Planno Raises Incubayt Investment to Scale Geospatial AI Solar Platform

What happened

Dubai-headquartered Planno has secured a strategic investment from Incubayt Investments, the sustainability-focused venture firm founded by Sami Khoreibi, to fund international expansion and further develop its geospatial AI platform for the solar industry. The deal was reported by Wamda.

Founded in 2023 by Daniel Domingues, Planno combines satellite imagery with local market data to help solar developers, engineering, procurement and construction (EPC) firms, and public agencies pinpoint high-potential commercial and industrial rooftops for solar installations. Following the Incubayt investment, the company has extended its footprint from the GCC into 16 markets spanning the Middle East, Europe, Africa and the United States.

Why it matters

At first glance, a geospatial AI tool for solar site selection sits at the infrastructure end of the energy sector — far from the customer journey. Look closer, however, and Planno is doing something with direct service-design implications: it is removing friction from the earliest, most uncertain stage of a solar project. For commercial and industrial building owners, the decision to invest in solar is laden with ambiguity — roof suitability, local regulation, financial return. By surfacing high-confidence site data before a single sales conversation begins, Planno shifts the customer's cognitive burden from "I don't know if this is viable" to "here is what is possible." That is a classic application of the behavioral-economics principle of reducing decision paralysis through pre-commitment clarity.

For service designers working in energy, utilities or sustainability consulting, the broader lesson is that the quality of the pre-sale information experience is itself a product. Customers who arrive at a decision already informed — and already trusting the data — convert faster, churn less and require less hand-holding. Planno's expansion into 16 markets also signals that appetite for this kind of intelligence-led, low-friction onboarding is genuinely global, not a GCC-specific phenomenon.

By the numbers

• 2023: year Planno was founded by Daniel Domingues in Dubai.
• 16 markets now served across the Middle East, Europe, Africa and the United States, up from an initial GCC focus.

The Renascence take

Most commentary on this deal will focus on the climatetech angle — renewable energy, GCC sustainability targets, venture momentum. What the CX and service-design community should notice instead is the structural role Planno plays in the customer acquisition funnel of an industry notorious for long, opaque sales cycles.

Solar adoption stalls not because customers lack interest, but because the information required to act is scattered, technical and trust-deficient. Planno is, in effect, a confidence-building engine disguised as a data platform. The behavioral insight here is that certainty is a service — and whoever provides it earliest owns the relationship. Customer-obsessed operators in any capital-intensive sector should be asking: what is the equivalent of a rooftop-suitability score in our category, and why are we still making customers wait until the proposal stage to receive it?