SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Planet Labs PBC (NYSE: PL), a leading provider of daily data and insights about Earth, today announced the completion of its acquisition of Salo Sciences, a San Francisco-based climate technology company that provides cutting-edge solutions to measure Earth’s constantly changing ecosystems. In December, Planet announced it had signed an agreement to acquire Salo Sciences.
With the purchase of Salo Sciences (Salo), Planet plans to further develop its offerings to enable customers to quantify carbon stocks globally, monitor forest change, and mitigate climate risks. Salo’s current products leverage Planet’s differentiated daily PlanetScope data as a foundational layer to build forest carbon, and other forest-related, data layers. These products will enable climate and sustainability solutions and eventually become Planetary Variables, starting with Forest Carbon, expanding Planet's data offerings with the capability to measure important conditions on Earth’s surface.
Given previous technology limitations, estimating forest carbon has typically relied on indirect and proxy measurements of forest area change. Through this acquisition, Planet’s offerings will expand to enable customers to measure the critical climate services that forests provide, and work to change economic incentives around land use to meet global climate and sustainability goals. This will be a pivotal tool needed to scale and enable systematic measurements of critical data.
“You can’t manage what you can’t measure. Salo’s analytics and modeling technology, when combined with Planet’s daily scan, are the foundations to enable reliable carbon estimates in forests and to do so at scale,” said CEO and Co-Founder of Planet, Will Marshall. “We’ve worked for years with the Salo team, and they are going to be a powerful addition to our product suite helping us leap towards understanding forest conservation and helping us combat biodiversity loss at scale.”
Salo’s team of world-class scientists and professionals with deep expertise in forest ecology, climate modeling, and wildfire risk will join Planet’s operations in San Francisco. The Salo team has leveraged Planet’s Earth observation datasets to deliver automated information on global forest ecosystems, including the development of the California Forest Observatory (CFO). The system provides continuously updated views of wildfire hazard and forest health for California and beyond (using artificial intelligence, satellite imagery and airborne lidar data) to produce detailed data on vegetation fuels—including tree heights, canopy cover, density and understory ladder fuels. Salo and Planet also collaborate on Upstream Tech’s Lens for Carbon to monitor reforestation and forest carbon.
“Salo Sciences was founded to help implement and scale nature-based solutions to climate change. There is no better way for us to accelerate that mission than joining forces with Planet to launch a next-generation system to monitor the carbon stocks and health of every tree on Earth,” said Dr. David Marvin, CEO and Co-founder of Salo Sciences. “Better protection, restoration, and management of our global forest ecosystems will play a key role in climate change mitigation and biodiversity conservation in the decades to come.”
The transaction was closed on January 3, 2023. This is Planet’s fifth acquisition (BlackBridge ‘15, Terra Bella ‘17, Boundless ‘19, and VanderSat ‘21). For more information on Planetary Variables and how Salo will look to add data feeds that accurately measure important conditions on the surface of the Earth, visit here.
About Planet Labs PBC
Planet is a leading provider of global, daily satellite imagery and geospatial solutions. Planet is driven by a mission to image the world every day, and make change visible, accessible and actionable. Founded in 2010 by three NASA scientists, Planet designs, builds, and operates the largest Earth observation fleet of imaging satellites, capturing over 30 TB of data per day. Planet provides mission-critical data, advanced insights, and software solutions to over 800 customers, comprising the world’s leading agriculture, forestry, intelligence, education and finance companies and government agencies, enabling users to simply and effectively derive unique value from satellite imagery. Planet is a public benefit corporation trading on the New York Stock Exchange as PL. To learn more visit www.planet.com and follow us on Twitter.
Forward-looking Statements
Except for the historical information contained herein, the matters set forth in this press release are forward-looking statements within the meaning of the "safe harbor" provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995, including, but not limited to, the Company's expectations with respect to future performance and anticipated impacts of its acquisition of Salo Sciences, the Company’s ability to capture market opportunity and realize any of the potential benefits from any current or future product enhancements, new products, or strategic partnerships and customer collaborations. Forward-looking statements are based on the Company’s management’s beliefs, as well as assumptions made by, and information currently available to them. Because such statements are based on expectations as to future events and results and are not statements of fact, actual results may differ materially from those projected. Factors which may cause actual results to differ materially from current expectations include, but are not limited to the risk factors and other disclosures about the Company and its business included in the Company's periodic reports, proxy statements, and other disclosure materials filed from time to time with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) which are available online at www.sec.gov, and on the Company's website at www.planet.com. All forward-looking statements reflect the Company’s beliefs and assumptions only as of the date such statements are made. The Company undertakes no obligation to update forward-looking statements to reflect future events or circumstances.
About Salo Sciences
Salo Sciences is a climate technology company that provides high resolution monitoring services and analytics for natural climate solutions and risk management. Salo uses three key tools—satellite data, artificial intelligence & ecological modeling— to accelerate nature-based solutions to climate change and biodiversity loss. Salo built and manages the Forest Observatory, a high-resolution satellite-based vegetation and wildfire hazard mapping and monitoring system to improve forest resilience and land management decision making.
