This month, Planet opened an office in central London, allowing the company to be physically present near key UK stakeholders and partners, and where decisions that shape the country are made. While this national hub is a new milestone, our commitment to the United Kingdom is not. Through our visionary leadership, technical investments, and strategic partnerships, our impact in the UK stretches back over a decade.

British Leadership, Local Expertise

Our journey started with a distinct British vision, and it continues to advance with British leaders at the helm. Planet’s co-founder and CEO Will Marshall was born and educated in the UK, studying at the University of Leicester and achieving his PhD at Oxford University. In addition, we are guided by exceptional British strategic minds on our European and Defense and Intelligence Advisory Boards, including Sir Jeremy Fleming, Former Director of Government Communications Headquarters, and David Miliband, Former UK Foreign Secretary. Their expertise ensures our strategic focus evolves in lockstep with the UK’s national security and environmental priorities, while also addressing the global context.

As someone deeply shaped by these same native roots, steering our global commercial growth from home soil is incredibly personal to me. This shared heritage is woven into Planet’s DNA, driving our mission to solve Earth's most pressing challenges from the largest constellation of Earth imaging satellites in history. Planet’s 30+ employees across the UK, spanning nearly every department — from engineering, data science, sales, customer support, marketing, and government affairs — understand this too. This team knows first-hand the challenges and opportunities in the UK to help Planet better serve our customers and partners.

Leveraging the UK’s Technological Strengths

Beyond our leadership and employee base, Britain serves as a vital hub for our global operations. Goonhilly Earth Station in Cornwall supports high-frequency data downlinks from our constellation of hundreds of satellites. In fact, Goonhilly was the first commercial ground station to down-link Planet data more than 10 years ago! By leveraging world-class British facilities, we ensure the UK remains a vital hub for global space traffic.

Rather than competing with local industries, we provide the foundational "ground truth" that empowers the British tech sector. A fundamental focus of our investment is partnering with local artificial intelligence and data science firms to unlock the full value of our daily imagery. Britain boasts a world-class technology landscape spanning thriving research institutions, startups, and established companies. By pairing our unique dataset with this rich domestic expertise in AI and analytics, we are enabling innovative solutions for critical challenges across security, sustainability, and economic activity.

Empowering British Innovation and Security

Planet's history in the UK has also been built through our outstanding customers and partners. Key areas of impact include:

• Commercial Innovation: Many premier UK geospatial and analytics firms — like MapImpact, Earth-i, Esri UK, and 4 Earth Intelligence — build high-value applications on top of our data to scale British-made innovation worldwide.
• Sustainable Leadership: We actively steer the national conversation around sustainability and innovation alongside key organisations like UKspace, TechUK, Space4Climate, ADS Group and the British Association of Remote Sensing Companies (BARSC). Through the Sustainable Markets Initiative, we have collaborated with His Majesty King Charles III to foster sustainable supply chains.
• National Security: We have a longstanding relationship with NATO and are committed to ensuring allied forces have the independent surveillance needed to protect communities and verify international treaties.
• Public Sector Usage: Our data has brought valuable efficiencies to agencies across the region. For example, as a longstanding partner to England’s Rural Payments Agency (RPA), our Planet Insights Platform successfully reduced the time required to process weekly agricultural data by 95 percent — shrinking a nine-month manual task into just two weeks for British farmers. We maintain similarly productive partnerships with the devolved governments of Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. Forest Research leverages Planet’s daily global data to modernise its woodland monitoring programme, enabling more efficient deployment of field teams and stronger analytical support for national conservation efforts.
• Global Good: Data scientists at the UK Office for National Statistics (ONS), The HALO Trust, the Open Source Centre and others use our high-resolution imagery to pioneer machine learning tools for global humanitarian relief efforts, clear explosive remnants of war, and monitor rapid environmental shifts in the changing Arctic. Organisations like Poseira use Planet data to support the detection and forecasting of harmful algal blooms in Lough Neagh.

These collaborations demonstrate the transformative power of pairing Planet’s daily global imagery with British ingenuity, ultimately helping our partners build a more secure, sustainable, and innovative future for the UK.

Our Commitment to the UK

Our new London home is a celebration of our shared history and a launchpad for what comes next. We are accelerating our support for government customers to help achieve the UK’s strategic goals and policy priorities, adding new highly-skilled jobs to the thriving tech sector, supporting UK policymaking, and collaborating with British innovators to unlock new applications and services derived from Planet's unique data set.

As we look to the future, we remain deeply dedicated to supporting — and elevating — the UK’s status as a global science, technology, and space superpower as we continue to use space to help life on Earth.