue. It's an offset to our R&D expenses, and we're launching two demo satellites for them to test out the ability to do these TPU, to put these TPUs in space to do cross-satellite computations and think about a distributed architecture for a data center in space, so it's very early days. It's super exciting. I think Planet was able to win that opportunity, which was competitive on the basis of, one, being one of the few companies that has actually operated a scaled fleet of satellites that work collectively, not individually.
Two, a lot of the work that we're doing around Owl is relevant to Project Sun Catcher in terms of the bus capabilities and some of the thinking that we're doing around everything from managing thermal load to size of solar panel arrays and computational power. There's obviously a lot more that's needed for this idea of a data center in space. And so we'll obviously be building that with them. And there's an opportunity that if and when this works, that that's an opportunity to really scale production, which would have ancillary benefits to our core business. But that's not on contract. That is years out. But we're really excited. It's a great partnership. And obviously, Google's been both a shareholder and a partner for many, many years. We host our data at GCP. So we were excited about it.
I think it's built on the Pelican bus?
No, Owl.
Oh, Owl bus, the new Owl bus. Outstanding. The competitive landscape, what's that been like for you? Obviously, there's a lot of competition in tasking. How does the Daily Scan differentiate your tasking product?
Yeah. It is quite the differentiation because you obviously know where you want to task, and having a high-resolution asset that can capture that when you want it is important. As I mentioned, as we get to 30 satellites, we're competitively differentiated in just the speed at which we can capture and produce that image and frequency, but the intelligence that we can get with the Daily Scan tells a customer when they maybe don't need to task. They have enough information from the Daily Scan, and can tell them somewhere else that they weren't thinking about tasking that maybe they should have been, and so it's that optimization of the assets that they have, whether they're our high-resolution assets or maybe their own SAR assets or classified assets or whatever else incremental they need to that Daily Scan.
But for those of you who attended our analyst day, you'd have heard the former Defense Minister of Ukraine talking about the fact that working with our Daily Scan and analytics enabled them to optimize their drone assets. So it goes far beyond how it makes our high-resolution offering more powerful. It makes their defense budgets more optimized generally.
More efficient. Great. You mentioned the acquisition of Bedrock. Can you tell us some more about that and what was behind it?
Yeah. So small company out of Colorado, a really exceptional team, many of them with classified access and a long history, I believe, in Lockheed Martin and working with multiple sensor data sets, but including medium resolution data. They were partnering with us in a certain capability in our Global Monitoring Service that they were able to do really well and at scale. And when we saw how they were doing it and the capabilities of that team, we moved very quickly to make them part of Planet. They're super culturally aligned. They're really smart. And they're very excited about all the different ways that you can take their capabilities and actually apply it in the commercial landscape and civil government landscape as well. So definitely a tuck-in acquisition, an acquihire, if you will, but I think a very strategic move.
Outstanding. And maybe rewinding back to the Sinergise acquisition as well, what you did there and for what markets?
Yeah. So the Sinergise team had built what was called Sentinel Hub. So they were primarily working with open data sets. They did have Planet data on their platform. Their founder is incredibly bright and knowledgeable about the space and often provided us feedback on ways we could make our pricing model simpler. We could make the data easier for other customers to use. So he's an incredible partner. And so their platform is something we have now integrated into our core Planet Insights Platform for self-service products. So for those smaller customers that we don't want sales reps spending time on, they can self-serve and access the data that they need and access other analytics. So that piece of it was great. The other piece is they actually brought to us this AMS product. So they were actually doing this and embedding these as web services through the platform.
So there's a lot of learnings that we're taking from them and embedding into how we're thinking about building out the next solution. So there's a lot of commonality. When you talk about signals and markers, that's actually very parallel to indicators and warning. So a lot of overlap between ultimately the functionality of these services just packaged to meet the market that they're serving and an incredible base of talent in Slovenia. So it gives us a stronger European presence, access to incredible talent, and a team that is super highly motivated. So it's turned out to be a great acquisition.
Yeah, so should we expect to continue to be inquisitive and add to the platform?
Strategically so.
Yeah. Outstanding. We have a few minutes. Happy to open the floor to any questions from the audience. Anybody have any questions? Yeah. Julie?
Congratulations on your sort of full success you've had and particularly the cash flow, positive cash flow.
Thank you.
Can you talk about the recurring or the ACV and why you see that sort of trending?
Yeah. So it's important to say when we talk about ACV, we're focused on the data subscriptions because when we sell the direct access service, so it's hardware revenue, it is recurring in that we're continuing an ongoing contract with that customer over multiple years, but it's not recurring in the way you think of SaaS metrics. So we exclude the portions of the contracts that look like that. But for direct access service, we're ratable over the term of the contract. And for other data contracts, we religiously monitor ACV as a metric, including net dollar retention rate. We look at gross retention metrics. We look at all of these metrics by end market. We look at it by product set, et cetera, because obviously the fastest and most effective way to grow the business is to land and expand with existing customers.
We are very sticky in the government sector. The challenge that we sometimes run into with those on the metrics we report is that governments are not great at on-time renewals. They can sometimes have procurement challenges. They can sometimes run into political budget challenges.
Shutdowns.
Shutdowns. I've heard that happen. So yeah. And those are big contracts. So you'll see that sometimes in my frustration around net dollar retention rates. Good, but it's not where we want it to be. And it's typically things like that because they're big contracts. They move the metric. And then we look at what's going on in commercial, which is more like you would see in an enterprise SaaS company where maybe average deal size is closer to 50, 100K in the smaller end of that market. How are those renewal rates? What's driving them? Are we getting that time to value fast enough? Did we sell the right thing to the right person? Do we know what the value driver is? So there's a lot of continued investment we've been making on that side to get better at it.
I'm really impressed with the progress that we've made so far. And I think a lot of that is just getting better at selling to the right customer, the right product. And we've been in product-market fit mode for many years. Now we're in product acceleration or market acceleration mode. So I'm not happy if those metrics aren't north of 120%. Many investors have heard me say that. So I guess you could say I'm still not happy. I don't remember where we were last quarter. I want to say it was around 108%-109%. But again, a lot of times the asterisk is because this one contract slipped three weeks. And so it screwed up our metric for the quarter. So generally speaking, we have very high retention rates.
Yes, sir.
I want to double-click into the embedding, how it strengthens your competitive advantage against your competitor. Because my current understanding of PL is it has unified raw data and it's immutable. It never retouched. And you guys are refining the algorithm how to train those data and embedding it to the latest technology versus all your competitors, they have various data sources from different people. And those data sources in the embedding vector space are vastly different. So when they try to embed it, the search result and final display will be a mess. So yeah, could you just try to cross-check this with you?
Yeah. I was going to say, I'm not sure I can say much more than what you did, but the value, multiple vectors of value for the archive. But one of them is it's a consistent data set. So the cameras are always pointed at the same angle. It's generally the same time of day. And it's a very consistent data set day to day. So when you think about running models against that, I can't speak to embeddings because I only know the word. I don't really understand what it means. But there is an advantage to the way our data set is constructed so that that's actually worked very well to accelerating the pace of getting to value and insights from the data.
Like I mentioned, there's also kind of a thought in the future of if you optimize across embeddings, maybe you don't need to download the whole data set. Maybe you can download the embedding plus a chip and you've got enough information to do it. So these are all kind of future thinking that our AI research department is working on. But yes, I would say our data is very uniquely suited to AI given its consistency and breadth.
I see. Thank you so much.
Yeah.
Fascinating. Yes, sir.
Any update on the German facility in terms of manufacturing? And then as well, any cost gaps that you guys are seeing in the Pelican and the Owl that you're learning as you scale those or sell those to customers that you're able to eke out additional cost out?
So the team is always looking at ways to do cost engineering down. So I mean, one of the very simplistic ways that we did that was we had unexpectedly higher levels of cash flow positivity in the back half of the year than we had anticipated. So we pulled forward some investments and did bulk purchasing that gave us a little more leverage than we typically have given that we typically manufacture relatively small numbers. But the team is always looking for both cost engineering and value engineering. What are incremental capabilities that we can embed in the satellite that we didn't have in the last set? For German manufacturing, we're making progress. It is going to be a longer process because there are export licensing and things like that that have to be considered and other elements of permitting.
But the team has a sense of urgency around it. We would love to double our manufacturing capacity. We see the demand there. And so as fast as we can move, we are moving and hope to be up and running kind of second half of this calendar year if we can get all the pieces to fall in place in the time we'd like them to.
Appreciate you coming, Ashley. Any last words you wanted to remind investors about Planet?
I would just say we're in early innings. So there is so much opportunity in front of us. We've seen a lot of success by being very focused, and particularly in defense and intelligence. But the market opportunity in front of us extends well beyond that. So I'm very excited to be a part of this team. And thanks for all of you who've joined the ride.
Great. Thank you.
Thanks, Ashley.