Satellogic Lands $18M+ Defense-Monitoring Contract

Satellogic ($SATL) announced a $18M+, one-year agreement today with an undisclosed international defense customer. In February, Satellogic launched a new data product, called Aleph Observer, to offer customers persistent monitoring capabilities through its NewSat EO constellation. The contract marks the company’s first large agreement since it made that strategic shift to persistent-monitoring capabilities. How it works: Satellogic operates a constellation of sub-meter-resolution satellites. In addition to offering tasking capabilities to customers in an ad-hoc fashion, Satellogic has started to bundle services into an offering focused on persistent monitoring. Basically, customers can bulk-buy tasking services, selecting hundreds or thousands of sites on the ground for Satellogic sats to periodically revisit. Aleph Observer then uses AI to spot changes on the ground, allowing analysts to monitor much larger swathes of the Earth. It’s a new take on the tip-and-cue model, in which EO data customers traditionally relied on low-resolution, broad imagery to spot changes, and would then task a higher-resolution, multispectral, or SAR sat to take a closer look. Satellogic aims to offer the best of both worlds, by giving customers the ability to regularly revisit a large pool of sites and spot more granular changes, all in one service. “AI is really giving us the possibility to do things that we couldn’t do before,” Satellogic CEO Emiliano Kargieman told Payload. “We’re going from an analyst looking at 10 sites per day, to being able to look at thousands.” The payoff: The shift comes at a time when demand for EO data is booming. In March, the company posted a record annual revenue of $17.7M for 2025, and the company’s stock price reached an all-time high of $10.61 on Friday. Kargieman attributed the recent revenue growth to two main drivers: Increasing demand from commercial and defense customers in response to rising geopolitical tensions; The increasing capability of AI, which has unlocked the new persistent monitoring use case. What’s next: Satellogic is doubling down on persistent monitoring. The company expects to launch a new class of satellite as part of a planned constellation—called Merlin—to offer customers daily one-meter-resolution monitoring of the entire planet. Merlin sats will be equipped with onboard AI capabilities—to autonomously spot and surface changes before downlinking insights to customers—as well as intersatellite links, further reducing data latency. The first Merlin sat is expected to launch in October, according to Kargieman, and the company aims to make the entire constellation operational in 2027. “That’s one of the ways that I think we’re differentiated from companies that are going to have much more binary outcomes,” she said. “If you’re selling hardware, you recognize revenue when you’ve delivered that hardware. If it fails, that’s the end of the story.” SpaceX launched its Starship V3 launch vehicle for the first time on Friday, unveiling a full suite of upgrades during the rocket’s twelfth test flight. Starship lifted off the newly built pad in Starbase, TX, at 6:30pm, and proceeded to hit nearly all of its milestones, despite losing a few engines along the way. Total overhaul: The launch showcased multiple upgrades SpaceX made to the launch vehicle and ground systems—both vehicle stages, the Raptor engines, and the launch pad.