Planno’s AI maps South America’s solar rooftops, one pixel at a time

For anyone who has watched a solar developer squint at Google Earth for hours, praying that a warehouse roof isn’t actually a greenhouse, the old way of doing business feels almost medieval. That is the world Daniel Domingues set out to fix with Planno, a greentech startup that treats the search for solar-ready rooftops as a data problem rather than a guessing game. In a region where the sun is abundant but the paperwork is not, this is not just a tech story — it is a quiet revolution in how capital finds its way to clean energy.

Planno’s platform uses geospatial AI and high-resolution satellite imagery to detect flat, structurally viable rooftops across commercial and industrial zones. Instead of dispatching teams to cross-reference outdated municipal property records or manually scan satellite maps, developers can now let machine learning models flag the most promising surfaces in minutes. The system then runs a human quality-control pass, where experts verify that what the algorithm sees matches the physical reality on the ground — a crucial step for excluding false positives like greenhouses or degraded roofs that would fool simpler tools. Domingues frames this as an antidote to cold calling and blind database searches, turning information chaos into a shared management platform that development teams can actually use.

The economic logic here is brutal and clear. In mature solar markets, soft costs — customer acquisition, permitting, site assessment — can eat up to 35% of a project’s total cost. For a developer in Brazil or Chile, where margins are thinner and financing is harder to secure, that overhead can be the difference between a profitable portfolio and a cautionary tale. Planno’s pitch is simple: cut the prospecting time, cut the acquisition cost, and suddenly the whole project becomes bankable. The company’s analysis in Portugal identified 79,000 commercial and industrial rooftops with a combined generation potential of 15.4 gigawatts — a number that should make any investor in South America sit up and take notice.

That proof of concept has attracted serious European attention. Planno recently partnered with Spark Wave Energy, a firm linked to Octopus Energy Generation, one of the UK’s most aggressive clean-energy investors. For a Brazilian startup, this is more than a stamp of approval — it is a signal that global capital is willing to bet on Latin American tech that solves a universal problem. Planno is already active in Saudi Arabia, South Africa, the United States and the European Union, but its Brazilian roots matter deeply in a region where local founders often struggle to scale beyond their home market. The company’s roadmap includes integrating with CRM systems and engineering tools that developers already use, which suggests a long-term ambition to become the operating system for solar prospecting, not just a point solution.

For South America, the implications are double-edged. On one hand, the region’s solar potential is immense, and tools like Planno could unlock distributed generation at a scale that was previously impractical. On the other, the startup’s expansion into markets like Saudi Arabia and South Africa shows that the technology is not bound by geography — if Brazilian developers do not adopt it quickly, their competitors in Portugal or Texas will. The real story here is not about panels or pixels; it is about who gets to capture the value of the sun first. Planno’s bet is that speed and precision will win, and that the days of manual rooftop hunting are numbered. For anyone tracking capital flows in South America, this is a name worth watching — because the next big solar deal might just be decided by an algorithm before a human ever sets foot on the roof.