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

Dubai-based climatetech startup Planno has secured an undisclosed strategic investment from the UAE-based sustainability-focused venture firm, Incubayt Investments.

Founded by Daniel Domingues in the UAE in 2023, Planno combines satellite imagery with local market data to help solar developers, engineering, procurement, and construction (EPC) firms, and public agencies identify commercial and industrial rooftops suitable for solar installations. The fresh capital the company has raised has been earmarked to support its international expansion and accelerate the development of its geospatial artificial intelligence (GeoAI) platform, which is designed to modernize prospecting for the solar industry.  

“We're a prospecting platform for commercial solar,” Domingues told Inc. Arabia. “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.”

Having spent two decades developing solar and infrastructure projects across the Middle East, Europe, and Latin America, Domingues explained that Planno was born from his experience of seeing teams devote significant time and resources to identifying promising commercial rooftops and tracking down ownership information before projects could even begin. The process was manual, slow, and often led nowhere, despite the fact that the necessary data existed—it was simply scattered, inconsistent, and hard to reach. 

It was this challenge that led Domingues to build Planno around a different approach to prospecting. “What we're really doing is reimagining a process the industry already runs, but making it dramatically faster and more productive,” Domingues explained. “We treat prospecting as an intelligence problem, not as legwork, and once you make that shift, the economics of finding a project change completely." 

It’s this approach that resonated with Incubayt, the venture firm founded by Sami Khoreibi, a veteran entrepreneur who established the Arab world's first utility-scale solar developer before selling the business to a UK pension fund. Incubayt’s investment in Planno marks its entry into geospatial AI for the solar sector.

"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 shared. “That's the lens he brought to Planno. He has always said the solar industry never lacked capital or sunlight. What it lacked was intelligence: knowing where to build, and who owns the roof. Planno is exactly that intelligence layer, and I think he recognized it immediately, because it answers a question he understands at a deep level within our industry.”

Domingues also pointed to his longstanding professional relationship with Khoreibi as another factor that shaped the investment. “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,” he revealed. “That shared history meant there was trust from the start in our dedication to advancing solar development projects. But what actually convinced him was the scalability. He could see that the work which once took a team weeks could now be done across an entire market in a fraction of the time, in any country. It's a faster route to the future he's been building toward all along." 

Incubayt’s investment has enabled Planno to expand its operations from the GCC into 16 markets across the Middle East, Europe, Africa, and the US, with it now serving regional solar developers, EPC firms, and global energy operators. Domingues noted that Planno’s expansion was not driven by a single breakthrough, but by a strategy to build it as a global platform from the outset. "Honestly, there was never a single ‘aha’ deal or moment,” he shared. “That's because I set out to build Planno to be global from the very first day, before we opened a single market. That came from my own experience developing projects in a lot of different places, not just the Emirates or the wider Middle East. Working across all those markets, I noticed the beginning of the process is almost identical everywhere. Every country has its own rules, its own solar policies, its own amount of sunlight. But the very first question a solar company asks is which rooftops are worth pursuing, and who owns them, which doesn't change when you cross a border. So, the proof came the other way around from what people usually expect.”

That global outlook also informed how Planno approached its geographic expansion. “We started in the Middle East, because it's home; it's where we live and where our network in solar is the strongest,” Domingues said. “Also, solar initiatives have been growing strong here alongside the energy demand stemming from AI usage. From there, we moved into Europe, then Africa, and more recently the United States. And every single time we open a new market, the reaction is the same: solar companies look at it and immediately understand how much faster they can work. It elevates their team's workflow and pipeline, which confirms the model travels. The problem is universal; so, the solution is too." 

Having thus demonstrated that its model can scale across markets, Planno is now focused on expanding its impact across the solar ecosystem. "I want every solar company in every market— not just the largest ones—to have proper data to work with,” Domingues said. “The big energy players have always had resources the smaller developers don't, and that imbalance shapes who gets to build. Planno closes that gap by democratizing that data intelligence. The ambition is to become the data layer the entire industry can build on, in any market in the world.”

According to Domingues, building for global markets from day one is a strategy that other founders in the MENA region should also embrace. “Don't build for one market and hope to adapt later; instead, build for the world from the start,” he said. “Some of the best ideas I've seen are being built right here, in Dubai, in Abu Dhabi, across the region, and many of them can serve global markets immediately. More and more companies are proving that now. Don't let the region be your ceiling; let it be your starting point.”

That ambition needs to be matched by discipline in execution, Domingues added. “Be resilient,” he said. “Building a company is hard, and it stays hard for a long time. There are low moments and high ones, and what separates the founders who make it from those who don't is often just the will to keep going. Also, stay close to your customer. In the early years, your customers are your most important sponsors—their feedback shapes the product, and their business funds your growth. We like to hold monthly conversations with every one of our customers, because we want to understand how they work, what's changed. and how we can serve them better. Don't ever lose that connection; it's valuable in so many ways.”

Pictured in the lead image is Planno founder Daniel Domingues. Image courtesy Planno.