UPDATED 21:53 EDT / JULY 07 2021

BIG DATA

Satellite imagery and data startup Planet to go public in $2.8B SPAC deal

Satellite imagery and data startup Planet Labs Inc. announced today that it’s planning to go public through a special-purpose acquisition company in a $2.8 billion deal.

Under the deal, Planet will merge with dNY Technology Group IV, a SPAC listed on the New York Stock Exchange. Planet will also raise $434 million through the transaction, including $200 million through private investment in public equity. The PIPE funding is being led by BlackRock and includes Google LLC, Koch Industries Inc. and TIME Ventures.

Founded in 2010, Planet was founded by former U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration engineers and deploys small Earth-imaging satellites that collect information about the planet. From an initial deployment of 28 nanosatellites in 2013, the company now has successfully deployed 366 satellites, with more than 150 currently in orbit providing broad coverage and high-frequency data to Planet’s customers.

The service is pitched as delivering customers unprecedented access to global and local insights that have previously been either impossible or cost-prohibitive to obtain. Planet designs, builds and operates the satellites and offers online software, tools and analytics that allow users to access the data.

According to the company, it has 1,300 images of every place on earth, a dataset claimed to be unprecedented, with its satellites providing a near-daily stream of imagery from every location. The imagery can be fed into a variety of workflows for commercial and humanitarian applications.

“At Planet, our goal is to use space to help life on Earth,” Planet co-founder and Chief Executive Will Marshall said in a statement. “We have this huge new dataset — an image of the entire Earth landmass every day — which we serve up via a Bloomberg-like terminal for Earth data, making it simple to consume and expanding reach to potentially millions of users across dozens of verticals.”

That Planet is another company choosing to go public via a SPAC merger indicates that there’s abundant life in SPAC deals midway through 2021 despite claims earlier in the year that the method was falling out of favor. SPAC deals have debuted to mixed results, however.

Payoneer Inc. went public via SPAC on June 28 and saw its shares drop, whereas other SPAC deals have found strong investor interest. Financial technology company Social Finance Inc. or SoFi went public via a SPAC on June 1 and saw its shares surge 12% on their first trading day. More recently, genetic testing company 23andMe Holding Co. went public and its shares rose 21% on its first day as a public company.

Also lining up for a public listing via a SPAC merger is hyperlocal social networking startup Nextdoor Inc., which announced its plans on July 6.

Planet intends to use the proceeds from the transaction to expand its operations and services “to enable a more sustainable and secure planet.” Coming into the SPAC merger, Planet Labs has raised $373.9 million, according to data from Crunchbase.

Photo: Planet Labs

A message from John Furrier, co-founder of SiliconANGLE:

Your vote of support is important to us and it helps us keep the content FREE.

One click below supports our mission to provide free, deep, and relevant content.  

Join our community on YouTube

Join the community that includes more than 15,000 #CubeAlumni experts, including Amazon.com CEO Andy Jassy, Dell Technologies founder and CEO Michael Dell, Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger, and many more luminaries and experts.

“TheCUBE is an important partner to the industry. You guys really are a part of our events and we really appreciate you coming and I know people appreciate the content you create as well” – Andy Jassy

THANK YOU