I'm going to talk about another company that isn't a household name but is an interesting business called "Planet Labs". If you haven't heard of this company before, Planet Labs operates the world's largest fleet of Earth imaging satellites.
This includes more than 200 small Dove satellites that collectively image almost the entire land area of the Earth every day with an accuracy of up to about 3.7 meters. Instead of simply selling these images, Planet Labs sells access to this constantly updated archive as a subscription to customers in the agriculture, forestry, insurance, and government sectors, of course.
They pay recurring fees to monitor changes over time in areas such as disaster damage, deforestation, crop health, and infrastructure development. Naturally, since the cost of the satellite constellation is generally fixed regardless of the number of customers using this data, whether they are government agencies or others, the cost of servicing each additional subscriber on Planet Labs is very small.
This gave the company a certain degree of operational strength as it expanded. This is really interesting. I mean, if you consider the fact that what Planet Labs does is sell the ability to detect changes.
You know, a single satellite image of a farm, for example, if you're a farmer, doesn't tell you almost anything useful on its own, but daily images of the same area for years tell you exactly when the crop started to go bad, or whether a competitor has expanded their facility.
So, there is a lot of value here, and of course for government clients in particular, as well as for some of those smaller clients who contract with them.