Planet Labs ($PL) brought in $61.3M in revenue during the quarter ending Oct. 31, and executives at the space data company said a summer restructuring that laid off 17% of the company’s workforce paid off.
Planet’s stock closed at $4 a share yesterday and has nearly doubled in the past six months. The company is pushing to be profitable on an adjusted EBITDA basis in the current quarter, and lost just $242K by that metric last time around.
Private interest: Planet shares stumbled earlier this year as growth slowed among private sector customers, but CEO Will Marshall said he’s “cautiously optimistic” that expansion will return. The company has changed the way it structures contracts with agricultural tech buyers and expects AI applications to play a role.
“The daily scan [of Earth’s landmass by Planet’s Dove spacecraft] is pretty much unique, and it’s the most applicable data set for AI, because it is a continuous data set, the same angles every day,” Marshall said on a call with investors to discuss the quarterly financials. “Having this stack of over 2,500 images for every point of the land for the Earth is the data set that everyone’s training on.”
Public wins: Planet also announced a new task order worth $20M from NASA’s Commercial SmallSat Data Acquisition program, which it received in late November. Asked about the incoming administration, Marshall was fairly bullish, citing conversations with agency officials who expect an emphasis on efficiency and commercial partnerships.
Pelican brief: Next up for Planet is launching its first operational Pelican spacecraft, along with 36 SuperDoves, on SpaceX’s Transporter-12 mission, expected NET January.
The Pelican spacecraft is equipped with a 40 cm resolution optical sensor, inter-satellite comm links, and an NVIDIA Jetson GPU, which Marshall believes will be the “fastest processor in space.”