Planet Labs, a provider of remote sensing satellites, signed a multi-year $230 million agreement to expand its partnership with a long-standing Asia-Pacific commercial partner. According to Planet CEO and co-founder Will Marshall, the contract is the company’s largest to date. Per the agreement, Planet will build and deliver a constellation of new Pelican high-resolution satellites, securing certain capacity on the satellites for the partner, in addition to providing operational services. Planet will leverage the increased capacity of the expanded fleet to serve its own government and commercial customers around the world. Rendering of a Planet Labs Pelican satellite. Courtesy of Planet Labs. Pelican, Planet’s next generation high-resolution satellite, enables continuity and enhancements over the current SkySat fleet, including in image quality, spectral bands, imaging capacity, and latency. Planet successfully launched the Pelican-2 satellite on Jan. 14, which includes the latest NVIDIA GPU processor for AI on the edge and satellite to satellite communications. These capabilities will allow the company to provide customers with critical data in a matter of minutes rather than hours. Planet expects to recognize the $230 million of commercial payments from the partner as revenue over the build and operational service period of the satellites, which is estimated to be approximately 7 years. This is the third strategic space systems partnership Planet has signed in the last 4 years. In partnership with the Carbon Mapper Coalition, Planet built, launched, and deployed Tanager, a first-of-its-kind hyperspectral satellite, which is now producing a dataset for use by customers and partners across government and commercial markets. In support of NASA’s Communications Services Project, Planet is developing real-time space-to-space connectivity solutions between Pelican and partner satellites with technology demonstrations onboard Planet’s Smallsat platform in 2025.