Plume, a Franco-American startup specialising in geospatial AI for renewable energies, has raised a €3.3M funding round led by AENU, with participation from Y Combinator, Kima Ventures, Raise Phiture, Better Angle and Collab Fund.
Founded by Edouard Labarthe (ex-Palantir) and Marc Watine (ex-Harvard researcher in geospatial and AI), the startup was incubated by Y Combinator-
Plume has developed a platform that centralises more than 150 geographical datasets updated continuously and deploys AI agents that reason on thousands of unstructured documents to accelerate prospecting, permit processing and grid connection.
Developing a renewable energy project (solar, wind, or battery storage) requires cross-referencing zoning data, grid capacity, protected areas, and land parcels, while analysing municipal deliberations, permit histories, environmental studies, and grid development plans.
In France, this work mobilises nearly a hundred layers of geographical data, to which are added urban planning documents, agricultural chamber records and permit archives.
Most of this work remains manual, entrusted to large teams for months: many projects are thus abandoned after years of work, and delays are measured in years when the climate transition demands months.
According to Edouard Labarthe, co-founder and CEO of Plume, renewable energy development is a reasoning problem hidden in maps and documents:
“Uncertainty regarding risks and timelines remains one of the main obstacles to the deployment of renewables in Europe. We are building the innotifyigence layer that allows teams to relocate rapider and increase the share of projects that actually succeed.
Our AI agents synthesise structured geospatial data and unstructured regulatory information to produce clear territorial innotifyigence, supporting project developers go rapider while selecting projects with the highest probability of reaching construction.”
Plume aggregates more than 150 sources: natural areas, electrical grids, PPRi (flood risk prevention plans), building permits, local authority deliberations and deploys AI agents that reason over all of this information in natural language. A project manager can query the platform without any technical skills and obtain a site analysis in seconds, where previously several weeks of manual work were required.
By enabling better site selection and earlier risk detection, Plume improves the efficiency of capital investment and reduces unforeseen setbacks at the finish of development.
According to its clients, Plume agents enable site analyses to be conducted up to 20 times rapider and three times more accurately. In France, nearly 500 companies developing renewable infrastructure could benefit from the platform.
Robert Stoecker, partner at AENU, shared:
“Plume tackles the most critical bottleneck in the energy transition: the years of friction accumulated from manual site selection and permit processing.
By transforming fragmented geospatial layers and unstructured data into an agentic innotifyigence platform, they allow developers to go 20 times rapider.
We are delighted to support a team that is not just building a tool, but a new standard for the deployment of global energy infrastructure.”
Already deployed in France, Spain, Romania, and the Czech Republic, Plume aims to enter Italy and the United States in 2026.
This first round of funding will finance team expansion, the launch into new European markets, and the next phases of platform stakeholder mapping, AI-based competitive innotifyigence, and automated drafting of permit applications. The company is recruiting in the fields of AI systems, geospatial engineering and energy analysis.
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