Closing Bell - Manifest Space: Real-time Satellite Data, AI Learning and More with Planet Labs CEO Will Marshall 7/18/25

Episode Date: July 18, 2025

Planets Labs CEO Will Marshall joins Manifest Space to discuss the company’s rapid growth, fueled by deals across the globe as the changing geopolitical landscape means countries are looking for real-time data from satellites to respond to natural disasters, security threats and more. Planet Labs stock is up more than 100% in the last three months and Marshall talks about the demand for his company’s product.  

Planet Labs has inked a flurry of new deals recently. CEO and co-founder Will Marshall says the changing geopolitical landscape, coupled with advancements in AI, are enabling countries and companies to have a peripheral vision to quote understand threats in their neighborhood. We just announced five new major partnerships. The biggest one we've ever done in partnership with Germany, which is both dedicated satellites over Europe, as well as data of a large region of Europe, maritime domain awareness solutions, as well as other AI tools. And then four other partnerships, one with NATO monitoring Russia and activities

around there so they can get smarter using satellites and AI. We did one with the US Navy. We did one with the Indo-Pacom. That's the US military command in the Pacific. A lot of people are after our data to understand threats in their region. And it's an AI is enabling an unprecedented ability to see those threats at scale and at speed. Planet's stock has taken off as well. Shares have doubled in three months. They're up 200% in 12.

On this episode, Planet's Will Marshall on the surging demand for satellite imagery and analytics and how AI is changing everything. On this episode, planets Will Marshall on the surging demand for satellite imagery and analytics, and how AI is changing everything. I'm Morgan Brennan and this is Manifest Space. Joining me now, Will Marshall, the co-founder and CEO of Planet Labs. And Will, it's great to speak with you. Thank you. Wonderful to be back. You're busy. You're saying very busy.

You just announced a flurry of new deals and contracts here in the last couple of weeks. Let's start there. Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, look, the world is absolutely leaning into satellite imagery and there's a number of reasons. The planet provides critical information about threats around the world. And we're seeing it just this week in North Korea, in Gaza, in Iran. Of course, these world events are people want ice and the changing geopolitical landscape and the revolution that's happening in AI are enabling countries to have a peripheral vision to understand threats in their neighborhood. And so they're coming to plan it for it

because we have this unique daily scan and ability to leverage AI to get them the insights about the threats that they need to understand. So demand is surging, it sounds like. Yeah, absolutely. We just announced five new major partnerships. The biggest one we've ever done in partnership with Germany, which is both dedicated satellites over Europe,

as well as data of a large region of Europe, maritime domain awareness solutions, as well as other AI tools. And then four other partnerships, one with NATO, monitoring Russia and activities around there so they can get smarter using satellites and AI. We did one with the US Navy. We did one with the Indo-Pacom. That's the US military command in the Pacific.

A lot of people are after our data to understand threats in their region. And it's an AI is enabling an unprecedented ability to see those threats at scale and at speed. And I want to dig into the AI piece of this, but just a little bit more on this, because I've been having these conversations with folks that work with governments and in defense contracting and other commercial space companies as well. And that is the fact that we're seeing this tidal wave of spending, not just in the U.S., but in other parts of the world, most notably in Europe for national security and intelligence and defense.

Is that what you're seeing as well in terms of some of this ongoing or incoming, I should say, deal activity? 100%. Countries are moving with a new clarity, speed, and urgency to enhance their security. I've never seen anything like it in my life. I recently was in Europe and the urgency is there. I mean, we've seen these deals come together in weeks, like six or eight or 10 weeks when normally that would have taken six or 10 months. That says huge demand, huge need. And so what's going on behind that? When countries, you know, this change geopolitical landscape, countries are like, we need to deal with our own security. you know, with this change geopolitical landscape, countries are like, we need to deal with our own security.

The first thing you need, the very first thing you need is eyes. What is going on? And if you don't have that, you can't do anything else. The second thing that is happening is they're looking to Ukraine and going, what's happened there? Well, if you look at Ukraine, that war is heavily dependent on AI, drones and satellites. That is the name of the game. It's not. It's also conventional capabilities, missiles and rockets and helicopters and soldiers and tanks. But it's also this new information war where having a greater understanding can change the game. So whilst Ukraine has a 7 to one tank and troop disadvantage, they have

information advantage because of satellites and AI and drones. So it's a critical club. So when countries like Germany are looking to add security capability or NATO, they look to Ukraine to go, what is happening in modern warfare? How is that game changing? We need those new tools, and that can enable us to use our conventional tools more smartly. And these capabilities countries can gain in weeks and months,

not years or decades, and for tens or hundreds of millions of dollars, not tens or hundreds of billions of dollars. So it much faster, and they can get this awareness, the eyes that they need to understand threats in their region. We talk about images and we talk about space-based data and AI. How critical was that to the U.S. precision strike we saw in Iran and some of the other activities we've seen in the Middle East? Well, satellites were certainly part of what was going on there. What I can tell you about is that in the aftermath of that and run up to it,

people were using our imagery to figure out what's going on. And like not just the images you saw in the press of the strikes on the different nuclear facilities and so on, but also analysis of where there are more vehicles than normal in the run-up where they could have been taking the nuclear materials out. When did they close the hatch on those facilities and so on? Why is that relevant? That's relevant to whether or not that was a successful strike or not. What's really important to me is our mission is about bringing transparency and accountability to these events around the world, both in security and sustainability, which we've also spoken about before. And that accountability is no better seen than the press leveraging our imagery

to figure out what's going on and share that with the world. So everyone gets to see this. Everyone gets to have accountability in real time and triangulate truth of what's going on in a world where there's a lot of misinformation. The satellite data doesn't lie. And so having that can help people understand what's going on and to verify what the countries are saying. Open source intelligence. Absolutely. How quickly with all these deals that you're cultivating right now, how quickly does all of this capability come online? How much of it depends on the constellation and the satellites you already have on orbit? How much of it is new

technology that you are building and getting ready to launch? I think about the Pelicans, for example. Yeah, well, most of the deals we're doing are based on the satellites we already have in space. So most of the deals that I just mentioned, however, there are now we're doing a few new deals where countries are buying dedicated satellites. And for those ones, we're launching more satellites just for those countries. So they have dedicated capabilities. And we've done two deals like that now. One with Japan, one with Germany, both over $200 million over several years to build them a set of satellites, a set of these pelicans, you just mentioned them, that have dedicated capacity in that region. Pelican is an amazing spacecraft. We just got first light just over a month ago now from our first satellite that

we launched earlier this year, incredible high resolution. And but what's more, this satellite has the fastest computer in space. It has one that we did a partnership with Nvidia. So it flies the Nvidia Jetson-Oren platform upstairs so that we can do compute on the edge. And it also, the future ones are gonna have satellite, satellite communication so that the data can come back even faster. Like literally within minutes.

Why does that matter? If you have a disaster, like a flood or a fire or what have you, you want the data quickly to help save lives. If you have a security incident, you want the data quickly to be able to understand what's going on, right? So this satellite is not just great resolution,

it's all the bells and whistles. We call it 30 by 30 by 30 because it's gonna have 30 revisits per day, it's gonna be a 30 centimeter resolution and you're going to be able to get the information within 30 minutes of tasking no matter where it is in the world. And so that new capability has never happened before. So we're also building those new capabilities and these partnerships with these countries enables us to scale that, pays for that capex, and then all of the rest of our customers get that benefit as well.

So AI, I mean you just touched on it, but how is AI changing the game and how quickly is the technology and the capability evolving? It is evolving incredibly fast and we feel like a planet we're in the center of it. Let me explain why. We have 3,000 images for every point on the Earth's landmass, a wicked data set to change to analyze change over time. What matters in these cases, like I just mentioned there's a RAND case, is not just what has changed but what's normal. What's the normal number of vehicles at those facilities? And you can only know what's normal if you've got an archive. So AI is leveraging that deep archive.

We're the only ones with that daily scan and they are certainly the only ones that we've been doing it also for the last eight years. So we have all these layers. That means that we have a wealth of data. In short, our data set is critical for training AI about the real world. So AI today is mainly about the text on the internet. AI tomorrow will also be able to understand the real world. And how do you understand the real world? It's the real world data. Also, we feel literally in the middle of it because we are in

what I call the AI triangle. Gemini is a Google Gemini team is just a few blocks that way. Open AI is a few blocks that way and open and and Thropic is a few blocks that way. So the three best AI teams on the planet are all within certainly within a kilometer of here and we planet are in the middle of it literally. So we we we get AI by osmosis almost around here. Are you working with all of those different providers of the LLMs?

Yeah, well, we are we are public. We have said publicly that we're working with Anthropic and Google. So yes, two of them. Yeah. Um, so you mentioned that you mentioned the AI of tomorrow is tomorrow already here? I guess how quickly does this really truly take root, become realized and become a more widespread daily dynamic? I think that's an interesting question.

I mean, I think AI to your question earlier is changing incredibly fast. We couldn't do these wide scale scans and AI analysis just a few months ago. I did a TED talk in 2018, so what's that, seven years ago now, where I spelled out a vision I call queryable earth, which is being that anyone should be able to semantically write, instead of just looking around the map, should be able to write a query and get an answer about things happening on the earth. Where's the nearest deforestation event?

What could I do to help parks in my region? How can I improve my agriculture yield? What's the security challenges at our border? You should be able to just ask semantic questions and get answers just like you can today with chat GBT or Gemini or Claude. And so these technologies of large language models, as they're becoming multimodal, visual large language models,

they are becoming able to understand satellite imagery. And that is speeding up this vision of a query of Earth. So I'm incredibly excited by what we could see in the next literally months, certainly years, to bring about a democratization of satellite information, where it's not just those organizations with a bunch of people with PhDs in satellite imagery processing that can get value out of this,

but anyone can get value out of it, just like they can today from chat gbt and it can provide real answers that help make them unable to make real decisions about real world phenomena that we have this data set on. So it's an exciting time for democratization of this technology. It certainly sounds very exciting. I want to go back to the geopolitical piece of this. I guess, there's some framing out there from some folks that like we're in an AI arms race. I mean, just to go back to where the conversation started

and sort of this idea of modern warfare involving AI and intelligence and imagery and drones and some of these newer technologies and capabilities, I guess what does that competitive landscape look like? And what does it mean, particularly when you're talking about countries and adversaries? Well, look, I think we're in an AI arms race for sure. There's a race dynamic between the companies and between countries, between OpenAI, Google,

and Anthropic, and between the US and China, especially. And that means that people are stepping on the gas of this technology to beat one another. I think that's fraught with dangers that we have to think about because how can that enable terrorists to build things that we don't enable terrorists to build things that we don't want them to build faster than they could before?

And are we going to have the checks and balances on those systems so that it doesn't speed up that kind of nefarious use? I think that we have to be very careful in deploying these tools. Ditto on the environment. I mean, people have talked about how AI is also driving a huge amount of energy expenditure and that's just the surface level. Of course, it's directly driving energy usage but it is also indirectly driving it because it is making all these industries more efficient and if you make all these industries more efficient, they will

inevitably, we humans will choose to use that efficiency to do more. We won't do the same thing with less, we will do more, more extraction, more agriculture, more mining, what have you. That's a real challenge. So what is most critical about AI is not just that we step on the gas, I'm all for us accelerating and using this amazing new technologies. But we've got to have the wisdom to steer it as we do so that we leverage it to help us to solve those wicked challenges of climate, biodiversity loss, and all the planetary challenges that we're faced, and don't set off an arms war. So we need to make sure that we de-escalate as well.

So I would call for some wisdom at the same time as acceleration as we deploy these technologies. Well, Marshall, it's always great to glean your insights and to hear about the latest at Planet Labs. Thank you so much for joining me. It's great to be back. Thanks. That does it for this episode of Manifest Space. Make sure you never miss a launch by following us wherever you get your podcasts and by watching our coverage on Closing Bell Overtime. I'm Morgan Brennan.