Planet Labs, a Silicon Valley start-up, has ambitious plans to bring down the sky-high cost of satellite imagery and significantly increase the recording frequency of such photos—all with the goal of improving life down here on earth. To make that happen, the company plans to set up a nonprofit arm, Planet.org, to provide satellite images to charities and help them learn how to use the cutting-edge technology to fulfill their missions.
“We are a purpose-driven company that happens to use space to benefit humanity,” says Robbie Schingler, one of the company’s three co-founders.
Hybrid companies often struggle to maintain their social missions as they grow. Hoping to learn from earlier examples, the founders of Planet Labs are taking steps to weave the charitable mission into the fabric of the company.
“We don’t want to disrupt the aerospace industry and be sold to a big defense contractor,” says Mr. Schingler. “That’s not what we’re about.”
A New Model
Satellite imagery is expensive, and the photos aren’t updated very often. The interval between image recordings can be from several weeks to more than a year. The satellites themselves are often the size of a school bus, may take as long as a decade to build, and cost hundreds of millions of dollars.
Planet Labs is trying to upend that model. Rather than building custom parts, the company uses cutting-edge—but readily available—electronics and sensors to build shoebox-size microsatellites. The tiny devices have been launched from the International Space State and from unmanned rockets. Modeling its approach on the software industry, Planet Labs redesigns its satellites every three months or so, incorporating new information it learns by testing them in space.
The plan is to encircle the globe with a network of microsatellites that will scan the earth’s surface every day. So far, Planet Labs has launched 71 of the devices. It expects to launch 100 to 150 more satellites to meet a goal of achieving daily imaging in the next 12 to 18 months.
The prospect of cheaper, more up-to-date satellite imagery excites nonprofit technology experts.
Because of the cost, only a handful of large charities have been able to use satellite imagery in their work, says Jim Fruchterman, chief executive of Benetech, a nonprofit technology group in Palo Alto, Calif. He points to Amnesty International’s use of remote imagery to document human-rights abuses in Darfur and Syria as an example.
Lowering the price of the technology will increase the number of nonprofits that can use the data, and more-frequent images will expand the ways groups can use the information, he says. Human-rights groups could, in some cases, use the images to confirm or refute reports they receive, almost in real time, says Mr. Fruchterman.
“Let’s say you get a report that there’s a civil disturbance, a rebel group is attacking villages in a certain province,” he says. “You can go and look, just by specifying the place, whether there are people on the move in masses.”
Mr. Fruchterman thinks environmental groups will be able to find many uses for frequently updated images, such as monitoring of illegal logging.
“Is there a new road being built in this national forest?” he says. “Wouldn’t it be great to hear about that as it starts to be built—as opposed to three or four weeks later, when it shows up on Google maps and it’s done?”
Boosting Agriculture
Daily satellite images also have the potential to transform the way humanitarian groups respond to disasters, like earthquakes or tsunamis, because photos of the affected area both immediately before and after the event occurs would be available, says Mr. Schingler.
“The difference between those two really gives you an immediate, order-of-magnitude understanding of how severe the impact is to a community and therefore what the response should actually be,” he says.
Some of the ways that nonprofits will probably use the satellite data won’t be that different from applications by the company’s commercial customers, says Mr. Schingler.
One case in point, he says, is agriculture. Many farmers in developed countries already use satellite imagery to help them plan when they should plant and irrigate, says Mr. Schingler. With wider access to remote imagery, he says, nonprofits could help distribute the same information to farmers in developing countries.
“We image sub-Saharan Africa as frequently as we image the Corn Belt in Iowa,” says Mr. Schingler.
‘Venture-Capital Route’
The co-founders of Planet Labs—Chris Boshuizen, Will Marshall, and Mr. Schingler—met more than a dozen years ago at a United Nations conference on the use of satellites for humanitarian purposes. All three were working at NASA when they started to think about a new approach to satellites.
Their first impulse, however, wasn’t to start a company. Instead, they took the idea to several foundations, thinking they could build Planet Labs as a nonprofit. The foundations showed a lot of interest, Mr. Schingler says, but because of the big initial investment in the technology necessary to get the venture off the ground, neither grant makers nor the founders could figure out how to make it work as a nonprofit.
“So we ended up going the venture-capital route,” he says. To date, the company has raised $65 million from investors.
From the beginning, the founders told investors they were starting the company because they wanted to use satellite imagery to benefit humanity, “rather than flipping the company or making a whole bunch of money and retiring,” according to Mr. Schingler. He says the investors understood, and that the founders stipulate the mission in all of the company’s legal documents.
In time, he says, the mission became a selling point as the company recruited employees, something that made Planet Labs stand out from other start-ups.
Changing course on the mission really isn’t an option anymore, says Mr. Schingler, “because we don’t want to and because that’s not what 85 people signed up for.”
Charity Partners
Planet Labs doesn’t yet have products ready for release. Instead, it’s working with a small group of early customers that are helping it develop its services. The company made a point of including charities in that initial group, says Mr. Schingler. He declined to name the organizations.
“We have a number of nonprofits that are on our platform from the very beginning, getting the same amount of attention as large companies that have paid us millions of dollars,” he says. “It will shape the product so that the social-impact cases are baked into the core of what we’re doing.”
The company’s nonprofit arm, Planet.org, will work with tech-savvy groups that have the expertise to use satellite imagery, and also offer assistance to nonprofits that have a compelling idea for using the data to advance their mission and need help pulling it off.
But the nonprofit also will have another responsibility: maintaining an independent, up-to-date archive of all the satellite imagery Planet Labs collects. If at some point the founders of the company or the board of the nonprofit are not satisfied with the for-profit’s commitment to the humanitarian mission, Planet.org will be able to act on its own.
Says Mr. Schingler: “It’s something that makes us, as founders, feel like there is a backup plan, in case we can’t do this inside of our for-profit.”