Planet Labs stock has been on a tear over the last few months as investors bet on the company’s satellite data offerings.
Shares have surged since early September and are up more than 100% over the last three months, making it one of the best performers in CNBC’s screen of San Francisco-based companies. The stock has soared more than 215% this year, building on last year’s gain of more than 60%.
“We are starting to see investors wake up to the potential of our business,” Ashley Johnson, the company’s president and chief financial officer, told CNBC’s Brian Sullivan in an exclusive interview on Tuesday.
Plant Labs in 2025
Sullivan is interviewing the leaders of top-performing San Francisco stocks all week. The interviews can be viewed on the Power Lunch’s homepage.
Johnson said Planet Labs documents everything going on across the planet with its hundreds of satellites. From there, the company utilizes artificial intelligence to help its customer base of governments and large companies to make decisions.
Historically, she said the industry has been more focused on “point-and-click” data that captures a place at any given moment in time. But Johnson said Planet Labs is “shifting the paradigm” by using large quantities of data and measuring things like the land surface temperature that are untraceable by the human eye.
Planet Labs uses machines “to do correlations over very large areas, and then derive really important decision-making capabilities from that,” Johnson said. “That is very different from: ‘Can I count how many cars are in this parking lot using this image that I took over that parking lot?'”
Johnson noted that each satellite costs around $300,000 to produce and launch, a price she says has been driven down by Silicon Valley’s innovation. In fact, she said the cumulative cost of Planet Lab’s more than 600 satellites is lower than what one from the traditional industry would have been a decade ago.
Planet Labs’ margins get a boost due to the fact that the company can sell the same data to multiple clients, Johnson said. She said the company is seeing heightened interest from governments looking for an edge amid geopolitical uncertainty.
To be sure, the stock hit a rough patch earlier this year with declines of more than 20% in both February and March.
But the majority of analysts have a buy rating on the stock, according to LSEG. Wall Street also expects the stock to run further, with an average price target implying 5% more upside.
