Planet Labs (PL) Cuộc họp công bố kết quả kinh doanh Q2 FY2027: Doanh thu tăng vọt 58%, nâng triển vọng kinh doanh

Điểm tin chính

• Planet Labs PBC (NYSE: PL) đã báo cáo doanh thu kỷ lục trong quý 2 năm tài chính 2027 đạt 116 triệu USD, tăng khoảng 58% so với cùng kỳ năm ngoái. Doanh thu được hưởng lợi từ việc bàn giao vệ tinh đầu tiên cho Lực lượng Vũ trang Thụy Điển, tạo ra doanh thu ghi nhận một lần.
• Doanh thu từ mảng Quốc phòng và Tình báo tăng hơn 90% so với cùng kỳ năm ngoái. Doanh thu thương mại tăng hơn 15%, trong khi doanh thu từ chính phủ dân sự tăng hơn 5%.
• Biên lợi nhuận gộp phi GAAP đạt 59%, so với 61% của một năm trước đó. Lợi nhuận EBITDA điều chỉnh đạt 13,9 triệu USD, nhờ tăng trưởng doanh thu và khả năng mở rộng của mô hình kinh doanh.
• Planet đã xác định được các cơ hội dịch vụ vệ tinh trị giá hơn 4 tỷ USD. Hơn 25%, tương đương khoảng 1 tỷ USD, được xếp vào danh mục dự án tiềm năng ngắn hạn, được ban lãnh đạo định nghĩa là tính theo quý thay vì tính theo năm.
• Công ty đã nâng mức dự báo tối thiểu cho năm tài chính 2027. Ban lãnh đạo hiện kỳ vọng doanh thu đạt từ 430 triệu USD đến 441 triệu USD, biên lợi nhuận gộp phi GAAP từ 55% đến 57%, và EBITDA điều chỉnh từ 3 triệu USD đến 10 triệu USD.
• Planet dự định đẩy nhanh đầu tư vào Pelican và Owl. Dự báo chi tiêu vốn cho năm tài chính đã tăng lên 100 triệu USD - 115 triệu USD khi công ty mở rộng công suất sản xuất và thực hiện mua sắm trước cho các vệ tinh thế hệ tiếp theo.

Các dữ liệu tài chính trọng yếu

Planet cho biết khoảng 50% giá trị hợp đồng chờ thực hiện sẽ áp dụng cho 12 tháng tới và 70% cho 24 tháng tới. Việc thực hiện lượng đơn hàng tồn đọng hiện có có thể tạo ra hơn 400 triệu USD doanh thu trong bốn quý tới, không bao gồm các hợp đồng mới và gia hạn.

Doanh thu ghi nhận một lần chiếm 12% doanh thu quý, so với 1% ở cùng kỳ năm trước. Ban lãnh đạo dự kiến tỷ lệ này sẽ biến động khi các dịch vụ vệ tinh mở rộng.

Kết quả kinh doanh và hoạt động

Các dịch vụ vệ tinh là động lực tăng trưởng chính trong quý. Planet đã hoàn thành việc đưa vào vận hành và bàn giao vệ tinh quan sát Trái Đất chủ quyền đầu tiên cho Lực lượng Vũ trang Thụy Điển. Công ty cho biết họ đã giao các vệ tinh cho hai đối tác dịch vụ vệ tinh gần đây nhất lần lượt trong vòng hai và bốn tháng kể từ khi trao hợp đồng.

Quốc phòng và Tình báo vẫn là thị trường người dùng cuối mạnh nhất. Sau khi quý kết thúc, Planet đã nhận được hợp đồng trị giá 8 triệu USD từ Cơ quan Tình báo Địa không gian Quốc gia cho Dịch vụ Giám sát Toàn cầu của mình, với các tùy chọn mở rộng và kéo dài công việc. Công ty cũng đảm bảo một thỏa thuận thời hạn một năm trị giá bảy chữ số với một khách hàng quốc phòng và tình báo châu Âu.

Đức đã trao cho Planet một gói thầu dịch vụ vệ tinh công suất riêng với giá trị tiềm năng tối đa là 25 triệu EUR trong vòng năm năm, bao gồm các tùy chọn gia hạn. Ban lãnh đạo cho biết danh mục dự án dịch vụ vệ tinh mở rộng trải dài khắp khu vực EMEA, APAC và Bắc Mỹ, đồng thời tiếp tục tăng trưởng cả về số lượng và giá trị hợp đồng.

Tăng trưởng doanh thu diễn ra trên diện rộng theo khu vực địa lý. EMEA tăng hơn 130% so với cùng kỳ năm ngoái, Bắc Mỹ tăng khoảng 25%, Châu Á - Thái Bình Dương tăng hơn 15% và Mỹ Latinh tăng khoảng 3%.

Trong mảng chính phủ dân sự, Planet đã ký hợp đồng cấp quốc gia với Cơ quan Vũ trụ Rwanda bao gồm dữ liệu và phân tích độ phân giải cao cho các ứng dụng như nông nghiệp, quản lý đô thị, quy hoạch không gian và ứng phó thiên tai. Công ty cũng đã gia hạn mối quan hệ hợp tác với Cơ quan Quản lý Đất đai Bang New Mexico.

Tăng trưởng thương mại bao gồm hợp đồng gia hạn trị giá sáu chữ số mở rộng với một nhà phát triển AI quy mô siêu lớn để giám sát việc xây dựng trung tâm dữ liệu và cơ sở sản xuất bán dẫn. Planet cũng hợp tác với FarmQA về các công cụ nông học tích hợp AI và với Braga Technologies về việc tự động phát hiện thay đổi và phân tích gần như thời gian thực.

Ứng dụng AI của Planet đã bước vào giai đoạn thử nghiệm mở (open beta). Sản phẩm được thiết kế để giúp kho lưu trữ hình ảnh hàng ngày trong 10 năm của công ty có thể tìm kiếm được thông qua ngôn ngữ tự nhiên và giảm bớt nhu cầu về chuyên môn địa không gian chuyên sâu.

Về mặt vận hành, Planet đã phóng vệ tinh thử nghiệm công nghệ Pelican thế hệ tiếp theo vào tháng 7. Công ty cho biết sứ mệnh này đã đạt được các mục tiêu công nghệ lớn và hỗ trợ lộ trình hướng tới ảnh vệ tinh lớp độ phân giải 30 cm. Vệ tinh quang phổ siêu rộng Tanager thứ hai và 18 vệ tinh SuperDove đã được vận chuyển để chuẩn bị phóng trên sứ mệnh Transporter-18 của SpaceX.

Ban lãnh đạo cũng đang đẩy nhanh chương trình vệ tinh giám sát thế hệ tiếp theo Owl. Owl được thiết kế để cải thiện độ phân giải từ lớp 3 mét lên lớp 1 mét và giảm độ trễ xuống chỉ còn một giờ ở các khu vực trọng yếu. Planet kỳ vọng chương trình này sẽ cung cấp nhiều dữ liệu hơn khoảng 10 lần và nhanh hơn khoảng 10 lần.

Dự báo của Ban lãnh đạo

Ban lãnh đạo cho biết quý 2 đã hưởng lợi từ việc bàn giao vệ tinh vốn trước đây dự kiến diễn ra vào quý 3, làm dịch chuyển doanh thu giữa các quý mà không làm thay đổi triển vọng cả năm.

Planet mục tiêu đạt Quy tắc 40 (Rule of 40) cho năm tài chính 2027 và duy trì dòng tiền tự do điều chỉnh dương trên cơ sở hàng năm. Công ty dự kiến biên lợi nhuận sẽ mở rộng trong những năm tiếp theo khi mở rộng quy mô và thu về lợi nhuận từ các khoản đầu tư tăng trưởng hiện tại, mặc dù kết quả hàng quý sẽ phụ thuộc vào cơ cấu kinh doanh và thời điểm bàn giao dịch vụ vệ tinh.

Rủi ro và Các yếu tố cần theo dõi

• Việc bàn giao vệ tinh có thể tạo ra doanh thu ghi nhận một lần, làm tăng sự biến động theo từng quý của doanh thu và biên lợi nhuận gộp.
• Các dịch vụ vệ tinh có đặc điểm biên lợi nhuận khác nhau tùy thuộc vào giai đoạn bàn giao và cấu trúc hợp đồng.
• Chi tiêu vốn có thể thay đổi tùy thuộc vào thời điểm mua sắm, phóng vệ tinh và xây dựng cơ sở hạ tầng. Planet đang đẩy sớm một số khoản mua sắm để đảm bảo các linh kiện có thời gian cung ứng dài.
• Ban lãnh đạo mô tả công suất phóng, đặc biệt là các sứ mệnh phóng ghép (rideshare) của SpaceX, hiện đang thắt chặt và cho biết giá phóng đã tăng nhẹ, mặc dù Planet đang đa dạng hóa các nhà cung cấp.
• Con số 4 tỷ USD dịch vụ vệ tinh đại diện cho các cơ hội được xác định chứ không phải giá trị đơn hàng tồn đọng đã ký hợp đồng. Thời điểm chuyển đổi và cấu trúc hợp đồng vẫn chưa chắc chắn.
• Planet đã huy động khoảng 120 triệu USD thông qua chương trình phát hành cổ phiếu tại thị trường (ATM) trong quý 2 với giá bán ròng trung bình là 31,96 USD/cổ phiếu sau chi phí. Ban lãnh đạo cho biết đang cân bằng giữa sự linh hoạt trong bảng cân đối kế toán chiến lược và nguy cơ pha loãng cổ phiếu.

Tóm tắt phiên hỏi đáp với chuyên viên phân tích

Chiến lược AI và dữ liệu độc quyền: Ban lãnh đạo cho biết Planet đang theo đuổi phương pháp tiếp cận không phụ thuộc vào mô hình (model-agnostic) và có thể áp dụng các mô hình AI khác nhau cho hình ảnh của mình. Họ lập luận rằng sự sẵn có rộng rãi hơn của các mô hình làm tăng giá trị tương đối của dữ liệu quét hàng ngày độc quyền và kho lưu trữ lịch sử đã hiệu chỉnh của Planet.

Danh mục dự án dịch vụ vệ tinh: Planet cho biết khoảng 1 tỷ USD trong số hơn 4 tỷ USD danh mục dự án tiềm năng được xác định là ngắn hạn. Các cơ hội bao gồm cả các hợp đồng chính phủ dân sự nhỏ hơn và các chương trình Quốc phòng và Tình báo lớn hơn tại các khu vực EMEA, APAC và Bắc Mỹ.

Tạo doanh thu từ Owl: Ban lãnh đạo nhận thấy dư địa tăng giá từ Owl vì độ phân giải cao hơn và độ trễ thấp hơn sẽ hỗ trợ các ứng dụng mới. Ví dụ, trong giám sát hàng hải, hình ảnh thuộc lớp 1 mét có thể nâng cao khả năng nhận diện các tàu thuyền nhỏ hơn.

Khả năng sinh lời trong dài hạn: Planet tiếp tục đặt mục tiêu biên EBITDA điều chỉnh đạt ít nhất 25% trong dài hạn, với biên lợi nhuận gộp trên 60%, tùy thuộc vào cơ cấu kinh doanh. Ban lãnh đạo nhấn mạnh rằng chi tiêu hiện tại nhằm mục đích nắm bắt cầu thị trường thay vì để đáp ứng một ngưỡng doanh thu tối thiểu để có lợi nhuận.

Chiến lược cảm biến: Planet có kế hoạch tiếp tục giữ hình ảnh quang điện làm cốt lõi trong danh mục cung cấp của mình, đồng thời hợp tác với các nhà cung cấp phương thức cảm biến khác, bao gồm ra-đa mở rộng tổng hợp (SAR), khi khách hàng yêu cầu các giải pháp tích hợp.

Toàn văn Biên bản Cuộc họp Báo cáo Kết quả Kinh doanh

Toàn văn cuộc gọi công bố kết quả kinh doanh

Phần trình bày của ban lãnh đạo

Operator

Thank you for joining us, and welcome to the Planet Labs PBC Second Quarter of Fiscal Year 2027 Earnings Call. [Operator Instructions]

I will now hand the conference over to Cleo Palmer-Poroner, Director of Investor Relations.

Cleo Palmer-Poroner

Thanks, operator, and hello, everyone. I'm joined by Will Marshall and Ashley Johnson, who will provide a recap of our results and discuss our current outlook. We encourage everyone to please reference the earnings press release and earnings update presentation for today's call, which are available on our Investor Relations website.

Before we begin, we'd like to remind everyone that we will make forward-looking statements related to future events or our financial outlook. Any forward-looking statements are based on management's current outlook, plans, estimates, expectations, and projections. The inclusion of such forward-looking information should not be regarded as a representation by Planet that future plans, estimates, or expectations will be achieved. Such forward-looking statements are subject to various risks and uncertainties and assumptions as detailed in our SEC filings, which can be found at www.sec.gov.

Our actual results or performance may differ materially from those indicated by such forward-looking statements, and we undertake no responsibility to update such forward-looking statements to reflect events or circumstances after the date on which the statement is made or to reflect the occurrence of unanticipated events. During the call, we will also discuss historic and forward-looking non-GAAP financial measures. We use these non-GAAP financial measures for financial and operational decision-making and as a means to evaluate period-to-period comparisons.

We believe that these measures provide useful information about operating results, enhance the overall understanding of past financial performance and future prospects, and allow for greater transparency with respect to key metrics used by management in its financial and operational decision-making. For more information on the non-GAAP financial measures, please see the reconciliation tables provided in our press release issued earlier today, which is available on our website at investors.planet.com.

Further, throughout this call, we will provide a number of key performance indicators used by management and often used by competitors in our industry. These and other key performance indicators are discussed in more detail in our press release and our earnings update presentation, which are intended to accompany our prepared remarks.

At this point, I'd now like to turn the call over to Will Marshall, Planet's CEO, Chairperson and Co-Founder. Over to you, Will.

William Marshall

Thanks, Cleo, and welcome, everyone, joining us today. Planet had another outstanding quarter, delivering a record $116 million in revenue, representing approximately 58% year-over-year growth. Non-GAAP gross margin was 59% for the quarter, better than expected, demonstrating the ongoing scalability of our business model. For the fourth sequential quarter, we achieved and, in fact, well exceeded the Rule of 40, which is our revenue growth rate plus adjusted EBITDA margin.

Our revenue growth rate was driven by strong execution across our satellite services deals as well as continued momentum in our Data and Solutions business. We completed commissioning and handed over the first sovereign Earth observation satellite for the Swedish Armed Forces and successfully launched our next-generation Pelican tech demo. And this week, we shipped our second Tanager and 18 SuperDove satellites for launch. Both at home and abroad, Planet's data, AI-enabled solutions, and sovereign satellite capabilities are proving critical to the challenges and opportunities governments and companies across all industries face every day, from disaster response to resource management to national security.

Defense and Intelligence was once again an area of strength for us, with over 90% revenue growth year-on-year. I want to highlight 2 recent wins in this sector for our Data and Solutions business, both of which landed in August and therefore, are not included in our financial metrics for the quarter. We were awarded a new $8 million contract with the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, NGA, to deploy Planet's Global Monitoring Service, GMS, in support of national defense priorities with options to expand and extend this work. Planet was the only vendor considered as our solutions are truly unique.

We've created a deep archive of thousands of images for every point on Earth's landmass, enabling a peripheral vision, which with AI-powered pattern recognition on top, provides customers with the strategic indication and warning capability to proactively recognize patterns and identify emerging threats. This program grew out of a successful pilot with the Defense Innovation Unit in support of INDOPACOM, and we're incredibly proud to see GMS graduate to an operational program. We were also awarded a 7-figure 1-year agreement with a European defense and intelligence customer to supply high-resolution global Mosaics and support operational planning.

Turning to satellite services. Our team's execution against our backlog for our satellite services customers contributed to the strength in our defense and intelligence results. As we discussed last quarter, in May, we launched our first satellite for the Swedish Armed Forces just 4 months after the satellite services contract with them was signed. The Space Systems team's rapid commissioning of that satellite enabled us to officially hand over to the customer, which contributed to the Q2 revenue outperformance. In August, the German government announced that we were awarded a tender for dedicated capacity satellite services. The tender award includes options and has a maximum possible value of EUR 25 million over 5 years.

Overall, our satellite services pipeline progress has been extraordinary. In particular, we're very pleased with the maturation of this pipeline. Today, we have over $4 billion of identified opportunities for satellite services, over 25% of which is qualified as near-term pipeline. Planet is extremely differentiated here due to the strength of our operational history as we've launched more Earth imaging satellites than any other company on the globe and due to our speed of delivery.

For our 2 most recent satellite services partnerships, we've delivered a first satellite in orbit within 2 and 4 months of the contract award, respectively, compared to many years for the space industry historically. We are also increasingly finding that our customers and prospects want both AI-enabled solutions and satellite services. This bundling creates synergies and is even more differentiated. Governments are articulating an urgent imperative to secure sovereign access to space, understand threats in and around their region, modernize their defense capabilities, prepare their infrastructure for natural disasters and other catastrophic events and maintain their strategic edge.

More broadly across the civil government sector, second quarter revenue grew over 5% year-over-year, and we continue to see encouraging momentum both in the U.S. and abroad. To share some recent highlights, during the quarter, Planet signed a new contract with the Rwanda Space Agency to provide national high-resolution data and analytics for government ministries, departments and agencies as well as public universities. The satellite imagery data will be used in policy and decision support on agriculture, urban management, spatial planning, disaster response, amongst other applications. This deal marks Planet's first national program of its kind in Africa.

Also in the quarter, Planet signed a renewal with the New Mexico State Land Office. Since 2019, this long-standing partnership has evolved into a sophisticated multiproduct strategy that enables that land office to monitor, protect and manage over 9 million acres of public trust land.

Shifting to the commercial sector. Revenue grew over 15% year-on-year, reflecting the continued focus from our teams on landing and expanding in large opportunities and leveraging AI-enabled solutions. To highlight a few interesting use cases in the sector, last month, we signed a 6-figure expanded renewal with a hyperscaler AI developer for global monitoring of data centers and semiconductor manufacturing facility construction. Planet's Pelican high-resolution data is used to track construction milestones for those facilities, which are strong indicators of the supply chain health and computing capacity.

We're currently seeing meaningful demand from our customers in the AI and financial services industries to use Planet's data to track the pace of infrastructure expansion across the AI value chain. Planet partnered with FarmQA to develop and commercialize AI-powered agronomic intelligence tools for enterprise agriculture. The first application of the collaboration is already in the field, an AI-driven sugar beet yield estimation model, currently being piloted with multiple sugar beet cooperatives during the 2026 growing season.

Finally, Planet partnered with Braga Technologies to integrate Planet's high-frequency satellite data into their spatial intelligence platform, enabling automated change detection and near real-time analytics for natural resource management and civil government applications.

Stepping back, AI is enabling us to move up the market into high-value, higher-growth segments. We believe we currently have under 5% market share of today's overall Earth observation market, which excludes satellite services. And with the innovations we are making across solutions, real-time insights and next-generation monitoring, we believe we are poised to rapidly expand our market share.

Perhaps more importantly, we believe that AI is expanding the potential market for these capabilities by enabling users without geospatial expertise to leverage this critical data into their daily operations and expand to further applications and segments. Planet is uniquely positioned to capture this expansion as our daily scan mission is core to those expanded applications and most ready and relevant for AI utilization.

Turning to technology and operational updates. In July, we successfully launched our next-generation Pelican tech demo, which included several technology advancements across payload, on-orbit compute and satellite-to-satellite communications. This satellite follows our path towards delivering 30-centimeter class resolution imagery. As a reminder, this satellite is a tech demo and is not expected to serve customers.

Just this week, we shipped our second Tanager hyperspectral satellite to the launch site along with 18 SuperDoves. They're slated for launch this fall aboard SpaceX's Transporter-18 mission. We're very excited to be growing our fleet in support of our partner, Carbon Mapper, and doubling our capacity for methane and CO2 detections and enabling higher revisit rates. Overall, we're investing in launch, both to diversify our supply chain and in response to synergies with our key satellite services government partners.

To that end, in July, we announced a launch partnership with Isar Aerospace. Under this agreement, Isar is scheduled to launch a Pelican next year, which we plan to build in our new German satellite manufacturing facility. With both the satellite and the Isar launch vehicle, Spectrum, being built in Germany, this would be a national first for the country, demonstrating the value of commercial space in rapid advancements in German sovereign space capabilities.

Relatedly, I wanted to provide an update on the German manufacturing facility, which is expected to roughly double our manufacturing capacity. This project is progressing at pace with the facility setup and clean room fit-out scheduled for September and plans to begin building in the facility this year. There has been considerable interest from the German and European governments in this new facility, and we believe it positions us well to serve critical needs of customers and prospects in the region. Over the summer, we also opened a new office in London as we scale our European presence and establish a hub for our customers and partner relationships in the region.

Finally, our AI app has progressed to the open beta phase. This pioneering tool is focused on making Planet's massive global data archive queryable through natural language. By leveraging Planet's proprietary 10-year archive of daily data and integrating LLMs, it can help lower the barriers of entry for nontechnical users across all markets, allowing teams without geospatial expertise to accelerate their adoption of Planet's products.

Given our momentum with our AI-powered solutions, I wanted to take a moment to discuss our upcoming next-generation monitoring satellite, Owl, and our excitement over that program. We are already seeing significant traction with GMS and MDA among our most critical partners and customers and feedback indicates that Owl program will unlock massive value for them. They would like to see us accelerate that program, which we are beginning to do.

This program will upgrade the data underpinning the solutions from 3-meter to 1-meter class resolution, enabling the detection of smaller objects such as smaller vehicles as well as reduce the latency to as little as an hour in key areas, enabling faster response. Owl represents, in that sense, a massive leap forward. To put it in perspective, it will deliver roughly 10x more data and do so about 10x faster. We expect Owl to reinforce our leadership position in broad area monitoring and analytics with greater resolution and lower latency, which puts us in a position to capture market share from the high-resolution market and power downstream solutions with higher fidelity insights.

In closing then, our strong performance this quarter demonstrates clear execution across the business. We delivered robust revenue growth, disciplined execution and major strategic wins with our large government customers while growing our pipeline across all of our offerings. By expanding our international footprint, advancing our next-generation constellations and lowering technical barriers with AI, we are positioning Planet to capture a rapidly expanding Earth observation market and building a foundation for sustained long-term growth.

With that, I'll turn it over to Ashley to discuss our financials. Over to you, Ash.

Ashley Whitfield Johnson

Thanks, Will. It was indeed a strong quarter, supported by outstanding execution from our teams and exciting technology developments.

Turning to our financial results. Revenue for the second quarter came in at a record $116 million, representing approximately 58% year-over-year growth. The outperformance in the quarter was driven primarily by delivering against our satellite services contracts, specifically with respect to the handover of our first Pelican for the Swedish Armed Forces. The Space Systems team did a fantastic job with rapid commissioning, exceeding our expectations, generating point-in-time revenue and contributing to the Q2 beat.

We were pleased to see growth across all of our market sectors in the quarter. Our Defense and Intelligence revenue grew more than 90% year-on-year, which includes our satellite services revenue. The commercial sector was up more than 15% year-on-year and civil government revenue was up over 5%.

Similarly, turning to our regional revenue breakdown, growth continues to be distributed around the globe. During the quarter, year-on-year revenue growth was approximately 3% in Latin America, over 15% in Asia Pacific, approximately 25% in North America and over 130% in EMEA.

As our satellite services revenue grows, we will likely see an increase in revenue recognized as point-in-time versus over-time. In Q2, point-in-time revenue was 12% of revenue versus 1% in the same period last year. While we scale our satellite services business, we expect to experience variability in this metric quarter-to-quarter.

Before I turn to ACV metrics, I want to remind you that our ACV metrics exclude satellite services, which for the purposes of our financial reporting, we define as sovereign satellite ownership, direct access services and managed operations. Our ACV metrics do include dedicated capacity contracts as customers are not taking ownership of the hardware and revenue for these services is recognized ratably.

Recurring ACV was 98% of our end-of-period ACV book of business, reflecting our continued focus on selling subscription data contracts and solutions as opposed to onetime professional or engineering services. Approximately 94% of our end-of-period ACV book of business consists of annual or multiyear contracts. Net dollar retention rate on ACV at the end of the second quarter was 109% and net dollar retention rate with Winbacks was 110%.

Our non-GAAP gross margin for the second quarter was 59% compared to 61% in the second quarter of fiscal '26, reflecting investments in support of our satellite services contracts and AI-enabled partner solutions. Our non-GAAP gross margins came in considerably better than expected, driven by the scalability of our business model and our revenue mix in the quarter.

Adjusted EBITDA profit was $13.9 million for the second quarter, better than expected, driven by higher gross margins and the revenue outperformance.

Capital expenditures in Q2, which include capitalized software development, were approximately $29 million. This was just above our guidance range based on the timing of certain Pelican procurements and capitalized software development to support AI-powered solutions. As Will mentioned, given the strong demand we're seeing for our solutions and satellite services, we're investing behind our largest growth opportunities. We expect CapEx to increase in future quarters as we lean into market demand, scale up our manufacturing capacity in San Francisco and Berlin, invest in supply chain resiliency and build out our next-generation fleets.

Year-to-date, we generated approximately $68 million in net cash from operating activities, while year-to-date free cash flow was $21 million. Year-to-date adjusted free cash flow was $29 million, which excludes nonrecurring payments related to litigation settlements.

Turning to the balance sheet. We ended the quarter with approximately $865 million of cash, cash equivalents and short-term investments, an increase of over 200% year-on-year, driven by our positive free cash flow and proceeds from our capital transactions over the last year. During Q2, we raised approximately $120 million from stock sales under our ATM program at an average net sales price of $31.96 per share after expenses. Given our strong balance sheet and cash flow positive operations, we remain focused on executing sales under the program in a disciplined manner, balancing market dynamics with our desire to minimize dilution as we add to our cash reserves.

At the end of Q2, our remaining performance obligations, or RPOs, were approximately $753 million, up approximately 9% year-over-year, of which approximately 46% applied to the next 12 months and 68% to the next 24 months. We estimate our backlog, which includes contracts with the termination for convenience clause to be approximately $815 million, up approximately 11% year-over-year. Approximately 50% of our backlog applies to the next 12 months and 70% to the next 24 months.

This implies that by executing on contracts already in our backlog, we could recognize over $400 million in revenue over the next 4 quarters, not including the impact of any new business or renewals closed during that period. This provides us with excellent visibility to near-term revenue and combined with the strength of our pipeline gives us confidence in our ability to sustain high growth rates in future years.

Let me now turn to our guidance for the third quarter and full fiscal year 2027. In Q3, we're expecting revenue to be between $101 million and $105 million, which represents approximately 27% year-on-year growth at the midpoint, supported by strong visibility from our backlog. As a reminder, our strong Q2 revenue outperformance was due in part to the timing of the handover of our commissioned satellite in Q2 rather than Q3, shifting revenue between the 2 quarters without changing our full year outlook.

We expect non-GAAP gross margin for the quarter to be between 56% and 58%. Q3 adjusted EBITDA loss is expected to be between minus $6 million and minus $1 million, reflecting our focus on investing to drive sustained growth. We are planning for capital expenditures of approximately $30 million to $37 million in the quarter, encompassing our facilities expansions and procurements for our next-generation fleets in response to the strong demand that Will alluded to in his remarks.

For the full fiscal year 2027, we are increasing the low end of our guidance range to reflect our improved visibility as we continue to move through the year. We now forecast revenue between $430 million and $441 million, reflecting year-over-year growth of 40% to 43%. Our non-GAAP gross margin for the year is projected to be between 55% and 57%, above the high end of our prior expectations, driven by the mix of business and scale achieved from optimization of our infrastructure and in-house analytics. We anticipate margins to continue to expand in subsequent years as we scale the business and realize returns on our growth investments.

We are similarly increasing the low end of our guidance range for adjusted EBITDA to reflect the improvement in margins with a current forecast between $3 million and $10 million, reflecting our resolve to drive adjusted EBITDA profitability on an annual basis as we capture market share through advancing our technology stack and expanding our global sales and marketing organization. We also aim to deliver Rule of 40 for this fiscal year, calculated as our revenue growth rate plus adjusted EBITDA margin.

We are planning for approximately $100 million to $115 million in capital expenditures for the year, reflecting the necessary investments in our manufacturing facilities and next-generation satellites to meet surging market demand. CapEx can vary quarter-to-quarter based on the timing of our procurements, launches and real estate build-outs. We are managing the business to be adjusted free cash flow positive on an annual basis for the full fiscal year 2027, while we also focus on opportunities to accelerate growth.

As a reminder, while free cash flow can vary quite significantly quarter-to-quarter based on the timing of cash collections and capital outlays for procurements, our focus remains on generating sustainable adjusted free cash flow on an annual basis through efficient growth in revenue across data solutions and satellite services.

In closing, our Q2 results underscore the robust demand for our products and services. We remain focused on capturing share in a rapidly expanding market to drive top line growth while also delivering profitability on both an adjusted EBITDA and free cash flow basis. We have built a solid launching point to support our ambitious plans, underpinned by a strong balance sheet with over $850 million of cash and equivalents. We are well positioned to execute on our growth initiatives and deliver for our customers whose work is driving real-world security, economic and ecological value. As always, Will and I are awed by the achievements of our Global Planet team over an incredibly busy and exciting quarter and summer. Thank you all for all that you do.

Operator, that concludes our comments. We can now take questions.

Operator

[Operator Instructions] Your first question comes from the line of Edison Yu with Deutsche Bank.

Phần hỏi đáp

Xin Yu

First of all, I want to ask about AI and maybe try to tie in some of the broader dynamics going on. There's obviously been a lot of attention paid to the fact that the gap between frontier and open source open models has compressed a lot. Does this have any sort of impact on sort of your efforts? And if so, is that actually a positive tailwind for you?

William Marshall

I thought very much about it in that way. But look, what we're taking is the best models across the field to apply on top of our data. It does help us, of course, the proliferation of that, more models, more availability and what we're trying to be is model agnostic on a lot of our applications. You heard about our AI app and that progressing to the open beta phase. And in that particular app, we allow people to choose their own models back end. So if you have a preference for Gemini over Anthropic or what have you, you can choose. It's a good point about smaller models. Obviously, I think that we're going to turn to a situation where the system will choose the model that's most appropriate for the question at some point. I'm sure that's where the big companies are going to go as well.

But yes, I mean, in the sense that commoditization of those models only accentuates the extra value that we have of our data. And I often say to people, AI is all about the training data. Obviously, most generally to date, LLMs have trained off the text and other information on the Internet. That means they're largely blind to real-world information. And so if you're a farmer trying to understand your farm field or journalist trying to investigate a flood or someone in defense and security trying to investigate a threat around the horizon, you don't want a theoretical knowledge info about that. You want actual information around the corner. And that's where our data, our new daily scan with all of the archive really fits in well. So I think it just -- with the point you're making, only accentuates the value of extra data sets like ours.

Xin Yu

Understood. Understood. And then -- yes, yes, totally. Separate question as a follow-up. You cited the pipeline at, I believe, $4 billion, and I think over 25% or $1 billion, I guess, is near term. Can you provide a little bit more context on how that number has been relative to in the past and also kind of the size of the deals maybe in the pipeline relative to -- in Germany?

William Marshall

Yes, it's really great. Yes, we're very pleased with the German deal. That pipeline that you're talking about is referring to Constellation Services. So yes, we've got about $4 billion of deals identified in our pipeline there, about $1 billion of which we have designated as near-term pipeline.

And yes, so we've seen both smaller deals when civil governments come in like this German civil, but it's really exciting that there are civil governments now taking interest in dedicated capacity options, in particular of our Constellation Services options. And I'm pleased to say we're also seeing even bigger deals at the big end of this spectrum. And some of that's contributing to the sheer scale of near-term opportunity pipeline there.

So yes, I mean, I've never seen it as big as it is now. So it's maturing in all the way, but especially the maturation of the big deals is really impressive right now. So we're pleased on all fronts with Constellation Services.

Operator

Your next question comes from the line of John Godyn with Citi.

John Godyn

A number of companies out there planning to launch different types of large LEO constellations and the launch players would generally describe the market for their services as very tight. You mentioned a recent partnership in Germany as an example of just diversifying access to launch. I was hoping you could offer a bit of a temperature check on the market for launch services as you see it? And do you have any concerns about getting access at reasonable prices?

William Marshall

Yes. I mean there is definitely a lot of demand for, especially for the rideshare missions with SpaceX right now, and that is driving some challenges for some of the players, especially the smaller players. You have to remember, of course, in the big arc, prices have been coming down. When we first started out at Planet, the launch prices were about $20,000 a kilogram. Now they're significantly less than that. They have been going up a little bit as we're dealing with that, and we've been investing to secure access.

But I would also say that Planet's experience here is really critical. I mean we've launched 688 Earth imaging satellites on 42 rockets of 10 different varieties. So it's not just SpaceX, SpaceX 16 times, the Indian PSLV rocket 7 times, the Vega rocket, the H-II rocket, the Atlas rocket, there are many others. And so we're very experienced in putting our payloads up when we need. And we're very flexible and speedy. So all those providers really like working with us because of how experienced we are in doing that.

So we always turn up with the payloads on time, integrate them quickly and so on. And so they love working with us. So we've got good plans. Of course, diversification is really great when new players, and we like investing contracts with new players because it helps encourage them to get going. They want to show they've got real opportunities to their investors to get going, and that's great. And it's synergistic with our satellite services with countries.

I mean, in the case of that one with Isar Aerospace in Germany, yes, that's really great because, of course, Germany would love to see satellites built in Germany and launched on German rockets. So it just plays into that game. So we're an even stronger industrial player for that country in that example. And there's others around the world like that.

John Godyn

That's great. And if I could just follow-up with a broadening up that question a bit to the supply chain at large, kind of same idea, a lot of activity, a lot of growth in expected satellite launches. Is there anything deeper in the supply chain that's showing up as kind of a problem, a concern, access to some sort of raw material or technology that's tightening up lead times? Anything like that, a temperature check would be great.

William Marshall

Yes. No, we feel relatively good about our supply chains. We do think a lot about the supply chain risk, of course, and shoring that up, and we have made some investments to stockpile things that we really think are critical components. Most of that is relatively straightforward for us. I mean we're relatively small numbers still on most of the global scales.

So Ashley, anything to add to that?

Ashley Whitfield Johnson

No. I mean I obviously took up guidance on the year for CapEx, and part of that is we want to make sure that we don't run into any of those constraints. So we're looking at longer lead time items and making sure that we're making advanced procurements so that we can move at the pace of demand.

Operator

Your next question comes from the line of Mike Latimore with Northland Capital Markets.

Mike Latimore

Great. On the queryable Earth offering, I guess you call it AI application, what -- when might we see this get to general availability? And then how are you thinking about monetizing it?

William Marshall

Yes. Great questions. I mean, look, we're really pleased with how that, the interest of folks into that application, some of the emerging use cases that we're seeing really incredible. We're really still in a learning journey. It's a beta mode for a reason. We're learning what, and really trying to hone the app into what is valuable for customers. And then we'll think about the marketing and go-to-market pieces of it. So we're more focused on that value creation first. But the general way in which it's helping is it's enabling people to get going really quickly. Like what's the quick way of getting a rough idea? Does Planet have data that could be relevant for this? And what's the quick answer?

And then the other piece of it is just lowering the barriers of entry for non-geospatial experts such that they can get going again without any such team in the loop. And that means also that it opens up to all those organizations that don't have geospatial teams at all. Now there's all sorts of caveats with it. We're learning. It's just early days. So, but I think Planet is in a unique position with one of the most fantastic data sets that could be combined with LLMs to make an incredible offering that is differentiated in the marketplace entirely. I mean, again, all those LLM companies are focused on building real-world models. And to do that, they need real-world data. And we have arguably the most incredible data set of real-world data to train up that. And so we're focusing on doing that ourselves.

Mike Latimore

Yes, definitely great. And then on the pipeline, when you say 25% is near term, is near term like 12 months? And then also within that near-term bucket, any color on regions that are more prominent?

William Marshall

Yes. What we mean by near term is quarters, not years. And what we mean by -- I mean, in terms of geography, I mean, at least 3 geographies of import, EMEA, APAC and North America are all playing significantly into our pipeline. And yes, I mean, we're very pleased to have about $1 billion in that near-term bucket.

Mike Latimore

All right. And impressive Rule of 40 this quarter.

William Marshall

Yes. Rule of 70.

Operator

Your next question comes from the line of Trevor Walsh with Citizens.

Trevor Walsh

Will, I wanted to maybe start with you around a comment you made for that $8 million deal with NGA. I think you had said that Planet was the only provider kind of in the mix for that deal, which is impressive, not, I think, for any customer, but certainly for a U.S. government where that's not really the standard playbook.

So I'm just maybe from like a broader competitive perspective, are you seeing that type of situation more where you guys are the only kind of game in town around certain deals or RFPs? And if so, kind of what do you think might be driving that? Is that the bread and butter kind of core ability of kind of PlanetScope or other newer type of capabilities?

William Marshall

Well, yes, it's because of our daily scan. And we have seen it before. In the case of the U.S. Navy, that was also sole source awarded and, actually, they competed it the first time. But then once they realize what we had, they sole source it on the second time. So we have seen that on occasion. Obviously, governments do really prefer to have multiple vendors if they can. So this really means they've checked all the boxes and check that there's no other options.

And yes, yes, exactly. Underlying that is our daily scan, which there is simply no one else does that. I mean you can look this up, anyone can look this up. No one has a sufficient number of Earth imaging satellites in the right kind of plane and all that to do a daily scan. And so if you want to monitor for new threats and monitor things consistently, we're the only game in town. Now that doesn't mean there's not other market opportunities for tasking and other things. Obviously, we're playing in that game as well. But in that particular area, which especially on the security front is about finding new threats, we're kind of the only game in town.

Trevor Walsh

Got it. Helpful. Ashley, maybe for you, but Will also feel free to chime in. I think kind of as I just looked over the last few quarters, it looked like D&I is now, I think, at a higher watermark in terms of total revenue contribution in the quarter, 70% this Q. And then at the same time, international is kind of overtaking by a pretty good clip, the North America business.

So just wondering how much of that is really just a function of Germany and JSAT flowing and maybe even the Swedish deal now flowing through the model, and that's just sort of a natural occurrence of those 2 metrics reaching those kind of higher contribution levels? Or if, or is that really more of like what the story of Planet is kind of in the future kind of going forward at least? Is it more of an international D&I-focused type of opportunity really that you guys are chasing ultimately?

Ashley Whitfield Johnson

So you hit on it at the beginning of your question, as we are realizing backlog into revenue and delivering against our satellite services contracts, that hits primarily international as well as Defense and Intelligence. Now Will talked about the fact that we just signed our first civil government satellite services deal in August. And we do think that there is a meaningful opportunity for us in the civil government arena. And we also see a lot of opportunity for growth in civil government and commercial generally with the daily scan plus AI. I highlighted the fact that we're seeing a lot of interest in data center monitoring across insurance, the energy sector and financial services.

I read a report recently that by 2030, the investment management sector alone is expected to be buying somewhere in the order of $23 billion worth of alternative data sets. And we think the type of data that we're providing fits really nicely into that type of space. So the net of that is there's a lot of opportunity for us to grow in commercial as well as in civil government and AI is really unlocking that by lowering the barrier to entry and not requiring GIS experts in order to derive value from the data.

Operator

Your next question comes from the line of Ryan Koontz with Needham & Co.

Ryan Koontz

Great quarter. I actually, I wanted to ask kind of the dynamics that we're seeing in RPO here, just to simplify it for us here. We've seen a step down in total, but a real healthy step-up in current RPO. Is this primarily driven by kind of progress on the sat services deals, these big large deals you're just speaking about? Or are there other trends at play here in terms of shorter duration contracts outside of those?

Ashley Whitfield Johnson

Yes, it's a really good question. Obviously, the current RPO and current backlog is directly attributable to the fact that we are making progress against some of these larger contracts. And as we continue to execute, we absolutely expect to translate that from backlog into revenue. And then just generally speaking, we've talked about the fact that we're exploring new markets. So those are going to be more short-term pilot deals and pilot opportunities. As we transition those into program of record, we would expect those to turn into longer-term deals. So I think there's a bit of some and some on that.

But as Will said, there's also a lot of opportunity in our pipeline. And as we convert that, we'd certainly expect to continue to see backlog to grow. So it's going to be a little inconsistent quarter-to-quarter other than the fact that we absolutely are executing against the backlog and transitioning that into revenue.

Ryan Koontz

Makes perfect sense. And another question on Maritime Domain Awareness. You guys have had a lot of success there. Are you seeing any changes in the competitive environment? I did see an announcement of one of your partners that's working with a competitor now. Anything you can share about the competitive environment in Maritime Domain?

William Marshall

Yes. I mean there are a number of companies out there doing the, some of the analytics on top of data. But I mean, in terms of the core data set that it depends upon, again, we're the only one doing a daily scan. I mean, we image tens of millions of square kilometers of ocean territory. I mentioned the U.S. Navy partnership just in the last question. And that one alone images 13 million square kilometers of ocean territory. Just to give you a sense, that's far more area coverage than any other at least Western company doing Earth imaging, that alone. It's bigger than the United States area of ocean territory that they are looking at.

And so no one else is doing that. And so yes, so the underlying data set is core to that application. So there's a number of players playing on the top of the analytics, like combining AIS data, SAR data, RF data, other sort of AI to predict ships and things like this, but they all need our data as far as I'm concerned.

Operator

Your next question comes from the line Michael Filatov with Berenberg.

Michael Filatov

So just 2 questions for me. The first one, there's a view out there that some customers might ideally want a single provider across multiple sensing modalities, so optical, SAR, RF, thermal, you name it, rather than integrating point solutions themselves. So you've got Tanager hyperspectral, but the core of the business remains optical.

Can you talk about how you think about the idea of broadening the sensor portfolio? And if you agree with that idea, whether that's primarily an organic development path for Planet or whether M&A could play a role with the balance sheet you've got now? And then I'll follow-up with one more.

William Marshall

Yes. I mean, look, I think electro-optic is the mainstay biggest piece of the market when you look at that, biggest area of applications, biggest market across all the segments. I think especially in civil government and commercial, it will be the biggest area of expansion as well. SAR is more expensive for sure. But there are synergies, to your point, in certain applications. Some of our customers have wanted both. I'll give you one example in NATO. That customer did want both SAR and optical. We integrated into a solution for them and others have done the same.

And so -- and we're willing to work with others and partner on that front. And so we feel that we're in a good position. Again, daily scan is hard on SAR because you would need a lot and there's a lot of power considerations and much more power hungry. And so the base change detection system, we still think is the right thing to focus on optical first. So we think that's the core of the market. We're focused on that. We have partnerships and other things in the other areas.

Michael Filatov

Sure. And just a follow-up. On the image archive as an AI asset, one thing I'd like to understand a bit better is data consistency across generations. I assume spectral calibration varies across Dove, SkySat, Pelican fleets and then archive spans multiple hardware iterations. So how much sort of normalization work is required before that data is genuinely training ready for a given commercial model or for your customers to utilize?

William Marshall

Yes. Well, I mean, we essentially make our data backwards compatible. So as we enhance it, we always make it such that you can get the subset of the previous iteration with it. So Doves, for example, had 8 spectral bands, but they kept the 4 spectral bands of -- sorry, SuperDoves had 8 -- the Doves had 4, but they kept the same 4 and we do a lot of calibration work. All of these fleets are calibrated to Landsat, Sentinel, MODIS. These are government missions that have high calibration accuracy that we calibrate our data to. So such that people can be assured that when they get an analytic feed from us in the next generation, they always can continue that.

By the way, that is a huge barrier to entry because this sort of calibration is really hard and there's a huge archive involved. I think people often underestimate the value of our archive, but it's central to all of their applications, GMS, for example, relies that work with NGA relies on years of data that looks back at the patterns of life over many years and then determines whether the new image tells you something changed that is significant. It's not just that it's changed, it's changed and it's significant. And that's because of the archive. And the AI applications is all about the archive.

And MDA, you don't just want to know where a ship is now. You also want to know where did it come from. And so not only is our data unique in terms of the daily scan, it's unique because we have the archive. So even if someone had a daily scan suddenly today, they wouldn't have the archive to go back and find all these things for several years. So we've got quite a lead there.

Ashley Whitfield Johnson

Yes. I think people often underestimate that exact point that you made, which is the calibration over time so that you have a very high signal-to-noise ratio. That has been a very significant investment that Planet has made over the years and makes the change detection analytics that we do on top of the data valuable to our customers.

Operator

Your next question comes from the line of Jeff Van Rhee with Craig-Hallum Capital Group.

Daniel Hibshman

This is Daniel on for Jeff. Maybe, Will, if we could just start on the pipeline, the $4 billion new sovereign deal pipeline number you gave, which is huge and real impressive. Maybe if you could just give us any other context you can around that in terms of how that's been trending quarter-over-quarter, year-over-year? Any call-outs on the composition of that? Any like concentration, geography, otherwise? Just any other context around that number, very interesting.

William Marshall

Yes. I mean -- so it's been growing in number of deals, in total size. And I think the key thing we were trying to point out with the $1 billion part of it, the 25% of it, is maturation. I also mentioned earlier, we are getting both smaller deals and bigger deals into the pipe. So bigger than we had thought and smaller than we had thought. So that's quite interesting. It's spreading out a little bit, and it's transitioned officially from just defense into civil government.

There's a few other deals like the German one that are in the mix as well, although it's still mainly Defense and Intelligence ones, which we always wanted, right? We want our solutions to transition to civil government and commercial, and we want our Constellation Services to transition. We often think of D&I as our forward-leaning partner. And so -- yes, we're very pleased with that momentum. And to geography, again, I said, there's 3 geos that are really driving that. And it's pretty strong in all 3 of those. I wouldn't say there's one like outstanding place amongst them.

Daniel Hibshman

Helpful. And then Ashley, on the model, and I take it the Q3 sequential revenue decline that's guided, that's probably due to the step-up in onetimes in satellite services. So that makes sense. As we look to Q4, then what's implied for Q4, it looks like there's a real strong bounce back in the revenue. Just anything you wanted to call out there? Is that just sort of standard course deals are ramping over time? Or anything in particular to call out in terms of lumpy rev rec, any other rev rec events to call out in the balance of the year?

Ashley Whitfield Johnson

Yes. No, I think you hit on it. Q2 was really about a step-up due to the point-in-time revenue. And I expect that as we continue to sign more satellite services deals that will both increase the variability in the short term, but over the long-term, probably normalize. In terms of the back half of this year, it's delivering against our backlog and really executing. And from -- from there, it will be landing and expanding with new business. So generally speaking, we feel very good about how the business is trending.

William Marshall

And I also wanted to point out that you saw that the gross margin went up and it is sustaining up, and that's really great as well.

Ashley Whitfield Johnson

Operator, any further questions?

William Marshall

We lost the operator.

Operator

Operator present. Our next question comes from the line of Noah Poponak with Goldman Sachs.

Noah Poponak

Maybe just following up on that discussion there on the outlook for the rest of the year and the margins. The -- recognize you raised the EBITDA, but it implies lower margins in the back half versus the first half. Can you talk us through where in the cost structure that's happening, why that's happening and maybe how we should think about how that progresses into next year?

Ashley Whitfield Johnson

So not a significant change in margins, but you're right to call out that it is a modest decline in gross margins. And that's simply just mix of business. So we are continuing to drive scale overall in the business. That's the strength to our one-to-many business model.

But again, satellite services are going to be a different margin profile depending on where we are in delivery across those deals that will impact the mix of business. And so you'll see some variability quarter-to-quarter on gross margin. We were obviously really pleased this quarter to still deliver 59% non-GAAP gross margins even with a meaningful step-up in delivery against our backlog.

Noah Poponak

Got it. Is there a way to think, Ashley, at this point about you had -- there was a long-term profitability framework provided in the company several years back, earlier days. Is there a way to think about the revenue base now after a lot of changes in the business and in strategy that's required to achieve that long-term profitability model?

Ashley Whitfield Johnson

There's not necessarily a minimum revenue if that's effectively what you're asking. We talked through last fall when we had our Investor Day, those same long-term financial targets and kind of how we see them evolving over time. We still see this as a business that can deliver very healthy adjusted EBITDA profitability to 25% plus and with that healthy free cash flow dynamics.

And gross margins, we amended that a bit to say north of 60% because it really is going to depend on that mix of business. But as we're demonstrating, even as we continue to fold more satellite services business into our revenue, we're maintaining high gross margins. So generally speaking, we are on track to continue to expand. And the main thing right now is we see so much market opportunity that we are leaning into that and investing across the board.

Noah Poponak

Okay. That's great. And then just lastly for me on the CapEx increase. Could you just further detail a bit what's behind that? It's a pretty large increase and to kind of be happening in the middle of the year. What is that for?

Ashley Whitfield Johnson

Yes. It's effectively -- see it as investments in Pelican and Owl. So as Will highlighted, it's strength of pipeline. We don't know ultimately how those deals will shake out in terms of dedicated capacity versus sovereign. So as we are stepping up investing and having that Pelican capacity, we operate under the assumption that those will be Planet satellites that could deliver dedicated capacity. Ultimately, if those turn into sovereign deals, those will flow differently through the P&L. But the long and the short of it is there's a lot of demand out there, and we want to make sure that we can continue to be the one that can deliver the fastest. So we're looking at long lead time items and making sure that we're in a good place on having the right inventory.

Similarly, there is a lot of interest in Owl. So we announced this last year. We've been talking to our customers and understanding from them how 3-meter -- or 1-meter class imagery could really enhance that daily scan relative to 3-meter class imagery. And frankly, the question coming back to us is how quickly can you have this available. And so we're leaning into that and doing some advanced procurements to make sure that as we get those tech demos live, we can be also in parallel scaling up for having the full suite. So that's really the nature of the CapEx increases is just looking at that demand and deciding to pull forward some of those procurements.

Operator

[Operator Instructions] Your next question comes from the line of Kristine Liwag with Morgan Stanley.

Kyle Benvenuto

This is Kyle Benvenuto on for Kristine. Congrats on the quarter. One on the balance sheet for you. You raised $120 million through the ATM during the quarter and ended with roughly $865 million of cash and short-term investments while generating positive free cash flow. What changed in either the opportunity set or your investment requirements that made it attractive to increase the raise of equity here? And should we think of the capital as primarily supporting Owl and additional manufacturing capacity such as the CapEx increase you just discussed or for other strategic opportunities or simply just adding balance sheet flexibility?

Ashley Whitfield Johnson

Yes, absolutely. I would really anchor it on the latter. It's that strategic balance sheet flexibility. Our target is on an annual basis to be free cash flow positive. So that means we're generating enough operating cash flow to support the CapEx investments in scaling up our next-generation fleet.

So we are very diligent about how we are adding that capital to the balance sheet, making sure that we're sensitive to dilution as we know our shareholders are. But at the same time, we want to be in a position to make strategic moves that can accelerate our market capture and make sure that we can deliver for the broadest customer base possible.

Operator

Your next question comes from the line of Greg Pendy with Clear Street.

Gregory Pendy

So you've talked about the Owl upgrade cycle. And I think, Will, you mentioned that it's 10x more data. I assume that going from 3 to 1 and then the 2D area scaling is how you're getting the 10x increase. But just how should we then translate that as analysts? I mean, does this mean that it's going to drive from a financial impact more usage? Or is it just -- is there a pricing increase opportunity?

William Marshall

Yes, definitely a price increase opportunity. I mean this is considerably more information. And so it opens up more applications. Again, think of things like vehicles where a meter, you can start telling more about the type or even ID vehicles. I'll give you a specific example in Maritime Domain Awareness. We can typically ID the vessel if it's under -- if it's over 30 meters in size. At that point, we can actually say it's this vessel with this IMO number, which is really helpful.

Smaller vessels we can see, but we can't ID them. If it's 1-meter, you would expect that roughly to divide in 3 so that you can see a 10-meter vessel. That's really important because there's a lot of fishing vessels and other things that are in that sort of 10- to 30-meter class. So it's things like that opens up more opportunities, different kinds of applications in that case, from military ships to maybe commercial ships and fishing vessels and things like that. So it opens up other applications. So definitely -- and we already have customers interested in that. And for sure, they're expecting the prices to go up.

Ashley Whitfield Johnson

The other thing that Owl delivers, which Will highlighted is that it's 10x faster. So we're incorporating into the satellite things like AI capabilities being able to do that onboard detection and analysis as well as satellite to satellite communication, which can enable the data to get back to our customers faster. So it's on multiple vectors that this is much more valuable data to our customers. And so yes, we would certainly expect that to be commensurate in terms of the price we can charge.

Operator

Your next question comes from the line of Gabriel Flouret with Cantor Fitzgerald.

Gabriel Flouret

This is Gabriel Flouret on for Colin. How does the team's balance of domestic opportunities range across the Pentagon's FY '26 budget, FY '27 CR and FY '27 request? To what extent can we see Planet programs to lift as program officers drive balance in commercial offerings?

William Marshall

Well, great question. This administration is really leaning into commercial solutions. And one of the interesting pieces also, especially ones that -- where the company has already gone and invested and is building the system already, so the government gets to just benefit from that. And then they're really leaning in. So -- and we see it across the board. There's substantial programs that we have our eye on this year -- this coming year and the government FY '27. And that hasn't yet passed through Congress. So we're tracking all of that and how it results after reconciliation.

But just know that there are meaningful expansion of commercial type operational budgets across the board, NGA, NRO for the intelligence community, the department itself. So it's getting a lot of budgets for new space capabilities. They're recognizing that space is a critical thing. That's because they're learning that. They're seeing what's happening in Ukraine. They're seeing what's happening in the Middle East, and they're learning that info -- satellites are key to information advantage, which is really critical in these places. So yes, a lot of interest across multiple years. I haven't got more specifics to give you on that or specific programs. A lot of that's very tight, but I assure you there's a lot of interest.

Operator

Your next question comes from the line of Chris Quilty with Quilty Space.

Christopher Quilty

I had a follow-up on the Gen 2. You've had the first satellite on orbit for a couple of months. It doesn't look like it's been lowered yet. But when will you have a good idea of the performance characteristics of that satellite, which I believe this is the first one targeting the 30-centimeter class. And does that satellite have an optical crosslink for testing purposes? Or will that come on the next set of satellites?

William Marshall

Yes, great question. So generally, that mission has been doing really well. So I'd say it's -- we have got the results from it, and that's what has enabled us to pave the path most importantly towards the 30-centimeter class imagery. So yes, I mean, roughly succeeded in all the major goals we set out for it. It was always set up as a tech demo mission. So it's all about the learnings as opposed to intending to be an operational satellite. But all the things we set out there for have been doing very well.

It does have inter-satellite links, not optical, though, it's RF inter-satellite links. And so lower bandwidth, but very flexible. And so it can enable last-minute tasking as well as summary data to go back and even full images, but not that many of them. So it really gets us going in that field. We're making more advances there, including on the optical side in later missions coming down the pipe. So yes, I mean, very much did all the things that we were hoping and I'm very proud of the team.

Christopher Quilty

Got you. And just specific on the optical, I mean, that's been the bane of every program out there, including SpaceX in the early days. I don't think you have announced a partner there. Is that an internal development effort? And how confident are you in that system working as designed?

William Marshall

Very confident at this point. That is an internal project and deliberately so, several years of effort to bring that in-house because we wanted independent supply chain, and that's one of the key successes that we've made so that it's really very solid, and we will be adding optical crosslink's later as well on those missions. So that -- yes, having that main telescope system in-house has been a really important advancement. And yes, so it's a success, I would say.

Operator

That's all the time we have for questions today. I will now turn the call back over to Will Marshall, CEO and Co-Founder, for closing remarks.

William Marshall

Yes. I'd just say in closing that we feel it was a great quarter, meaningful beat on the top line and on margins. This is all made possible because of a series of new deals. I want to call out a couple of the first operational program for GMS with NGA, our first satellite services deal with a federal civil government agency with Germany, our first countrywide contract with the civil government in Africa with Rwanda. And we shared our first win with an AI hyperscaler for data center monitoring, which is also really cool. Each of these speaks to the value that Planet is bringing to customers around the globe. I couldn't be more pleased also for how our satellite services business is maturing, as we've discussed here, with over $4 billion of opportunities identified and over $1 billion as -- qualified as near-term pipeline.

Stepping back, I believe today, we hold a small growing share of an enormous market. And furthermore, Planet's daily scan, along with our AI is opening entirely new applications and segments on top of that market. So Planet is uniquely positioned to go after these opportunities. On the satellite services side, our ability to deliver in months, not years, is a huge differentiation. And on the GMS side and MDA, it's all powered by a daily scan that no one else has, as we've also discussed on this call. So thanks always to the incredible hard work of the Planet team around the globe that enables this, and thanks, everyone, for joining us today.

Operator

This concludes today's call. Thank you for attending. You may now disconnect.