I am excited to introduce to you Caitlin Kontgis, Chief of Staff, and Dustin Greer, Interim CFO of Satellogic.
Good afternoon, and thank you for joining us today. Today I'll be presenting on the infrastructure that powers persistent global intelligence. That's a pretty big statement, so we'll unpack that today in our conversation. In addition, we'll also speak about how we go to market, what our technology's like, some of our competitive advantages, and some recent momentum that we've had in the marketplace. When we think about persistent global intelligence, we think about the movement from a single image delivered to a customer to a more continuous flow of information to the customer. So that's what we'll be speaking on today. All right. Just a quick backdrop on Satellogic. We are a vertically integrated Earth observation satellite company. So think about it as development of the satellite, building and manufacturing, all the way to operating a constellation, and delivering images to our customers.
A full value chain that we produce to get images to our customers. We're domiciled in the U.S., we're traded on the Nasdaq, and we have over 200 years of combined flight heritage. We have launched over 60 satellites in the last 10 years. So we now have a great depth of experience building and operating satellites, and putting them in orbit. We are led by Emiliano Kargieman, our co-founder, and we've recently appointed Vice Admiral Trey Whitworth as President of our company. We're excited for Frank Whitworth to join us. He comes from a long, distinguished career in the U.S. Navy, as well as he was the eighth Director of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency. So he's very well-versed in images, imagery, as the NGA is one of the largest consumers of Earth observation imagery.
In addition, we're supported by a very strong board led by Secretary Steven Mnuchin, the former Treasury Secretary. In addition, we have General Joseph Dunford as a board member, who is the former Joint Chiefs of Staff. We'll speak a bit more about this in the presentation today, but we want to just quickly comment on some financial momentum we're building. This last second quarter of 2026, we had year-over-year growth of nearly 260%. We had our first positive adjusted EBITDA in Q2, and at the end of the quarter, we had nearly $113 million in the bank. I'm going to now pass it over to my colleague, Caitlin, who will go through a few sections.
All right. Hi, everyone. I'm going to talk about how we go to market at Satellogic. We go to market through two distinct but connected business lines. The first are data and analytics. We control our core constellation at Satellogic, which is acquiring imagery every single day of Earth. We have customers who will task the satellites, meaning they control where an image is being captured, and they'll pay a priority price to get that image and control where the image is taken. Then we can resell that image to any number of customers, and this is really the core of our business. It's setting up these monitoring programs where a customer can say, "I want to look at 50 different locations on Earth.
I want to see them daily or weekly." And we can set up a subscription repeatable revenue source to get them the data and analytics for the places that they care about. The second line of business is space systems. This is where we will sell a customer not just a satellite, but all of the associated component parts to build a national sovereign capability. We build satellites in Uruguay. We're fully vertically integrated, and we do the end-to-end value chain of a satellite. We design the bus, the payload. We have patented optics. Build their sovereign solution. While these are two different business lines, they're not fully separate. Often we'll have a space systems customer who buys a satellite or a constellation, and then they might want to do more tasking to augment what they're getting from their system.
Likewise, we'll have data and analytics customers who then maybe want to go and buy a satellite. When I talk about our satellites, here they are. The one on the far left, our NewSats, Mark V and Mark VI. These are the powerhouse of Satellogic. We've been launching these for the history of the company. When Dustin Greer says we have over 200 years of flight heritage, it's from NewSats. When you see Mark V or Mark VI, we're iteratively improving every version of a NewSat that we put up. These satellites are tasked. A customer will say, "I want to task this location, get an image," and we'll deliver an image at 50-cm resolution for that location. Building on the NewSat program, we just launched our first in a new constellation of satellites called Merlin. These are continuous monitoring.
Instead of tasking the satellite, the satellite is always on, capturing imagery at one meter over the entire globe for this continuous awareness and monitoring. They also have the ability to have onboard processing. If when capturing an image, the Merlin satellite sees a change, it can communicate back to a NewSat to then task an image that can verify what that change is and give more detail. We're always looking to the future here at Satellogic. While we've been launching NewSats for our whole history, and we will continue to, and we've launched our, and I should say, our first Merlin, but we will launch more satellites in 2027 to have a fully operational constellation midway through 2027.
We're always looking to the future, and so that is the aptly named NextGen here on the far right, which will be higher precision coverage at 30 cm resolution, and that's currently in development with our teams down in South America. Why do we think we can win in this market? There's four key points to hit on. We have best-in-class technology stack. We design the mission end-to-end, as I said, from broad area discovery to more detailed collection and high confidence verification. Then we have radical cost leadership. Because we're vertically integrated and we have our patented optical technology, we're able to build these satellites at a lower cost than our competitors and pass that cost savings on to our customers.
Tasking thousands of satellites and getting those insights really only works if you can do it at a cost savings that customers can manage and take on in order to look at all the locations and assets that matter to them. Our sovereign solutions business that I mentioned, this is a big competitive advantage at Satellogic. Because we build everything end-to-end and because we can serve customers wherever they're at on their journey, we're able to design these solutions for sovereign controlled operations for allied governments across the world. Finally, our use of AI both on the ground and in orbit. Merlin satellites, like I mentioned, can process data in orbit in space, flag a change, and then be able to automatically task a higher resolution satellite.
Also on the ground, we're using AI algorithms to run through all of the imagery to focus efforts on where change that's happening matters. There are billions of pixels being collected. Nobody can possibly look at all of them, and so we're leveraging AI to help analysts focus where they should be looking. This is our customer journey, and a customer can enter at any stage of this process. But typically, what we see is a customer will task a few images in this imagery access box over on the left. They see value in what they're getting from those images, and then they'll set up a persistent monitoring where it's a subscription service for the places that they want to look at on a regular cadence, and then we will deliver that imagery to them.
Finally, hopefully, they then buy a satellite and realize the value that that will bring from all of the imagery they've collected, and then they want their own constellation in space. In practice, it doesn't always work this way. We have some customers who know they just want a satellite from the outset, and they'll start there, and then maybe they'll eventually get more tasking. A customer can enter at any stage of this journey, and this land and expand approach is how we win with our customers. Here you can see some of the customers we're serving. Satellogic imagery and infrastructure is helping power some of the largest commercial operations on the planet, like Palantir, as well as U.S. government entities like NASA and the U.S. Navy, and foreign allied governments such as Portugal, who we've recently sold satellites to that we announced earlier this year.
With that, I will hand it back to you, Dustin.
Excellent. I'll spend a minute talking about how we see the market changing. Historical legacy observation market was more of an image-driven market where you would deliver an image at a time, so a deliverable of an image. We're starting to see a change, and customer workflows are moving in that direction where customers want answers to ongoing monitoring rather than just having a snapshot at a point in time. We believe with our new technology that we're developing, including the Merlin, we're well positioned to help support this change to this persistent global intelligence. Additionally, as we see this shift happening, we move from in a deliverable event to an ongoing, more of a SaaS type subscription-based model.
That's why we're really focused on this transition, and I'll speak more in a moment about the technology that we have that's going to help support this. This here is a picture of our new constellation, Merlin. This is our first Merlin satellite, Merlin.01, and it is fully integrated in our clean room and prepared. It's going to be prepared for shipping for the launch site. We're happy to report that October 1st, this satellite did get launched, and it's successful in communication back to our mission and ops team, and we're currently commissioning the satellite. A couple key points related to the new Merlin constellation. First, the Merlin constellation is going to be a wide area global monitoring solution.
We're going to build a constellation of approximately eight satellites, which will be deployed at the second half of next year, and this solution will give us a daily remap of the world. So it's a fundamental change from taking an image to a full-scale mapping of the world. Additionally, the Merlin satellite, we went from concept to launch in 18 months. So in our industry, that's quite unheard of to have that rapid development and manufacturing. Our customers, in particular, the defense and intelligence customers, are very engaged on that and how we can potentially adapt to their needs in a quick manner. Finally, this Merlin satellite, as Caitlin noted before, has inter-satellite link as well as onboard AI and edge processing.
That gives us the ability to communicate quickly with other satellites in the constellation to not only detect, but then hone in on the area of focus with our NewSat constellation. Now I'll speak for a minute on the momentum that we've been building. Through the last nine months, we've had some really great wins on the commercial front. First, I'll speak to the Portugal agreement that Caitlin Kontgis noted earlier. We sold two satellites to the Portugal government for approximately $18 million. This is a real good indicator of the new area of focus in the space systems line of business that we have. We're seeing continued engagement and interest in this area. You can see not only did we sign that agreement, but we followed that in April with a $12 million in-orbit satellite transfer sale.
An additional international customer wanted to have the satellite purchased and transacted in a rapid manner, and so we were able to agree to a $12 million contract with them. Beyond the space systems line of business, we also are building our data business, as Caitlin Kontgis noted before, and we're pleased to see that we agreed to an $18 million monitoring contract with an international customer. We have balance on both sides of our businesses. In addition, we're building new capabilities into our product platform. We've signed strategic agreements with SynMax and SpaceKnow to help build out our platform as it relates to our AI analytics to be able to detect better the objects and analyze the information that comes off our satellites. As we've noted before, the Merlin launch just occurred in October, and that constellation is fully funded by a foundational customer of ours.
Speaking to financial momentum, as I mentioned earlier, we had a great quarter in second quarter with nearly $16 million in revenue, up 260% year-over-year for the quarter. We had our first positive operating income for the quarter, and we generated $2.8 million in positive adjusted EBITDA for the quarter as well. On the next slide, I'll speak to a little bit more about the financials, but those are some really critical highlights that I wanted to talk through. In addition to our financial performance, we've been able to attract some additional talent to the company and building that momentum as well. Recently, in June, we had a new board member join our company, Lieutenant General Michael Williamson. He is a former lieutenant general in the U.S. Army, and he also was an executive at Lockheed Martin.
We also mentioned before Vice Admiral Trey Whitworth, who joined our company as our President. Beyond that, as we build our go-to-markets motions, we've added four strong new sales leaders in the last six months. Speaking of financial performance for the second quarter. Like I mentioned before, our revenue was up nearly 259% with operating income and a positive adjusted EBITDA. A couple other key points to note on our quarterly results was the fact that we have remaining performance obligations, which is essentially our backlog of nearly $80 million as of the second quarter. If you look in the bottom right corner of the chart here, you'll see that the RPO recognition profile shows that we have nearly $46 million of anticipated revenue to be recognized within the next 12 months from the second quarter. Additionally, on the far left side, we have revenue by business line.
This is where you can see the profile of data and analytics business versus our space systems business. We like to see the balance that we are having between both business lines with nearly 45%-55% between the two. Finally, that brings us to closing remarks. Key takeaways that we want to make sure everyone walks out of this room with. First is that vertical integration is our moat. As we spoke about before, the ability for us to build everything start to finish and be able to deliver the solutions all the way through to the end customer, all under our control, gives us speed, gives us a cost advantage, and gives us the ability to manage timelines very well. In addition, as Caitlin noted, we believe our two business lines capture the full spectrum of the market opportunity.
We can have a customer enter with just an image purchase, trying to get to understand how they better utilize the information, or if we have a customer that is already ready to engage with us on a sovereign solutions, we are available and ready to sell all that to them. We believe this enables us to have a full breadth of products so customers can enter in any part of the journey, and we can work forward or backward along that journey with them. Third, the best-in-class technology and economics. Again, this is foundational to what we do. The company spent 10 years developing the technology. The technology was the real big focus initially because we wanted to get it right. We wanted to be able to drive costs out of the manufacturing process to enable the economics that we have today.
That technology and that economics, along with the vertical integration, enables us to really create another protection layer of moat for how we go to market, where we are able to sell to customers at a different price point than anyone else in the marketplace. Fourth, the Merlin constellation that we just spoke about, that was fully funded by a customer. The capital investment that it takes to get that launched is already essentially taken care of. As we look to the second quarter of 2027, we want to continue to build on that growth as we deploy our Merlin constellation and the global detection layer that it will bring to us. Finally, as I just spoke about, we are exiting the Q2 with strong operational and financial momentum. Again, revenue was up year-over-year significantly.
Our positive adjusted EBITDA and a solid cash position of nearly $113 million at the end of Q2 gives us a great foundation to continue to grow. With that ends our prepared remarks. Please see our contact information here, and we are happy to take Q&A. Yes.
Real quick. So your customer can also become a strategic investor with you after they see what you're getting.
A strategic investor? In what regards?
So-
A customer of yours would.
Yeah. So the question is
That question
Can a customer become a strategic partner, if you will?
Yeah, partner.
In some regard, we call it fully funded, but the customer essentially signed a contract with us in the amount that was equal to what it was going to take from a capital expenditures perspective to build the constellation. In essence, we believe that we have the full funding from one customer to cover that cost.
Cover the whole cost for everything.
As we develop and service that contract, because they're going to be receiving data from our constellation, but over that time duration is the dollar amount that's available for us to cover the cost of our constellation, of that Merlin constellation, initial launch of the constellation.
Do they own all the data or anything else? Can you tokenize that data?
The data ownership, they have a specific use case that they're going to use, but we broadly own all the data.
All the data?
Yeah. So in essence, yeah, fully funded means the fact that we have a customer contract that enables us to cover the cost of what we're going to build, but it is our satellite, and it is our information. Other questions? Yes.
The backlog that you guys have, like how I guess, you have 100 and something million on the balance sheet, you said, I think, right? So how are you going to kind of fill that backlog or pull it forward? Is there a strategy there?
Yeah, the question was about backlog and how we potentially could pull it forward. The backlog in and of itself is already contracted. We have basically the timing already set for how we're going to deploy the contract. That is why you saw the revenue pro or the RPO, the remaining performance obligation profile of nearly $45 million in the first 12 months from Q2 forward. We will continue to work our pipeline to continue to try to grow the backlog.
You are saying you do not need additional cash to fill the backlogs?
No, our cash position is $113 million, and that gives us more than sufficient runway to execute on our plans. Other questions? Okay. Well, great. Well, thank you for joining us. If you have any other questions, feel free to reach out to me directly or reach out to the IR site. Thank you very much.