00:08:34 · Molly O'Shea
[00:08:34] S0: Is all of the demand on the defense side?
00:08:37 · Will Marshall
[00:08:37] S1: No. We're seeing the strongest demand there right now, but we are seeing also a boon in commercial business and civil government business as well. So, civil government is counties and states trying to use us to help stop wildfires and respond to them or NASA using it for science and earth system science. It's, Brazil government using it to stop deforestation, but no one can do that on their own. AI is covering all of that. Satellites and the AI enable this scale. At Civil Government Commercial, we just are working with agricultural companies like John Deere, Bayer, BASF. We're working and there we help them improve crop yields. We work with hedge funds. I can't tell you who, but some of the hedge funds like to work with us to get alpha on stocks and commodities around the planet. We have a lot of an understanding of crop yields around the world, a lot of understanding of infrastructure development. We've even had some of the hyperscalers around here buy our data. Why? Because they want to monitor not just their data center construction, but they want to monitor their competitors' data center construction. Have all the understanding of the data center construction all around the world, not just in The US, in China, in other places. We have a wide variety of applications, but it's true that defense is really what's driving the biggest boon right now. We reported a significant growth last quarter. It was 58% growth year on year, but I think the biggest part of that was the defense growth. So the other sectors are growing as well, but the defense piece is growing the fastest.
00:10:22 · Molly O'Shea, Will Marshall
[00:10:22] S0: Last year at Reagan National Defense Forum, I had an interview with Emil Michael, under Secretary of Defense for the Department of War, and also the CTO there. Of a few companies, I think it was three or four, he mentioned Planet Labs. [00:10:41] S1: Is that why you came? Because you said it was a good idea. Look, again, new technology is changing the nature of warfare. Now it is increasingly hybrid. It's increasingly distributed and it's increasingly new technologies that can help you address that. Drones, satellites, and AI are the core of that. Satellites is less known than the drones, but they're playing a critical role around the world, whether that's in Ukraine or in Iran and other places around the planet. [00:11:16] S0: I have to ask you, what is the craziest thing or most surprising thing that you've seen?
00:11:20 · Will Marshall
[00:11:20] S1: Oh my God, I've seen so many things, but basically, when you look at a map and you see it's just static, it isn't. The whole world is changing. If you look at a field, the river will move. Human activity is changing everything, but everything is changing. But I mean, we've seen, what I'm most excited about is what people do with our imagery. Like, it's a huge range of things. To give you some bizarre examples, we had some people in South America, protecting, dolphins in rivers. Even though we can't see them, we can see the activity that was limiting their range or something. And we saw people use our data in Africa to stop river blindness. You're like, how on earth can we help with river blindness? It's a disease that's river based, but we obviously can't see what it is. But it's all to do with how close the village is to the stagnant water. And we can see stagnant water in the imagery. So these NGOs were using it to warn villages, you're close to stagnant water, therefore get out of this way or what have you. So it's just all over the place. The most interesting applications on the defense side are a little bit more sensitive, but just know that it's playing a big role in these conflicts around the world. And I believe one that is really helpful for the planet. As I said, diffuse tension, reduce the likelihood of civilian casualties, reduce the likelihood of war at all happening because the best situation is that we don't enter a war in the first place. And information diffuses that tensions because it means that different sides can understand what's going on.
00:13:08 · Molly O'Shea
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00:14:49 · Molly O'Shea
[00:14:49] S0: To walk through the satellites that you produce, you produce a handful and they're all called different birds. I know we talked about this on the tour, but could you walk through the different use cases or the specs for each one of them starting with dove?