Planno, the Dubai-headquartered Geospatial AI platform for solar developers, has secured a strategic investment from Incubayt Investments, the sustainability-focused venture firm founded by Sami Khoreibi. The deal has helped carry the startup from Dubai into 16 markets — including Europe, where the untapped rooftop opportunity could meet 40% of the EU’s long-term electricity demand by 2050.
It’s Incubayt’s first bet on geospatial AI for solar. Khoreibi knows the sector from the ground up: he built the Arab world’s first utility-scale solar developer, grew it past $750M in revenue across nine countries, and sold it to a UK pension fund.
“We invest in founders building globally ambitious projects from the UAE,” said Khoreibi. “The solar industry has never been short of capital or sunlight. What it lacked was intelligence. Where to build, and who owns the roof. In a data-driven economy, that insight is as valuable as the projects themselves. Planno is exactly that.”
The scale of Europe’s opportunity
In January 2026, the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre released the first per-building analysis of rooftop solar potential across the bloc using recent advances in geospatial AI technology. It looked at all 271 million buildings in the EU and concluded that their roofs could hold about 2.3 terawatts peak of solar PV and produce roughly 2,750 terawatt-hours a year using today’s solar technology. That would cover close to 40% of Europe’s electricity in a future net-zero system.
But only about 10% of European rooftops currently carry panels, even though rooftop systems already account for most of the EU’s installed solar. The commercial slice is where the JRC sees the fastest gains: it found that more than half of the EU’s 700 GW solar target for 2030 could come from non-residential rooftops, with large buildings over 2,000 m² alone able to host roughly 355 GW.
Take the Lake Geneva region, Switzerland’s largest market for rooftop solar. Planno has identified 9,834 commercial and industrial rooftops there, worth 1.9 GW of potential. About 24% of C&I buildings have gone solar so far. But among the biggest roofs, those above 4,000 m², adoption is already over 50%.
That large-commercial segment is exactly what Planno maps. It’s also where the guesswork is worst.
Energy costs and the case for rooftops
AI data centres are coming online fast, and geopolitical tension continues to push energy prices up. Europe has felt this sharply, and the response has included new rooftop rules. The Joint Research Centre pointed to the solar mandate in the Energy Performance of Buildings Directive as a measure that will speed up installations on new and renovated buildings, residential and non-residential alike.
Daniel Domingues, Planno’s Founder and CEO, sees rooftops as one of the few levers a business genuinely controls. “Oil and gas are global commodities. Even countries that produce them feel every shock, because the price is set somewhere else,” he said. “Rooftop solar is one of the few cost-control levers a commercial operator actually owns.”
As Europe’s building rules increasingly push commercial and industrial sites toward solar, developers keep running into the same wall Planno was built to knock down: figuring out which roofs are worth it, and who owns them.
Four continents, one playbook
Incubayt’s investment has let Planno spread globally. The company went from the Gulf into the wider Middle East, then Asia, Europe, Africa, and North America. Its customers now range from regional developers and EPC firms to global energy operators.
“We want every solar developer in every market, not just the largest ones, to have proper data to work with,” said Domingues. “Incubayt’s early backing gave us the foundation to build that. We’re now applying the same playbook country by country.”
For European developers chasing building-decarbonisation deadlines, and eyeing the 355 GW the JRC flagged on large commercial roofs, the timing works. What Planno sells is the thing that turns a legal mandate into an actual project list, not through data but intelligence.
