This San Francisco-based satellite company’s stock has doubled in the past three months

Planet Labs Shares have been on the decline over the past few months as investors invested in the company’s satellite data offerings.

Shares have surged since the beginning of September and are up more than 100% in the past three months, making them one of the top performers on CNBC’s screen of San Francisco-based companies. The stock is up more than 215% this year, on top of last year’s gain of more than 60%.

“We’re starting to see investors start to realize the potential of our business,” Ashley Johnson, the company’s president and chief financial officer, told CNBC’s Brian Sullivan in an exclusive interview on Tuesday.

Sullivan has been interviewing the leaders of the best-performing San Francisco stocks all week. Interviews can be seen on Power Lunch’s homepage.

Planet Labs documents everything going on on the planet with hundreds of satellites, Johnson said. Based on this, the company uses artificial intelligence to help its customer base, which consists of governments and large corporations, make decisions.

In the past, he said, the industry focused more on “point-and-click” data that captures a location at any moment in time. But Planet Labs is “shifting the paradigm” by using large amounts of data and measuring things like ground surface temperature that the human eye can’t track, Johnson said.

Planet Labs uses machines “to make correlations over very large areas and then derive really significant decision-making capabilities from that,” Johnson said. “This is very different from, ‘Can I count how many cars are in this parking lot using this image I’ve taken over of that parking lot?'”

Johnson noted that the cost of manufacturing and launching each satellite is approximately $300,000, a price that has fallen due to Silicon Valley’s innovation. In fact, the cumulative cost of Planet Lab’s more than 600 satellites is less than the cost of traditional industry a decade ago, he said.

Planet Labs’ margins increase because the company can sell the same data to multiple customers, Johnson said. He said the company has seen increased interest from governments seeking leverage amid geopolitical uncertainty.

Of course, the stock went through a rough patch earlier this year, falling more than 20% in both February and March.

However, the majority of analysts have a buy rating on the stock, according to LSEG. Wall Street also expects the stock to advance further, with the average price target pointing to 5% further upside.