Planet goes public with SPAC, valued at $2.8 billion

Paris, 8 July 2021. – More space at the stock exchange: the Earth observation company Planet will also go public at the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE), in a SPAC transaction valuing the startup at $2.8 billion, Planet said.

Planet Labs Inc. said it entered into a definitive merger agreement with dMY Technology Group, a publicly traded special purpose acquisition company (SPAC), the company announced. The combined company will retain the Planet name and be listed on the NYSE under the ticker symbol PL, it said.

The investors and funds BlackRock, Koch Strategic Platforms, Marc Benioff’s TIME Ventures and Google, as an existing Planet investor, inject $200 million in the company, as part of the transaction, Planet said.

Planet sees itself as a “new kind of data company”, rather than a new space company, an Earth data and analytics specialist producing 25 terabytes of data per day from approximately 200 satellites. This is “the largest Earth imaging satellite fleet ever”, it claims.

Its …. And ….  constellations capture more than 3 million images per day and cover over 300 million square kilometers, Planet says. The company generated $100 million in revenue in 2021 from a diversified portfolio of over 600 customers from 65 countries.

Planet operates a subscription-based business model in which customers purchase proprietary data feeds, the company says. Selling data and analytics “multiple times to multiple customers” enable it to achieve high profit margins, it says. Planet’s customers are in different sectors such as agriculture, governments, forestry and environmental mapping.

It was founded in 2010 by three NASA scientists.