Planno raises strategic investment from Incubayt for solar AI

Published: 2026-07-08T12:11:48.000Z

Planno has picked up a strategic investment from Incubayt to sharpen a simple but overlooked idea, which is that the hardest part of rooftop solar is not the panels but knowing which roof to put them on. The Dubai-based climatetech firm, founded in 2023 by Daniel Domingues, runs a geospatial AI platform that fuses satellite imagery with local market data to pinpoint the commercial and industrial rooftops most worth developing. The backing comes from Incubayt Investments, the sustainability-focused venture firm set up by the cleantech entrepreneur Sami Khoreibi, and marks the fund's first bet on geospatial AI for solar. Terms were not disclosed, but the money is aimed squarely at expansion. The pitch resonates because the solar industry has rarely lacked capital or sunshine, yet has long struggled with intelligence about where demand and opportunity actually sit. Planno's software answers two deceptively tricky questions for developers and engineering firms, namely which buildings have the right roofs and who owns them, turning a scattered guessing game into something closer to a targeted sales pipeline. Domingues frames the appeal in economic rather than green terms, arguing that with oil and gas priced by global markets that even producing nations cannot control, rooftop solar is one of the few energy costs a business can genuinely own and manage itself. That argument is landing at a useful moment. Global electricity demand is climbing as AI data centers come online and geopolitical strain pushes power prices around, which strengthens the case for distributed generation close to where it is consumed. Since Incubayt's investment, Planno has stretched well beyond the Gulf into 16 markets spanning the Middle East, Europe, Africa and the United States, serving everyone from regional installers to global energy operators. Domingues has been explicit that the ambition is to give every developer, not just the biggest, proper data to work with, and to replicate the same playbook country by country. The regional opportunity is striking precisely because it looks so untapped. The UAE has poured resources into vast utility-scale projects like the Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum Solar Park as it chases net zero by 2050, yet distributed rooftop solar remains an afterthought. Planno's own analysis of Dubai found that of more than 15,000 commercial and industrial rooftops, only around 5.6 per cent carry solar today, leaving roughly four gigawatts of potential capacity unbuilt, a pattern it says repeats across most Gulf cities. Schemes such as Shams Dubai, which lets buildings feed power back to the grid, have laid the groundwork, but adoption has lagged. For a country turning sustainability into industrial strategy, closing that gap is exactly the kind of problem a data-first startup is built to attack.