What changed in this filing

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Item 1. Business

2023-03-30 compared with 2022-04-14 · 53 added, 55 removed, 268 unchanged (29% of the section changed)

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Planet’s Class A common stock and warrants are listed on the New York Stock Exchange (“NYSE”) under the symbols “PL” and “PL WS,” respectively.

We image the entire Earth’s landmass every day at medium- and high-resolution.

We collect this powerful data set from the approximately 200 satellites we have in orbit, making our fleet the largest Earth observation fleet of satellites in history, which we design, build, and operate.

We image the Earth every day at medium- and high-resolution.

We collect this powerful data set from the hundreds of satellites we have in orbit, making our fleet the largest fleet of Earth observation satellites in history, which we design, build, and operate.

We have over 2,400 images on average for every point on Earth’s landmass, creating a non-replicable historical archive for analytics, machine learning, and insights.

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For example, our products help farmers make decisions that result in significant increases in their harvests, while using fewer resources, by timely alerting them to changes happening within their fields.

Governments use our data to help them deliver public services more effectively in disaster response.

Governments use our data to provide transparency and to promote peace and security addressing issues from national security to food security.

Mapping companies use our data to keep online maps up to date.

Also, journalists and human rights organizations use our data to uncover and report the truth about events in hard-to-reach places.

Our customers can leverage the power of planetary change detection into their decision-making process by embedding our data into their workflows to better inform their real time decision-making processes.

Our customers can embed our Earth data and change detection products into their workflows to better inform their real time decision-making processes.

Our historical archive of global, daily imagery data enables back-testing of predictive analytics, which is particularly relevant for time-series forecasting, an important area in machine learning.

Planet is a scaled business with $131.2 million in revenue for the fiscal year ended January 31, 2022, and approximately 200 Earth-observation satellites in orbit.

Planet is a scaled business with $191.3 million in revenue for the fiscal year ended January 31, 2023, and the largest fleet of Earth-observation satellites in history.

We generate revenue primarily by selling licenses to our data and analytics to customers over an entirely cloud-based platform via fixed price subscription and usage-based contracts.

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This began to change in the last ten years as a global increase in space investment has resulted in lower average launch costs, technological innovations in electronics, new market entrants, and product-driven entrepreneurial companies leveraging the commoditization of cloud computing to grow data platform businesses.

According to Allied Market Research, the sector’s total addressable market has grown to approximately $5.5 billion in 2019 and is projected to reach an estimated $19 billion in 2027.

However, we do not believe this projection takes into account potential market acceleration and positive tailwinds associated with sustainability and digital transformation, discussed below.

Sustainability Transformation:

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Digital Transformation:

Organizations across industries are driving operational improvements and taking advantage of new growth opportunities by leveraging third-party data, their own proprietary data, and AI technologies, all of which is driving a digital economic shift across many sectors.

Organizations across industries are driving operational improvements and taking advantage of new growth opportunities by leveraging third-party data, their own proprietary data, and Artificial Intelligence (“AI”) technologies, all of which is driving a digital economic shift across many sectors.

In addition, as more organizations digitize their workflows, it is increasingly important to deliver solutions that are cloud-native to take advantage of the cost savings and scale derived from cloud technologies.

Overall, we believe these two transformational shifts are driving organizations to better manage these risks and drive new growth strategies by having near real-time understanding of the impact of global changes across the Earth.

The first step for organizations undergoing the digital and sustainability transformations is to understand context and consistently measure and monitor relevant data.

Peace & Security:

Organizations such as governments, Non-Governmental Organizations (“NGOs”), media and think tanks are tackling growing global challenges on a daily basis.

We believe the issues facing the world are becoming increasingly more complex, and that our satellite imagery and tools can help enable unbiased, factual, and real-time reporting and decision making by governments, NGOs, media and think tanks.

Further, we believe the near real-time pictures from space that we provide are critical to global transparency and encourage increased peace and security.

Overall, we believe these transformational shifts are driving organizations to better manage these risks and drive new growth strategies by having near real-time understanding of the impact of global changes across the Earth.

first step for organizations undergoing the digital and sustainability transformations, as well as those seeking to establish and maintain peace and security, is to understand context and consistently measure and monitor relevant data.

With shared context and metrics, we believe that businesses and governments can improve operational efficiency, resource allocation, risk mitigation, and strategic decision making with data-enabled applications.

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We believe we are well-positioned to help power the digital and sustainability transformations with our extensive whole-Earth data set and robust analytic capabilities which are optimized to measure human activity and its interaction with the environment and delivered through our cloud-native platform.

By providing this analytic ready data to our partner ecosystem as well as our end customers, we believe we can expand the use cases we can address across industries at scale.

We believe globally consistent and reliable satellite imagery data is a critical component that can fuel the impact of these economic transitions in every major vertical sector.

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We see market opportunities in industries including:

Our data can enable precision agriculture, harvest planning, directed scouting, crop monitoring, field geo-mapping, and soil and moisture management.

Our data can enable precision agriculture, harvest planning, directed scouting, crop monitoring, sustainable agricultural monitoring, irrigation and pasture management, and soil and moisture management.

Our data can also help monitor sustainable agriculture practices.

Civil Government:

We perceive public forestry, agriculture monitoring and management, air and water pollution monitoring, permitting and code enforcement, disaster management, geo-mapping, and smart city planning, among others, as significant potential drivers of this opportunity.

We perceive forest health monitoring, agriculture monitoring and food security, protection of biodiversity, ecosystems and parks, water conservation and efficiency, permitting and code enforcement, disaster management, geo-mapping, and smart city planning, among others, as significant potential drivers of this opportunity.

Defense & Intelligence:

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Energy & Utilities:

We view pipeline and asset monitoring, air and water pollution monitoring, spill and disaster management, and earth data for geo-mapping services associated with these use cases, among others, as significant drivers of this market opportunity.

We view infrastructure and asset monitoring, proof of permit and code enforcement, air and water pollution monitoring, spill and disaster management, and earth data for geo-mapping services associated with these use cases, among others, as significant drivers of this market opportunity.

ESG-related Industrial / Supply Chain:

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Information about risks related to our satellite operations appears in the “Risk Factors” section of this report.

Our global sales organization operates directly and via our extensive network of over 250 partners across 72 countries.

Our global sales organization operates directly and via our extensive network of hundreds of partners around the world.

Our partner network consists of solution providers, OEM partners, and GIS Platform companies that have deep expertise in building last-mile vertical solutions using satellite imagery and geospatial data.

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Our marketing team utilizes a multi-channel approach to develop and increase our brand awareness and position, and communicate the value of our differentiated offering, and develop engaging outbound demand-generation campaigns.

We utilize an end-to-end buyer lifecycle program to develop awareness and lead-generation activities that engage and nurture prospective customers and expand opportunities within our installed base of customers.

We utilize an end-to-end buyer’s journey approach to develop awareness and lead-generation activities that engage and nurture prospective customers and expand opportunities within our installed base of customers.

The team drives our overall market positioning and messaging across our key audiences and vertical markets, as well as provides strategic go-to-market assessments of use cases that emerge from new product capabilities and the market landscape.

Our communications team also works with targeted influencers and media outlets to drive interest through earned and paid media channels, including blogs, social media, and video.

Our communications team also works with targeted influencers and media outlets to drive interest through earned and owned media channels, including blogs, social media, and video.

Research and Development:

Our research and development (“R&D”) team consists of software and hardware R&D for product discovery, technology incubation, and go-to-market planning.

Our R&D scope includes teams leveraging the rapid development in artificial intelligence, machine learning, and the evolving information technology architecture for massively distributed data collection, storage, and analysis.

It further includes our investments in our agile space missions, which includes advancing core spacecraft technologies, automated mission operations for our satellite fleet and ground stations, payload prototypes and development, and engineering operations for potentially more efficient scalability.

Our R&D scope includes teams leveraging the rapid development in AI, machine learning, and the evolving information technology architecture for massively distributed data collection, storage, and analysis.

Our R&D team at Planet is also responsible for developing and innovating our proprietary technology platform.

We continue to invest in R&D, particularly as it relates to building software solutions on top of our data to help make our platform more accessible to a wider range of customers, as well as innovating our space technology to capture various types of data efficiently.

Technology Partnerships:

We engage in partnership programs and strategic efforts to embrace open innovation, technology infusion and market-shaping opportunities.

Below is a partial list of efforts and partnerships in which we are involved.

Education & Research :

We launched our Education and Research Program on Earth Day in 2017 to allow university and academic researchers to apply for access to our monitoring data products and services through a non-

commercial science license.

We have also created dedicated university products for high-volume research and classroom applications.

Collectively, the Education and Research Program has reached more than 10,000 users across more than 1,000 universities, and led to over 1,800 peer reviewed journal articles and conference proceedings that have attracted a new generation of remote sensing scientists experimenting with our unique data set and services.

Carbon Mapper :

We have partnered with a new non-profit launched in April 2021 called Carbon Mapper, that has a goal to utilize our advanced hyperspectral satellites to identify and track methane and carbon dioxide emissions and release these enhanced data sets to help fight climate change.

We serve as the technology and commercial partner for Carbon Mapper where, together with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, we will build and launch two satellites as an initial proof of concept, as part of a multi-part project focused on emissions and higher fidelity biodiversity measurements.

These programs include initiatives such as our Education and

Research Program, our partnership with Carbon Mapper, our partnerships with Telesat and SES as part of the NASA Communications Services Project (“CSP”), among others.

Our Technology Platform

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Our technology is designed to put the power of knowledge about the Earth into the hands of more people.

Our aerospace innovation has enabled us to maintain the world’s largest fleet of imaging satellites in history, with the capability to image the entire world daily.

Our aerospace innovation has enabled us to maintain the world’s largest fleet of imaging satellites in history, with the capability to image the world every day.

This has enabled us to generate a proprietary, vast data archive that grows daily.

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Using and contributing to open data standards via the Open Geospatial Consortium, our cloud-native proprietary technology, autonomously performs critical processing and overall harmonizing of images for time series and for use in data fusion and analysis.

As of January 31, 2022, we collected more than 300 million square kilometers on average per day of Earth data;

more than 30 terabytes each day.

We collect hundreds of millions of square kilometers of Earth data every day, collected over the Earth’s landmass and some areas of water.

Our deep data archive is used to train our models, an important asset for delivering useful insights.

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Planet Monitoring:

Our satellites work together to create an always-online scanner for the planet that is able to image all of the Earth’s landmass on a daily basis at a resolution of up to 3.5 meters.

Our satellites work together to create an always-online scanner for the planet with the goal to image the Earth everyday at a resolution (Ground Sampling Distance, “GSD”) of up to 3.5 meters.

This allows our customers to monitor any areas of interest, discover trends, and gain timely insights — and is the backbone to our one-to-many business model.

Planet Tasking:

With 21 SkySat satellites in orbit, our high-resolution rapid revisit capability can capture a specified location up to ten times per day at a resolution of up to 50 cm, the highest cadence fleet in orbit today.

With high-resolution satellites in orbit and our rapid revisit capability, we can capture a specified location up to ten times per day at a resolution (Ground Sampling Distance, “GSD”) of up to 50 centimeters, one of

the highest cadence fleets in orbit today.

The agile tasking satellites, all powered by an application programming interface (“API”), can perform multiple imaging modes, including points, long strips, stereo collects, and video.

Planet Archive:

We have collected an average of 2,000 daily observations for every point on Earth’s landmass.

We have collected an average of 2,400 images for every point on Earth’s landmass.

These images are added to our archive of proprietary Earth observation data dating back to 2009 and daily Earth scanning data dating back to 2017.

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Our platform is built for speed and flexibility, enabling customers to efficiently access, discover, and build solutions at scale.

With over 20,000 users on our platform, from researchers to government agencies, we aim to continuously improve the user experience to speed up the mission utility and business value for our customers.

With tens of thousands of users on our platform, from researchers to government agencies, we aim to continuously improve the user experience to speed up the mission utility and business value for our customers.

Through our platform and analytics products, we offer customers a variety of capabilities, including the following:

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We have built automated, cloud-native, global-scale analytics on top of our data set and made them accessible by APIs and web applications.

Our analytic feeds use the latest AI and machine

learning techniques for a broad range of land-classification, object-detection, and automated change detection capabilities, from road and building detection, ships, planes, oil well pads, and more.

Our analytic feeds use the latest AI and machine learning techniques for a broad range of land-classification, object-detection, and automated change detection capabilities, from road and building detection, ships, planes, oil well pads, and more.

(6) Planetary Variables :

We produce and offer Planetary Variables by combining observations from Planet’s satellites and broader observations from a range of public satellite constellations.

Our goal with these products is to capture and quantify the changes in dynamic systems such as soil water content, land surface temperature and vegetation biomass and forest structure, and render that information to the people on the ground tasked with making decisions.

Our Customers

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We are committed to building deep relationships with our customers by providing easy access to critical geospatial data and analytics in a consumable, digestible format.

In addition, with our subscription services and data products, customers can monitor and detect changes and create insights that can help drive timely decision-making, and improve operational efficiency, resource allocation, risk assessment and mitigation and strategic decision making.

We have a proven record of building customer relationships, with over 880 customers across the globe, including leading agriculture, mapping, forestry, finance and insurance companies, and government agencies.

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We are a proven innovator with multiple compounding competitive moats across our technology platform.

We believe we have a differentiated offering, uniquely imaging the whole Earth landmass daily, creating significant barriers to entry.

We believe we have a differentiated offering, offering high-cadence imaging of the whole Earth’s landmass, creating significant barriers to entry.

We have a scalable business model enabled by a one-to-many use of imagery, in turn leading to an attractive financial profile.

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We believe as customers derive more value from the platform, they increase their usage by incorporating insight from our data into their workflows and analyses.

This creates a feedback loop that drives our technology roadmap, from the high-level analytics algorithms and end-user applications all the way down the stack to new sensors in space to capture valuable information for our customers.

This creates a feedback loop that drives our technology roadmap, from the high-level analytics and end-user applications all the way down the stack to new sensors in space to capture valuable information for our customers.

Differentiated Offering:

We believe we are the only company in the geospatial data industry producing a daily scan of the landmass of the Earth.

We combine this capability with our high-resolution SkySat satellites, which our customers can task to capture a higher resolution image of a single site multiple times per day.

We combine this capability with our high-resolution satellites, which our customers can task to capture a higher resolution image of a single site multiple times per day.

We believe we have the highest commercially available intraday revisit capabilities.

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We were one of the earliest next generation commercial geospatial companies, and we believe our agile aerospace innovations and fully operational fleet of Earth-imaging satellites have put us years ahead of the competition.

Unlike other emerging Earth observation providers who are just now establishing operational satellite fleets, we already have approximately 200 satellites in orbit as well as a comprehensive platform for data processing, delivery and image data integration to enable customers to realize value from our satellite data.

Unlike other emerging Earth observation providers who are just now establishing operational satellite fleets, we already have hundreds of satellites in orbit as well as a comprehensive platform for data processing, delivery and image data integration to enable customers to realize value from our satellite data.

As a result, we believe we have higher operational efficiency, more extensive proprietary historical data sets, economies of scale in data storage and processing, and proven execution by our global sales organization.

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We plan to make strategic investments in building new sensors to capture additional data sets from space.

As we grow our customer base, we believe we can better understand what additional data sets our customers are eager to access and therefore which sensors might enable us to capture additional data that is valuable to such customers.

As we grow our customer base and the use cases we can address, we believe we can better understand what additional data sets our customers are eager to access and therefore which sensors might enable us to capture additional data that is valuable to such customers.

By leveraging our agile aerospace approach to space systems, we believe we are well-positioned to introduce new Earth observation sensors into orbit to capture new types of data with greater capital efficiency and speed than other satellite data providers.

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We have made strategic acquisitions, including the acquisition of the BlackBridge group of companies in September 2015, the Terra Bella business from Google in April 2017, Boundless Spatial, Inc.

(“Boundless Spatial”) in March 2019 and VanderSat B.V.

(“VanderSat”) in December 2021.

We plan on continuing

to evaluate opportunities to make acquisitions that can accelerate our growth strategies and complement our existing product offerings.

(“Boundless Spatial”) in March 2019, VanderSat B.V.

(“VanderSat”) in December 2021 and Salo Sciences, Inc.

(“Salo Sciences”) in January 2023.

We continue to evaluate opportunities to make acquisitions that can accelerate our growth strategies and complement our existing product offerings.

Our Competition

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We also compete with data analytics platforms that use geospatial data from a variety of sources to provide analytics services to their customers.

These companies include Orbital Insights, Descartes Labs, and GeoSpatial Insight.

These companies include Orbital Insights and Earth Daily,

Many data analytics providers rely on partnerships with satellite imagery companies in order to source the data necessary to run their analytics platforms.

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We believe that the most impactful and profitable way to build our business is to ensure that this public benefit remains at the core of our company’s DNA in perpetuity — informing and driving what we create for planet Earth and all its inhabitants.

As part of our commitment to sustainability, we work with SCS Global Services (SCS), an organization specializing in third-party certification, validation, and verification for environmental and sustainability quality performance claims, to certify our own operations as carbon neutral in accordance with the internationally recognized PAS 2060:

2014 Carbon Neutrality Standard.

As of December 2021, we were certified as a carbon neutral company for the 2020 calendar year.

This certification covers our entire supply chain — from manufacturing and launching satellites to all aspects of our corporate operations.

Our Ethical Commitment

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We seek to deeply embed and socialize these principles within our company’s culture, and to build processes and policies to apply them consistently.

The purpose of a good ethical system is to enable its users to navigate dilemmas in which there may be complex trade offs between choices in a given circumstance.

The purpose of a good ethical system is to enable its users to navigate dilemmas in which there may be complex tradeoffs between choices in a given circumstance.

Such programs mature but are never “finished”, as new questions and contexts continually arise.

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To achieve this goal, we offer robust and comprehensive health, welfare and retirement benefits for our employees, including medical, dental, vision, flexible spending accounts (FSA) and health savings accounts (HSA), life insurance, short- and long-term disability, paid time off, various voluntary insurance programs, parental assistance, tuition and work from home reimbursements, a robust employee assistance program (EAP) and a 401(k) retirement plan.

We also conduct bi-annual employee satisfaction surveys, in addition to feedback cycles.

Following the coronavirus COVID-19 outbreak, we have taken numerous measures to protect the health and safety of our employees, including shifting many employees to remote work and adopting internal policies around flexibility, work from home expenses, and extra time off.

To encourage flexible working and better work-life balance, we maintain a soft-closing policy during two weeks of the year, and have adopted a "flex-Friday” policy which gives all of our employees one extra Friday off every month.

We also conduct virtual meditation and yoga classes and other well-being programs throughout the year.

Compensation and Advancement

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We provide opportunities to grow and develop through work experiences, mentorship programs, personal development experiences, training and tuition reimbursement.

To help our employees navigate their careers, we also maintain a job architecture program, which we believe creates transparency about career development within our organization and helps facilitate discussions around career growth.

To help our employees navigate their careers, we also maintain a job architecture program,

which we believe creates transparency about career development within our organization and helps facilitate discussions around career growth.

We believe that a strong, dynamic workplace only exists where people with diverse backgrounds and experiences are empowered to share their values and perspectives, challenge themselves with new ideas, and think critically on difficult questions.

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We make available free of charge through our website our annual reports on Form

10-K, quarterly reports on Form 10-Q, current reports on Form 8-K, proxy statements, registration statements and amendments to those reports filed or furnished pursuant to the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended (the “Exchange Act”) as soon as reasonably practicable after we electronically file such material with, or furnish them to the SEC.

The SEC maintains a website that contains reports, proxy statements and other information regarding issuers that file electronically with the SEC.

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Compared sentence by sentence after normalising whitespace, quotation marks, case and digits, so re-formatting and restated figures do not read as changed language. Wording changes appear as one removal and one addition. The current filing and the prior one are authoritative.

What changed 10-K

Item 1. Business