planet os

Planet OS, an Estonian-founded company, specialized in providing a big data infrastructure platform for geospatial Internet of Things (IoT) data. The company's origins trace back to 2008 when four friends, including Rainer Sternfeld, designed a profiling buoy for the Gulf of Finland to collect data on phytoplankton. This early work in marine data collection led to the founding of Marinexplore in 2011 by Rainer Sternfeld and Kalle Kägi, with the goal of organizing the world's ocean data for marine professionals. Recognizing the platform's broader capabilities for handling Industrial IoT data, the company rebranded to Planet OS in 2014, expanding its mission to include weather, climate, and other environmental sensor data.

The business catered to large enterprises and government agencies, particularly in the energy, transportation, and healthcare sectors. Its business model centered on providing a platform that allowed clients to manage, visualize, and analyze vast, multi-format datasets from numerous sensor sources. This enabled operators to identify patterns and gain insights for critical decision-making without the company taking ownership of the data itself. One of its key products was the Powerboard™, designed for renewable energy asset operators to manage data from wind farms, facilitating applications like predictive maintenance. Clients included major European energy company Innogy SE, which used the platform to manage data from its wind assets.

Rainer Sternfeld, a robotics engineer by training, served as the CEO and was a driving force behind the company's vision to create an operating system for planetary data. His background includes designing the first nationwide EV fast-charging network in Estonia for ABB and serving on the White House Open Data Roundtable. In August 2017, Planet OS was acquired by Intertrust Technologies, a Silicon Valley-based data rights management and security company. The acquisition aimed to combine Planet OS's geospatial data platform with Intertrust's security and risk management technologies to create a robust, multi-party data platform for industrial IoT applications. The entire Planet OS team joined Intertrust, which planned to expand its engineering operations in Estonia.

Keywords: geospatial big data, environmental data, industrial IoT, sensor data platform, data visualization, data analytics, renewable energy data, oceanographic data, climate data, weather data, Marinexplore, Rainer Sternfeld, Intertrust Technologies, data infrastructure, Powerboard, asset management, predictive maintenance, energy industry, government agencies, data integration