Planet Clients: Insurance & Mapping / GIS - Part 5
Planet closed its first insurance-related deal with Farmer's Edge in 2017. It also provides real-time mapping data to Dattabot, Google, and SpaceKnow, which they use for a variety of purposes. We have entered this information into the project spreadsheet as requested.
Below you will find a deep dive of our findings.
INSURANCE
Planet's Insurtech eBook did not provide any case studies that name their clients, so we researched Planet's press releases. The only article tagged "insurance" or "insurance tech" on Planet's blog was a case study describing how Planet's satellite imaging assisted Dattabot. However, this case study had little to do with insurance, and more appropriately belonged to mapping, as shown below. We were unable to locate any other case studies appropriate to insurance in Planet's press releases despite a thorough search. According to Planet's "Rocketing Into 2018" blog post, they only closed their "first deals in insurance, finance, and energy infrastructure" in 2017. The first insurance deal was not announced on Planet's press page, but we located the details off-site.
In February 2018, Farmer's Edge announced that it had previously closed a deal to become "the exclusive distributor of Planet imagery" for agriculture (presumably in North America; see below). Having done so, Farmer's Edge "is entering a four-year, exclusive agreement with PartnerRe, a key reinsurance firm in agriculture and crop insurance." Planet's real-time satellite imagery can be used to provide insurance companies with instant access to, for example, "satellite and weather data and determine the true crop damage from a hail event" and "better fine-tune insurance products and help farmers get coverage for the long term, perhaps at a better price, or more coverage for the same money."
Given that Planet closed its first insurance deal in 2017, that Farmer's Edge is claiming exclusive rights, and that we are unable to locate any public source contradicting those claims or detailing a second deal, we understand this to be Planet's only insurance client at this time, and have put N/A in columns G-J in the project spreadsheet.
MAPPING/GIS
Planet's Mapping market page did not include a link to an eBook; we therefore conducted a search for relevant press releases.
Dattabot, an Indonesian Big Data Analytics firm, needed to map agricultural yields and potential risks in order to help Indonesian farmers in connecting with financial institutions. Having determined that mapping fields, potential flood plains, etc. with drones was too inefficient due to the area required, Dattabot partnered with Planet to provide the necessary mapping. This enabled Dattabot to "offer a better analytics solution for our agricultural partners and provide precise agronomic recommendations that can improve productivity," so that farmers might "improve their quality of life through greater output and better access to credit."
Planet has also entered into a multi-year agreement with Google in which the latter purchases Planet's SkySat imaging data. This improves Google's own offerings as, for example, Google Earth only updated its images every few months. "Planet’s images are updated daily ... and are compiled into a cloud-based database, allowing users to compare changes to areas both large and small over time."
Since we were only able to find one insurance example, we have added this third mapping/GIS example to the project spreadsheet: SpaceKnow, an "on demand geospatial analysis" company, lacks satellites of its own, and so "culls imagery from third-party providers such as DigitalGlobe, Planet, Airbus, and UrtheCast" to feed data to its machine learning programs for a variety of applications, including real estate, construction, and speculation.
CONCLUSION
Since we were only able to find one insurance related example due to Planet only entering that space in 2017, we have instead offered three examples of Planet's mapping/GIS clients. We have entered the information for Farmer's Edge, Dattabot, Google, and SpaceKnow in rows 11-12 of the project spreadsheet.