Planet Labs strengthens global reach with major satellite partnership

Planet Labs has entered a multi-year USD230 million agreement to expand its partnership with a long-standing Asia-Pacific commercial partner. Under the agreement, Planet will develop and deploy a new constellation of high-resolution Pelican satellites, reserving dedicated capacity for the partner while also providing operational services. The expanded fleet’s increased capacity will enable Planet to better serve its government and commercial customers worldwide.

Will Marshall, Planet’s CEO and co-founder, described the agreement as a significant milestone for the company, marking its largest contract to date and a major step towards tapping into a vast market for satellite services. “These types of partnerships are a win-win: our partners gain critical satellite capabilities and priority access to leading-edge technology, while they help Planet accelerate key space programmes and create synergistic benefits for all our customers,” he explained. He added that Planet is strategically pursuing a select number of similar opportunities across its Pelican, Tanager and SuperDove satellites, targeting the defence and intelligence, civil government and commercial sectors.

James Mason, Planet’s chief space officer, emphasized that the announcement reinforces the company’s ability to leverage its advanced space systems and intellectual property to create unique value for partners. “Our trusted partners have long expressed interest in our proprietary space systems technology, and we’re proud to be able to fulfil their needs with our satellites and services,” he said. He also highlighted how Planet’s vertical integration and agile aerospace capabilities allow the company to scale to meet both customer and partner demand.

Real-time space-to-space connectivity

This is the third strategic space systems partnership Planet Labs has signed in the last four years. In partnership with the Carbon Mapper Coalition, Planet has built, launched and deployed Tanager, a hyperspectral satellite, which is now producing a powerful dataset for use by customers and partners across government and commercial markets. In support of NASA’s Communications Services Project (CSP), Planet is developing real-time space-to-space connectivity solutions between Pelican and partner satellites with technology demonstrations onboard Planet’s Smallsat platform in 2025.

Pelican is Planet’s next-generation high-resolution satellite, which enables continuity and enhancements over the current SkySat fleet, including in image quality, spectral bands, imaging capacity and latency. Planet successfully launched the Pelican-2 satellite on 14 January 2025, including the latest NVIDIA GPU processor for AI on the edge and satellite-to-satellite communications, which are together designed to enable Planet to deliver critical data to its customers in minutes rather than hours.