Planet Labs Debut

I have never seen a company go so far in stealth mode on a Series A… to space in this case. Twice.

Here are the Planet founders, Chris, Will and Robbie, with a bottle of my favorite J-Curve bubbly. They took this photo during a little signing ceremony of our Series A term sheet. (Full disclosure: I also led the seed round, before the company incorporated, and became the first outside board member)

The blue marble of Apollo 17 provides a wonderful backdrop for the company as they are taking a radically different approach to Earth imaging satellites to boost the frequency and universality of coverage to new levels. The data will be open for developers of cloud services from beyond the cloud!

They have a passion for humanitarian applications: instead of lamenting illegal fishing or deforestation in the Amazon months after the fact, imagine being able to catch them in the moment. When a natural disaster occurs somewhere on the planet, it often is in an area that was not an imaging hot spot and so it can be difficult to get timely before and after imagery surrounding the event. Imagine every farmer in the developing world having access to crop health and over-watering data, like the rich farmers do today. Existing imaging markets want better frequency and coverage, and if you push it far enough, entirely new markets will arise. The sky is not the limit. =)

Planet Labs announced their existence this morning with a website revealing imagery from their first two satellites. (SpaceReview, Dow Jones, MIT Tech Review, TechCrunch, SpaceNews, VentureBeat)

Stepping back a bit, we are seeing unprecedented innovation in the space industry, triggered by SpaceX lowering the cost of access, and now with companies like Planet Labs revolutionizing how a satellite company should operate in this new space market.

I first met them while launching rockets in the Black Rock Desert with my son, where these NASA scientists came to test fly a Google Android phone as a satellite….

Photo sequence of the early days below… and here are all of my Planet posts, in order.

8 responses to “Planet Labs Debut”

jurvetson

Jun 26, 2013 at 5:24 pm

First encounter at the RocketMavericks launch event…

That airframe has four motors, each of which is about 2x the impulse of a cruise missile booster. Here is a nice action video summary of that adventure, and a talk by the CEO of Planet on the early testing.

I have a special fondness for garage startups that literally start in a garage…

I also like to catch the white board ephemera…

and an earlier post, anonymous at the time, with the garage door and creative space…

(compare to the Google Space Plan or a different satellite startup)

Moving into their first office in San Francisco

To add a little color to the office, I lent them an Atlas rocket engine from the DFJ Space Collection:

Receiving first image here…

and orbital tracking from remote ground stations around the planet

and here are the first images downloaded from the two Doves…

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rschingler

Jun 26, 2013 at 5:51 pm

@Steve Jurvetson Ha! Steve!!! Great memories. I do like how we used that crate for a bike rack for a number of months…. 🙂

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solerena13

Jun 26, 2013 at 8:03 pm

The sky IS NOT the limit:) Yes!

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PeterThoeny

Jun 26, 2013 at 9:03 pm

Congrats Chris, Will and Robbie!! I got to know Chris as an ambitious and very goal driven young entrepreneur. Good things come out of Chris’ hands and brain. Go Cosmogia aka Planet Labs, go!

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PhOtOnQuAnTiQuE

Jun 26, 2013 at 11:30 pm

This is so awesome !!! I am really happy to hear back about them from you. Last time I saw them was at BIL giving a public demo. Most people were sceptical if not calling them crazy, even liars, for presenting such an idea with off the shelf and DIY small satellites… when their passion scientific and engineering skills were visionary. Congrats to the team and the one who believed in them !!!!

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sbove

Jun 27, 2013 at 5:39 pm

DFJ absolutely doing the coolest stuff in VC…congrats!

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jurvetson

Jun 28, 2013 at 4:30 am

@stephenbove — thanks! I have to pinch myself sometimes…

@photonquantique — I was with them today… and yeah, if nobody calls you crazy, you clearly are not changing the world…

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jurvetson

Jul 2, 2013 at 9:19 pm

Oh, here’s a collection of my favorite press clips, and the first one uses my photo from here:

“The only thing cooler than a tiny, cheap satellite is a fleet of tiny, cheap satellites.”
— http://www.sfchronicle.com/technology/article/Planet-Labs-army-o...

“Smallsat constellations: the killer app?”
— http://www.thespacereview.com/article/2322/1

“Board member and Draper Fisher Jurvetson Managing Director Steve Jurvetson met the founders on a Saturday in 2010 while he was launching rockets in the desert with his son for fun and they were launching a Google Android phone as an experiment. He said that of the several private satellite companies he’s looked at, Planet Labs is the farthest along. DFJ led the funding round
Planet Labs is part of a larger federal effort to re-focus NASA and privatize access to space and space travel. The private rocket company SpaceX, for instance, where Mr. Jurvetson also sits on the board, "enables a coral reef of innovation in satellite markets," he said. "If I have cheaper access to space, it’s like cheaper fiber optic lines, and once the infrastructure is built, physical satellites are like the Web infrastructure that runs on top of that."
— pevc.dowjones.com/article?an=DJFVW00020130626e96qao4n0

“the company plans to deploy the world’s largest fleet of Earth-imaging satellites to image the changing planet and provide open access to that information. Planet Labs says these imaging satellites, called “Doves,” can provide a new image of the planet at an unprecedented combination of resolution and frequency.”
— techcrunch.com/2013/06/25/planet-labs-raises-13m-from-oat…

“Steve Jurvetson, managing director of the venture capital firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson, says he’s “seen at least a couple of different companies” that hope to improve the price performance of satellites by a factor of two to 10. But, he says, “when we saw Planet Labs, we saw something that was quite dramatically better.”
— http://www.technologyreview.com/news/516611/startup-plans-conste...

“Planet Labs is seeking to revolutionize the Earth imaging industry with a constellation of 28 nanosatellites designed to offer frequent, low-cost images of any point on the globe. By providing high-resolution imagery quickly and inexpensively, the company’s founders hope to expand dramatically the customer base for Earth imagery and the use of that information to address humanitarian, environmental and business concerns.
Planet Labs in April launched its two first satellites, triple cubesats called Dove-1 and Dove-2, on technology demonstrations. Dove-2 launched April 19 on a Soyuz-2.1a rocket from Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. Also on April 21, Dove-1 traveled on the maiden flight of Orbital Sciences Corp.’s Antares rocket.
The satellites “obtained beautiful imagery with beautiful resolution straight out of the box,” Marshall added.
For example, Dove-1 obtained imagery of a forest in Portland, Ore., that was detailed enough to show the canopy of individual trees. When Planet Labs officials compared it with Google Earth imagery, they saw an area where logging had occurred.
Deforestation is one potential application for Planet Labs imagery. Customer interest will determine additional applications. The target audience extends far beyond “large companies and global information system experts” and includes individual Kenyan farmers trying to decide when to water or apply nutrients to their soil, Schingler said.
The image of Earth taken by Apollo 17 astronauts in 1972 known as the Blue Marble hangs in a prominent place in Planet Labs’ office. The company’s founders said the Earth imagery they intend to provide is designed to spur global action just as the Blue Marble image prompted greater global awareness. “By making regular imaging of the planet universally accessible, we will enable people to make better decisions,” Marshall said.”
— http://www.spacenews.com/article/civil-space/35980planet-labs-un...

“Planet Labs will create an entirely new data set, with both humanitarian and commercial value,” said Planet Labs investor and maker-movement legend Tim O’Reilly. ”We’ve become used to having imagery of the entire Earth. What we haven’t yet understood is how transformative it will be when that imagery is regularly and frequently updated.”
— venturebeat.com/2013/06/26/planet-labs/

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Planet Labs Debut

8 responses to “Planet Labs Debut”

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