Planet Labs PBC (NYSE: $PL) Stock Hub: the January Fiscal Year, a $906 Million Backlog, the $1.5 Billion ATM and the Second Quarter Print Nobody Has Dated Yet

Market snapshot as of the August 3, 2026 close

Price, market capitalization, float, short interest, ownership percentages, performance figures and the consensus target are from Finviz Elite, cross-checked against an independent end-of-day quote provider for the August 3, 2026 session. All revenue, margin, cash, backlog, guidance and share-count figures come from Planet’s own SEC filings and press releases.

The numbers, in five charts

Every bar below is drawn from a figure Planet has reported in an SEC filing or a press release. Percentages are calculated against the largest value shown in each chart.

What Planet actually sells

Planet designs, builds and operates its own satellites, then licenses what they capture. The 10-K describes a business that collects hundreds of millions of square kilometers of Earth data every day, added to an archive of imagery going back to 2009 and daily Earth scanning going back to 2017. That archive cannot be recreated after the fact, which is the clearest structural advantage the company has.

The offering splits into four things:

• Monitoring. The SuperDove fleet works as an always-on scanner of the planet, imaging at up to 3.5 meter ground sampling distance. This is the backbone of what the company calls its one-to-many model: the same image can be licensed to an unlimited number of customers, which is what separates Planet from legacy providers that sold single images exclusively.
• High-resolution tasking. SkySat and Pelican satellites can be pointed at a specified location several times a day, reaching up to 50 centimeter class resolution after processing on Generation 1 Pelicans. They support points, long strips, stereo collects and video, all through an API.
• Hyperspectral. Tanager captures over 400 spectral bands across the visible and shortwave infrared at 30 meter resolution, developed with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and sponsored by Carbon Mapper to detect methane and carbon dioxide super-emitters.
• Satellite services. The newest and most consequential line. Planet builds and operates satellites that the customer owns, invoicing against contractual milestones, and typically retains licensing rights over some of the imagery those satellites produce so it can resell capacity to its wider base. Sweden, Germany and Japan via JSAT are the three disclosed examples.

On top of that sits the software layer: the Planet Insights Platform, which absorbed the former Sentinel Hub product, plus analytics products and, from the first quarter of fiscal 2027, a private beta of an AI application that makes the archive queryable in natural language. Planet also announced SuperRes in May 2026, a technique for upscaling PlanetScope data toward a two-meter class visual product.

As of January 31, 2026 the company had approximately 1,000 employees, of whom about 945 were full time, working across 29 countries. The corporate headquarters in San Francisco is roughly 71,280 square feet and houses all satellite manufacturing, testing and research and development. European offices are in Berlin, Haarlem, Ljubljana and Graz, and the Washington D.C. office is the headquarters of the federal subsidiary, Planet Labs Federal, Inc.

Fiscal 2026: the year the model worked

The year ended January 31, 2026 is the one that changed the argument about this company, and it is worth setting out in full because the fiscal calendar makes it easy to compare the wrong periods.

The headline net loss of $246.9 million looks catastrophic next to $15.5 million of adjusted EBITDA and $52.9 million of free cash flow. Most of the gap is the warrant liability: as the share price rose, the fair value of the warrants Planet had to carry as a liability rose with it, and the increase was booked as a loss. The company quantified it at $161.4 million for the year, equivalent to $0.52 of the $0.80 loss per share. That mechanism is now dead: the public warrants were redeemed in April 2026 and the private placement warrants were exercised on a cashless basis, so from the second quarter of fiscal 2027 onwards the reported net loss will no longer be dragged around by the share price.

The customer count deserves a note because it went the wrong way and the company retired the metric in the same breath. End-of-period customers fell from 976 to 897, which Planet attributes to a deliberate shift of the direct sales force toward large opportunities while smaller users are pushed to the self-service Planet Insights Platform, whose users are excluded from the count. Planet stated that the metric had become less meaningful and that it would stop reporting it from the first quarter of fiscal 2027. That reasoning is coherent. It also removes the one published series that showed the breadth of the customer base narrowing while the revenue concentrated.

First quarter fiscal 2027 in detail, and what the second quarter has to beat

Read the operating lines rather than the net loss. Revenue grew 42.1%, but operating expenses grew 43.6% and gross margin fell by 1.7 percentage points on a GAAP basis and by three points on the non-GAAP basis the company guides to. Research and development rose 44.8% to $33.420 million, sales and marketing rose 39.6% to $22.782 million, and general and administrative rose 45.5% to $29.087 million, though that last line includes $6.211 million of litigation expenses relating to the Delaware class action and an acquisition dispute, against $0.326 million a year earlier.

The result is that a quarter with record revenue produced a slightly negative adjusted EBITDA and slightly negative free cash flow. That is a deliberate choice, stated openly by management on the fiscal 2026 call — leaning in and investing behind the opportunity — and it is reflected in guidance that holds full-year adjusted EBITDA at $0 to $10 million even as the revenue guide rises.

What to watch in the second quarter print

• Revenue against $102 million to $107 million. The sequential step from $94.150 million to the guidance midpoint is about 11%, which is a larger sequential move than any quarter of fiscal 2026.
• Non-GAAP gross margin against 52% to 55%. The first quarter came in at 56%, above the 52% to 54% full-year range, so a sequential decline is built into the guidance and would not by itself be new information.
• Adjusted EBITDA against $0 to $5 million. A return to positive would confirm that the first-quarter loss was a phasing issue. A second consecutive negative quarter makes the $0 to $10 million full-year range arithmetically demanding.
• Remaining performance obligations. They fell from $852.4 million to $816.0 million in the first quarter. Whether that was recognition outpacing new signings, or a genuine slowdown, is answered by the next reading.
• The share count on the cover of the 10-Q. The most direct evidence of how much of the $1.5 billion at-the-market capacity has been used.
• Any change in the fiscal 2027 revenue range. It has already been raised once, on June 4.

Contracts, catalysts, and the difference between a funded order and a ceiling

Planet’s announcements fall into categories with very different economic weight. Sorting them is most of the analytical work.

The pattern is consistent. What is contracted and funded is European and Asian sovereign demand plus a growing but individually modest set of U.S. government awards. What is unquantified is the American headline risk and the American optionality at the same time: SHIELD is a vehicle Planet has to win work under, and the Google partnership is research. Both are real. Neither is in the backlog.

AI and the Planet Insights Platform

Planet’s AI story has three distinct layers and they are frequently discussed as one.

What is selling. AI-enabled analytics are already inside contracted work. The NGA maritime domain awareness contract is explicitly for automated detection of ship-to-ship transfers and dark fleet activity. The German and Swedish agreements both include AI-enabled situational awareness solutions in their scope. Planetary Variables such as soil moisture and biomass proxy are sold into agriculture through partners including Nave Analytics, and the AiDash partnership makes Planet the preferred provider of fuel monitoring data for North American utility wildfire risk mitigation. This layer is inside the $906 million backlog.

What is in beta. During the first quarter of fiscal 2027 Planet launched the private beta of an AI application designed to make its global archive queryable in natural language, combining daily imagery with large language models so non-technical users can run time-series analysis and generate automated reports. In May 2026 it announced SuperRes, which uses AI to upscale PlanetScope data toward a two-meter class visual product. Neither has disclosed pricing or contracted revenue.

What is research. The Google partnership on Project Suncatcher explores whether machine-learning compute can run on solar-powered satellite clusters in orbit. Planet’s role is the spacecraft. It is an R&D collaboration with no disclosed economics, and the timelines discussed publicly run to 2027 for prototypes and considerably further for anything at scale.

The Planet Insights Platform, which absorbed the Sentinel Hub product acquired in 2023, is the self-service channel. It matters more than its revenue suggests because its users are deliberately excluded from the customer count and from the ACV book of business, which is part of why the reported customer number fell while revenue grew.

Management, governance and the vote that is worth reading

Will Marshall is Co-Founder, Chief Executive Officer and Chairperson. Robert Schingler Jr. is Co-Founder and Chief Strategy Officer. Ashley Johnson is President and Chief Financial Officer and signs the company’s filings. The board, following the July 9, 2026 annual meeting, includes Carl Bass, Ita M. Brennan, Vijaya Gadde, General John W. Raymond, Scott Reese, Kristen Robinson and Gary B. Smith. KPMG LLP was ratified as auditor for the fiscal year ending January 31, 2027.

The share structure concentrates control. Class B shares carry twenty votes each and are held entirely by the two founders, who consequently control over approximately 62% of the voting power of the capital stock. Planet is also a Delaware public benefit corporation, which obliges the board to balance shareholder pecuniary interests against the public benefit identified in its charter and the interests of others materially affected by the company’s conduct. Both features are disclosed as risk factors in the 10-Q, and both reduce the practical influence of outside shareholders on major decisions.

The annual meeting results carry one detail worth noting. Scott Reese was re-elected with 665,275,602 votes for and 1,018,386 withheld. General Raymond drew 41,706,354 withheld votes. Vijaya Gadde drew 72,107,314 withheld votes against 594,186,674 for — roughly 10.8% of votes cast on her election, and far above the other two nominees. Withhold votes are not binding and the director was re-elected, but the dispersion is a signal about how some institutional holders view specific board seats.

Two legal matters are disclosed. The Delaware class action brought in August 2024 against former officers and directors of the SPAC and the company reached a mediator’s proposal to settle following a May 7, 2026 mediation, subject to definitive documents and court approval; claims against the company itself were dismissed in January 2025, but Planet remains obliged to indemnify the former officers and directors. An acquisition-related arbitration demand filed in November 2025 was settled by formal agreement on May 11, 2026. Accruals for both sit in accrued and other current liabilities, and $6.211 million of related expense ran through general and administrative in the first quarter of fiscal 2027.

Ownership, insiders and retail sentiment

Google is both a large shareholder and a large supplier. It held 35,248,893 Class A shares at April 30, 2026, up from 34,422,330 at January 31, 2026, and more than 10% of the Class A stock. Planet buys hosting and other services from Google: $7.8 million of expense in the first quarter of fiscal 2027, of which $7.0 million sat in cost of revenue, and aggregate purchase commitments of $193.0 million under a hosting agreement running through January 31, 2028. That relationship is disclosed as a related-party transaction and is a meaningful part of the cost base.

Insider selling in July 2026 was heavy in absolute terms and pre-programd in structure. Six Form 4 filings between July 2 and July 24 report sales of roughly $11.4 million in aggregate: Will Marshall 200,000 shares for about $5.18 million at prices between $25.33 and $27.17, Ashley Johnson 110,028 shares for about $2.43 million, Robert Schingler Jr. 89,593 shares for about $2.32 million, Kristen Robinson about $0.93 million, Ita M. Brennan about $0.38 million and General Raymond about $0.17 million. Every one of those filings carries the Rule 10b5-1 affirmation, with plans adopted between July 2025 and April 2026 — that is, months before the June results and the June 5 equity program. Separately, seven directors received routine restricted stock unit grants on July 10, 2026.

Retail discussion of $PL through July concentrated on the June 5 gap, the size of the at-the-market program relative to the cash already on the balance sheet, and the argument that European sovereign demand is a multi-year structural change rather than a 2026 event. Those are non-professional opinions, they are not research, and they are recorded here only as a description of positioning and sentiment. Nothing in them is a source for any figure on this page.

Catalyst table

The two cases, stated as fairly as possible

Scenario framework

These are analytical frameworks for organizing what the next few reports could look like. They are not forecasts, targets or recommendations.

One structural point cuts across all three: satellite services revenue is recognized against contractual milestones on hardware Planet builds for someone else. It is lumpier and lower margin than licensing the same imagery to many customers, which is part of why non-GAAP gross margin guidance of 52% to 54% for fiscal 2027 sits below the 59% delivered in fiscal 2026. Mix, not execution, explains a good deal of the margin path.

Related research on Merlintrader

• Space, Defense & AI Stock Hubs 2026: the new infrastructure race — the full index of company hubs in this sector.
• BlackSky Technology ($BKSY) Stock Hub — the closest listed comparison on high-revisit tasking and government imagery contracts.
• Satellogic ($SATL) Stock Hub — another operator selling sovereign constellation access rather than only imagery.
• Rocket Lab ($RKLB) Stock Hub — the launch and space systems side of the same demand cycle.
• Redwire ($RDW) Stock Hub — space infrastructure and defense technology, with a comparable equity-funded growth profile.
• Dilution, ATMs and PIPEs: how equity funding actually works — background for the capital-structure section above.
• Weekly Market Pulse — the week ahead across catalysts and earnings.

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Educational disclaimer

This article is for informational and educational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice, financial advice, legal advice, tax advice, a solicitation, or a recommendation to buy, sell or hold any security. It has been prepared in line with U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission guidance on financial publishing and does not create any adviser relationship. Small and mid-cap equities, satellite and Earth observation companies, government-contracting businesses and companies with negative earnings, dual-class share structures or convertible debt can be highly volatile and risky. Readers should conduct their own due diligence, review official company filings and consult a qualified financial adviser where appropriate. The author and Merlintrader are not acting as registered investment advisers or broker-dealers. All scenarios are analytical frameworks, not predictions or guarantees. Market prices, filings, ownership data, analyst views and company fundamentals can change quickly, and figures quoted here are accurate as of August 4, 2026.

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