Dubai-Headquartered Planno Secures Investment From UAE-Based Incubayt To Scale Its GeoAI Platform For Solar Developers

Dubai-headquartered climatetech startup Planno has secured an undisclosed strategic investment from UAE-based sustainability venture firm Incubayt Investments to scale its geospatial artificial intelligence (GeoAI) platform for commercial solar prospecting. Founded by Daniel Domingues in 2023, Planno uses satellite imagery and local market data to identify commercial and industrial rooftops suited for solar installations, and the fresh capital will support international expansion and accelerated product development.

Direct quote

“We're a prospecting platform for commercial solar,” Domingues said. “We scan entire markets using satellite imagery and geospatial AI to identify every commercial and industrial rooftop, enriching each one with ownership, energy, and contact data. A solar company gets a clear pipeline of real opportunities, filtered by its own criteria, in days rather than months.”

Context and product details

Planno combines remote sensing with market-level enrichment to reduce the manual legwork historically required to find viable rooftop solar projects. Domingues, who has spent two decades developing solar and infrastructure projects across the Middle East, Europe, and Latin America, built the company from experience with the slow and fragmented process of rooftop prospecting, where ownership records, energy usage, and contact information are often scattered and inconsistent.

“What we're really doing is reimagining a process the industry already runs, but making it dramatically faster and more productive,” Domingues said. “We treat prospecting as an intelligence problem, not as legwork, and once you make that shift, the economics of finding a project change completely.”

Incubayt Investments, founded by entrepreneur Sami Khoreibi — who previously established the Arab world’s first utility-scale solar developer and later sold that business to a UK pension fund — led the strategic backing. Domingues highlighted Khoreibi’s industry pedigree and interest in technology that accelerates the energy transition: “Sami has spent his career backing ideas that move the energy transition forward; so, he approaches this space as someone genuinely convinced that better technology gets us to a cleaner future faster,” Domingues said.

• Target users: regional solar developers, engineering, procurement and construction (EPC) firms, public agencies, and global energy operators.
• Platform capability: scans entire markets, identifies commercial and industrial rooftops, enriches each asset with ownership, energy, and contact data.
• Geographic reach: expanded from the GCC into 16 markets across the Middle East, Europe, Africa, and the US.

Outlook

The undisclosed injection from Incubayt enables Planno to push beyond the GCC and operate across 16 markets, serving a mix of regional developers and global operators. Domingues emphasized that the company was designed from the outset as a global platform rather than pursuing a single-market breakthrough. He also pointed to a longstanding professional relationship with Khoreibi — “Years ago, I worked on the business development team at the solar company he built and later exited; so, we’d both done this work by hand; the same work Planno now does automatically,” Domingues said — as a factor that accelerated trust and convinced the investor of the platform’s scalability.

With Incubayt’s backing, Planno plans to accelerate development of its GeoAI prospecting tools and broaden commercial deployments, promising faster identification of viable rooftop projects and a more intelligence-driven pipeline for solar developers worldwide.