Planet FAQ

Planet was founded in 2010 by three NASA scientists.

On December 8, 2021 Planet became a public benefit corporation trading on the New York Stock Exchange as PL.

Planet is a Public Benefit Corporation (PBC). Our PBC purpose is “to accelerate humanity toward a more sustainable, secure, and prosperous world, by illuminating environmental and social change." As a PBC, Planet’s mission will be encoded into our corporate DNA, obligating the directors to stay true to our mission as part of their fiduciary duty to our stockholders. Planet will continue to bring value commercially, socially and environmentally.

A PBC is different from a B-Corp because “B Corps” have applied for certification by a nonprofit called B Lab. We don’t currently have plans to apply for certification. You can learn more about PBC and B-Corps here.

Planet is growing and has over 600 full-time employees. We are headquartered in San Francisco, CA, with additional offices in Berlin and Washington, D.C.

The number of satellites that Planet has in orbit changes often as our satellites approach their end of life and new satellites are launched to replenish the fleet. Since we launched our first satellite in 2013, we’ve successfully deployed 462 satellites. Today we have approximately 200 satellites in orbit - a number we expect to maintain going forward - including our Dove and SkySat constellations that are capturing over 25 terabytes of imagery each day.

Planet is a data company. We offer subscription services to our imagery and imagery products. Our licensed imagery products include global, daily 3-5 meter per pixel resolution imagery as well as taskable rapid revisit 50cm pixel resolution imagery. We also offer a platform and API for computer vision-based analytics.

We currently serve more than 34,000 users, 700 customers, and 200 partners. Planet is a leading provider of geospatial data for use in agriculture, government, and commercial mapping, and is seeing customer growth in new markets such as insurance, commodities, and finance.

Space debris is an important subject that we care deeply about. Planet is committed to ensuring our satellites do not further complicate the issue. Planet has purposely chosen to orbit its satellites at lower altitudes to both avoid the congested higher altitudes and to ensure timely and safe deorbiting of our satellites when their end of life is reached. By staying out of high traffic altitudes and ensuring timely deorbiting, Planet does not contribute to long term space debris.

Planet’s imagery that is posted online via our owned media channels (i.e., Planet.com, social media and in the press) is done so under creative common CC-BY-NC-SA. Under this license, you are free to share and adapt our imagery as long as you correctly attribute it to Planet (e.g. ©Planet Labs PBC, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0), and properly indicate any change that is made to the imagery. The imagery may not be sold or commercialized under this creative commons license, but interested parties can reach out to images@planet.com to discuss licensing our imagery data for commercial purposes.

For imagery licensed under a creative commons license, see paragraph above.

For imagery licensed pursuant to a commercial license, please refer to the attribution requirements as set forth in your license agreement.

At Planet, we hire people who are committed to our mission and are the best at what they do. Visit our careers page to learn more about open positions.

Yes, Planet has a number of patents and applications, both in the U.S. and abroad which cover a range of developments for our satellites, platform, and products. For a list of U.S. patents, please seeplanet.com/patents/.