Will Marshall | CEO Of Planet - Creating A Queryable Earth

Mar 25, 2026

Will Marshall, CEO and co-founder of Planet and former NASA scientist, built a fleet of 200+ satellites to create a queryable Earth. He discusses indexing daily global imagery, using AI and computer vision to make it searchable, applications for economic signals, conservation and disaster monitoring, and the technical and governance challenges of space-based data and compute.

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INSIGHT

How Miniaturization Made Daily Global Imaging Viable

Planet achieved daily global imaging by miniaturizing satellites using smartphone-era electronics to drop costs from ~$1B to ~$0.1–2M per satellite.
The fleet images ~4 million photos per day and provides ~3,000 images per point on land, enabling time-series 'digital forensics'.

ADVICE

Automate Image Analysis Instead Of Manual Review

Use AI layers on top of imagery to automate alerts instead of relying on humans to scan millions of images daily.
Planet built algorithms and computer-vision pipelines to surface events like deforestation or ship movement for rapid action.

INSIGHT

Queryable Earth Brings Real World Data To LLMs

Queryable Earth indexes imagery like Google indexes the web, letting LLMs access real-world, time-stamped data rather than only text corpora.
Will says this fusion unlocks applications from retail predictions to climate monitoring and defence transparency.

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Will Marshall is the CEO and Co-Founder of Planet.

Planet own and operate a fleet of (200+) satellites which image daily, the entire world.

Planet’s ultimate ambition is to achieve a queryable earth.

The way you might ask Google what the population of Australia is, you’d be able to ask Planet any conceivable question you might have about the surface of the world. The way Google would refer to the Australian Bureau of Statistics for an answer to the countries population, Planet will refer your query to their data, millions and millions of indexed images of the planet’s surface to present you an answer.

The applications of this are huge.

Take economic intelligence as an example… all types of queries that could summon early indicators of movements that aren’t already priced in.

For instance, as an early prediction of retail sales you could ask; How many cars are in Walmart parking lots across America right now? Or even, over the past 3 months, what’s the daily average number been?
Which Chinese ports are seeing more or less traffic than they usually might since the 2026 Iran war began?

And then there’s uses for climate and the environment.

I could ask, at what rate is a specific glacier retreating? Measure this season’s melt against each other year to date.
Monitoring and acting upon overfishing in protected zones.
Or as I ask Will in the interview, could Planet’s data be more accurate at early predictions regarding where an Australian bushfire season might be worst hit

You can imagine the applications for agriculture but as well, naturally, Planet’s data is also crucial for defence.

Will comment’s on Planet’s data indicating very early the Russian buildup of activity closing in on a Ukraine border.
And I caught Will just day’s after the 2026 war with Iran, a conflict where Planet’s data is also in use.

Will Marshall an incredible entrepreneur, but as you’ll see in the interview, he also has extensive interests beyond just those of his business.

Marshall’s PHD advisor was Sir Roger Penrose. He worked at NASA. He was on the team that discovered large quantities of water ice on the moon. He co-invented a space debris collision avoidance method using ground-based lasers. Will has lived in communal housing for 20 years. He’s a Brit abroad in America and is now the CEO of a company not only ambitioning for all the queryable stuff mentioned above, but as well is now partnered with both Google and Nvidia to explore the potential for data centres in space.

It’s a enormous pleasure to welcome to Will Marshall to the podcast.

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