A Dubai-headquartered climatetech company building artificial intelligence tools for the solar industry has secured fresh strategic backing, giving it fuel to expand well beyond the Gulf.
Founded in 2023 by Portuguese energy engineer Daniel Domingues, Planno operates a geospatial AI platform that merges satellite imagery with local market intelligence. The goal is to help solar developers, engineering, procurement and construction firms, and public sector bodies pinpoint which commercial and industrial rooftops are actually worth developing for solar, and to identify who owns them. What has traditionally taken sales teams weeks of manual legwork, pulling satellite images and chasing property records, Planno compresses into a filterable, data-driven shortlist.
The New Investment
Planno has now raised a strategic investment from Incubayt Investments, a sustainability-focused venture firm founded by Sami Khoreibi, who previously built and scaled a major Arab utility-scale solar developer to more than $750 million in revenue across nine countries before its sale to a UK pension fund. The deal marks Incubayt’s first bet on geospatial AI applied to the solar sector.
Khoreibi’s investment thesis centres on a straightforward observation: the solar industry has never lacked capital or sunlight, but it has consistently lacked the intelligence to know where to build and who owns the roof. In a data-driven economy, that kind of insight carries as much value as the physical projects themselves.
Why Dubai’s Rooftops Matter
Planno’s own analysis illustrates the scale of the opportunity sitting untouched in its home market. Dubai’s rooftop solar footprint expanded 39% between late 2023 and the first quarter of 2025, making it one of the more active markets in the region. Even so, of the emirate’s 15,283 commercial and industrial rooftops, only 5.6% currently carry solar systems, leaving roughly 4 gigawatts of generation capacity undeveloped in a single city.
The company says the pattern repeats across other major Gulf cities, where large numbers of commercial buildings continue to draw entirely from the grid despite strong rooftop solar potential. Beyond the region, Planno has mapped tens of thousands of rooftops in markets such as New York and points to European Commission research suggesting the continent’s building stock could theoretically host over 2 terawatts of solar capacity, most of it currently unbuilt.
Expansion Plans
With Incubayt’s backing providing what Domingues describes as the foundation for replicating Planno’s model market by market, the company’s stated ambition is to extend accurate, data-driven rooftop insights beyond large industry players to solar developers of every size. Recent moves include a partnership with a Portuguese developer backed by a major European energy investor to accelerate rooftop discovery in that market, alongside recognition as Solar Startup of the Year at a regional solar industry awards program in 2026.
For a Gulf startup ecosystem increasingly focused on climatetech and decarbonization, Planno’s trajectory, from a single-market GeoAI tool to a platform operating across 16 countries, adds to a growing list of UAE-born companies scaling sustainability technology internationally.
