Closing Bell - Manifest Space: Sustainability & AI in Space with Planet Labs CEO Will Marshall 9/26/24

Episode Date: September 26, 2024

World leaders and policymakers are meeting for both the UN General Assembly and Climate Week this week: a primetime for Planet Labs’s latest product launch and satellite success. The company, which operates the largest earth observation constellation in low-Earth orbit, has unveiled the world’s first-ever forest carbon monitoring system at 3 meter resolution. Additionally, the publicly traded company revealed images from it new hyperspectral satellite, Tanager-1. CEO Will Marshall joins Morgan Brennan to discuss AI in the space race, and why he believes his company  is positioning itself for a “multi-trillion dollar transition to a sustainable economy.”

This week, as world leaders met for both the United Nations General Assembly and Climate Week, Planet Labs and its CEO, Will Marshall, announced a new product, the world's first forest carbon monitoring system at three meter resolution. Today's announcement with forest carbon, that is an AI-powered data set that takes in LiDAR data, our own satellite earth imaging and does a machine learning tool to estimate the amount of carbon in each tree. And the hyperspectral data from the Tanager spacecraft is going to be an another boon for AI because all these color bands you can distinguish between

different objects on the ground in a myriad of ways. It's hard to do that as a person but if you train it on some data, hey this is what we know from between different objects on the ground in a myriad of ways. It's hard to do that as a person, but if you train it on some data, hey, this is what we know from ground truth, then you should be able to find those things around the world. Planet, which touts the largest Earth observation constellation in low Earth orbit,

launched its new hyperspectral satellite, Tanager-1, in August. This week, the publicly traded company, which has a $600 million market cap, shared the new satellite's first imagery, as the data it collects will be used to monitor and mitigate methane and CO2 emissions. We have 200 satellites that image the whole world every day. But Tanager is our first that is hyperspectral.

Now what the heck does that mean? So it means that we take images, but each image has 400 color bands, spectral bands we call them. So 400 colors with which you can have sensitive measurements of things like gases, the type of tree in a forest. So it's an extremely sensitive color measurement. We can do spectrograph from these that enable us to measure methane emissions around the planet and many other things besides. It's a cool new technology. As far as I'm aware, we've got the most sensitive hyperspectral instrument in orbit. On this episode, co-founder and CEO Will Marshall on how Planet Labs is positioning itself for the, quote, multi-trillion dollar transition to a sustainable

economy and how AI will change the space game. I'm Morgan Brennan, and this is Manifest Space. Joining me now, Will Marshall, the CEO and co-founder of Planet Labs. It's so great to be speaking with you again. Thank you for taking the time. Lovely to be back. You have a lot of news, so I want to get to that first, starting with Tanager 1. You have some updates on the satellite, I want to get to that first, starting with Tanager 1. You have some updates on the satellite which you launched over the summer and which is a real game changer for Planet and for the industry in which you operate. Walk me through it.

Yeah, absolutely. So as you know, we have 200 satellites that image the whole world every day. But Tanager is our first that is hyperspectral. Now, what the heck does that mean? So it means that we take images, but each image has 400 color bands, spectral bands we call them, so 400 colors with which you can have sensitive measurements of things like gases, the type of tree in a forest, so it's an extremely sensitive color measurement. We can do a spectrograph from these that enable us to measure methane emissions around the planet and many other things besides. It's a cool new technology. As far as I'm aware, we've got the most sensitive hyperspectral instrument in orbit. And this is the first

satellite of two that you have planned? Yeah, actually we hope to build even more, but we, through philanthropic funding of about $125 million from Mike Bloomberg and Richard Lawrence, we have enabled the first satellites to get going. But importantly, once we get operational, we will start providing that data to real users. Carbon Mapper, we've already done a data partnership with them, an eight-figure data partnership. We've done a partnership with the NRO, piloting the use of our data. And there's many others that we're having exciting conversations with,

energy companies, mining companies, who could all leverage this data and use it for their, and civil governments as well, to use it to better make smarter decisions. So as this satellite has come online, what does that mean in terms of the imagery and the data that you're already generating? Just, I guess, to give an example of how, of just how much it changes the game in terms of access that we get to observation of our planet. Yeah, I mean, that's exactly the point, is to have a higher fidelity understanding of our changing planet, especially to get down to a point source of emissions of methane. So the idea is that we would be able to see sources of methane that produce just a hundred kilograms of

methane an hour, that's not a very much amount of gas, so from an oil refinery that has a leak or a gas pipeline or agriculture facility or waste facility producing methane we'll be able to pinpoint that actually to a 30 meter level so we'll be able to say it's this facility or that facility that is causing that leak help regulators regulate that methane production and help oil and gas companies and agriculture and other companies get ahead of that by fixing those leaks ahead in both ways, helping us to achieve a sustainable planet. Now, it's also UN General Assembly week. It's also Climate Week. And so I always think of Planet Labs as not just a space company, but a climate tech company as well. One of the other things you're unveiling is this forest carbon monitoring system.

What does this do? That's correct. So we've been monitoring trees across the whole planet now for seven years. We image the whole world every day. And the canonical use case was to image down to individual tree level. But what we're launching today is the world's first global high resolution forest carbon measurement. That's a measurement of the amount of carbon down to the individual tree level. So we'll be measuring in every tree, in every forest

around the world, every quarter, and how much carbon is in the tree. Why does that matter? Well, we've got to move towards a sustainable economy and that means judo moving capitalism to value nature and carbon. Carbon is the easiest place to start. I mean, and with this measurement that's scalable and accurate we can enable the transition from just a few billion dollars in those sort of projects to trillions of dollars of projects. I mean, look, today, you today you know Microsoft, Google they want to offset their carbon but how do you actually do that? The EU has a new regulation called the EUDR which is forcing anyone that's producing commodities bringing them into the EU

they have to prove that those commodities did not cause deforestation in their country of origin. So our system could help them to measure and enforce that. And I think soon enough every company on the planet and every country on the planet will be forced to balance its carbon books just like we are forced to balance our financials. Every year we have to get a ledger of that and this is the data set that will help to underpin that at scale and accurately. So we think again it's a multi-trillion dollar transition to a sustainable economy and this is the starting point. A measurement system of carbon in all the forests. What do you think leads the adoption of

that technology? Where do you think the marketplace is for that at least initially? Is it on the government side? Is the commercial side? Do you see that both of those sectors coming up simultaneously in terms of the spending for these types of technologies? Yeah, both of those. I mean, what we're seeing from the governments is they're starting to adopt these digital measurement verification and reporting systems for their own carbon measurement. And at the same time, we have the voluntary carbon markets. That's the things where Microsoft or Google or others will be using voluntary carbon credits on voluntary markets and we can help them move to digital MRV systems as well and I think this is it's going to be huge

especially every when companies don't just do it because they they want to do it like Google and Microsoft but actually because they're forced to do it and the SEC is already planning regulations. So just like the EU is starting to force on those commodities, we see the U.S. will start to force companies to account for their carbon. And we'll be there ready to supply them with the data to underpin those markets. And if I just take a step back and look at your portfolio more broadly right now, you do seem to be doing a lot of work and ever more work with

not only the U.S. government, but also with international governments as well. How does that trajectory continue to play out? And how do you think about that versus the commercial side, when you have a lot of partners in the agriculture industry, which has been going through a bit of a downturn and some other key sectors as well? Yeah, well, we've seen very strong growth in our government business, over 30% growth in defense and intelligence, we reported last quarter. Very good growth also in the civil government business. Look, around the world, we're helping countries to understand their region, to look out for security threats in the defense intelligence piece and in civil

government it's responding to disasters so we can help give them building damage assessment quickly after a disaster or help them to understand key climate variables in the case of our partnership with NASA and so there's and and work with countries in the EU for for example, that are trying to implement agriculture policies. So across the board, and there are strong commercial business opportunities too. We're still seeing a lot of new opportunities in energy and finance and insurance. We've got partnerships, for example, with AXA and Swiss Re on doing automatic parametric drought insurance that enables much more efficient insurance processing than their prior system.

So I think that with the scaled opportunities of digitization, sustainable transformation, and peace and security, big opportunities for planning. How does AI and your development of AI capabilities propel all of this forward? Well our dataset is a field day for AI. I'm so excited by what AI can do. Essentially it's enabling the democratization of this. Instead of just NASA or the NRO which both use that data, but they're big organizations that have teams of thousands of people that have history and skills in understanding satellite processing. AI means that smaller organizations can get value out of it.

We have a vision of building towards what we call queryable earth, where you can search the planet for answers and get answers. But even as we build towards that, then large language models are enabling us to accelerate our transition to that. But even before that, we do great work with machine learning today. We partner with Brazilian federal police, as an example, to monitor the entire Brazilian Amazon, check for new roads. And if there's new roads, that's using AI, that enables them to do enforcement to stop

deforestation. And today's announcement with forest carbon, that is an AI-powered data set that takes in LIDAR data, our own satellite earth imaging, and does a machine learning tool to estimate the amount of carbon in every tree. And the hyperspectral data from the Tanager spacecraft is going to be an another boon for AI because all these color bands you can distinguish between different objects on the ground in a myriad of ways. It's hard to do that as a person but if you train it on some data, hey this is what we know from Grism

ground truth, then you should be able to find those things around the world. So I think space is producing an incredible data set that will power AI. And AI, in turn, is powering us to accelerate the extraction of value from our data to more and more clients around the world. Are you building all of these large language models internally, or are there certain tech companies that you're working with? Both. So we do work. The work I mentioned with Forrest, of course, is our own AI development. But we also partner with many organizations. We work with some of the biggest tech companies on AI.

As an example, we've worked with Microsoft, AI for Good Lab, which has done, for example, an assessment of all the solar panels and wind energy facilities around the world. We call it the Renewables Atlas. We've also worked with them on building damage assessment after disaster response. So we do both. We do our own staff and partner with others. We believe in an ecosystem approach, and we very much want to build a system and a platform that enables others to build machine learning on top of our data

to power the myriad of applications that are possible with Earth imaging. And finally, today actually marks the 25th anniversary of the first ever commercial Earth observation satellite being launched to orbit. It was built by Lockheed Martin. It was used by the company that would eventually, I believe, become Digital Globe and then go on to become other companies. Just the fact that we're 25 years into this business, which to me actually doesn't seem like a very long time,

and given the fact that Planet does have the largest constellation of Earth observation satellites circling the Earth, your thoughts? Well, I mean, it's an incredible revolution going on in space, especially the last 10 years. We've seen rocket costs come down about fourfold, and we've seen the number of satellites launched go up more than 10x, and the amount of data they're producing has gone up more than 10x as well. The upshot of this exciting space renaissance is new and powerful data sets,

better communication technology that enable us collectively to accelerate our plans towards a sustainable planet, like I've been talking about, and myriad other things, tele-education, telemedicine from the communications satellites, and much besides. And back to the AI point, even today, President Biden, who is speaking here at the UN in New York, mentioned how AI can help accelerate our ability to do climate change. Space brings an incredible data set that, together with AI,

can really accelerate our transition to a sustainable economy. Will Marshall of Planet Labs, always great to speak with you. Thank you so much. 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.