Energy / Retail energy + utility SaaS (Kraken) · Deep dive

Octopus Energy Group

London-based retail energy + Kraken utility software + Octopus EV + Octopus Energy Generation renewable-fund manager — took UK #1 from British Gas in January 2025 with 7.3M households, but the real business is Kraken, the utilities SaaS licensed onto EDF, E.ON, Origin Energy, Tokyo Gas and Tenaska covering 75M contracted accounts, being spun out at $8.65B in December 2025 ahead of a potential $15B IPO; the falsifiable question is whether Kraken compounds SaaS-style faster than UK retail margin commoditises under OFGEM's ~2% price-cap allowance and native-tech competitor parity.

emerging

The question that decides it: Does Kraken Technologies compound as a SaaS platform reaching 150M-plus contracted energy accounts under license within 24 months of its mid-2026 spin-out — off a $500M-plus contracted ARR base growing 4x every three years — before UK retail margins commoditise under OFGEM's ~2% price-cap allowance and native-tech competitor parity from a consolidated E.ON/OVO, a re-platformed EDF Next and Centrica's own stack; and can Kraken monetise each seat at £5-15 per meter per year (the price point the £380M/75M-account math implies) durably enough that the group + Kraken combined $17.65B implied mark holds, or does the valuation increasingly rest on retail-energy P&L that OFGEM controls and that produced only £136M of FY24 EBITDA on £12.4B of revenue? Answer conditions: (a) Kraken contracted accounts pass 100M by end-2026 with at least one new licensee among the top 20 global utilities outside the current EDF/E.ON/Origin/Tokyo Gas/Tenaska set — a re-platforming that costs a competitor $50M-plus signals real switching moat; (b) Kraken ARR crosses $1B by end-2027 with net revenue retention above 120% — SaaS-comp durability, not just logo count; (c) an eventual Kraken IPO prices at or above the $8.65B December 2025 mark and holds it through the first four quarters of public trading; (d) UK retail Trustpilot lead over British Gas / E.ON Next / EDF holds even after competitors migrate onto Kraken themselves — the operational culture, not the software, has to be the moat; (e) group EBITDA margin rises above 2% before the next OFGEM price-cap review widens supplier allowances. Fail two of the five and the group is a highly-successful UK retail supplier stapled to a good but not extraordinary SaaS platform, at a mark that has to work harder for the next round.

My take ★★ Very interesting ★ Interesting − Maybe ✗ Not interesting

Snapshot

Octopus Energy Group is the London-headquartered retail supplier + utility software platform + EV leasing operator + renewables fund manager that in January 2025 overtook British Gas as the UK’s largest household energy supplier and in December 2025 announced a $1B standalone funding round for its Kraken Technologies subsidiary at an $8.65B valuation, paving the way for a mid-2026 spin-out and a Wall Street Journal-reported IPO scenario as high as $15B. The group was founded in 2015 by Greg Jackson (CEO), Stuart Jackson (CFO, no relation) and James Eddison (CTO, the Kraken architect), incubated inside Octopus Group PLC — the UK asset manager Simon Rogerson founded in 2000. It serves over 10M retail customers across the UK, US, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Japan and New Zealand as of late 2025; Kraken is contracted to run 75M customer accounts globally through licences to EDF Energy, E.ON, Origin Energy Australia, Tokyo Gas and Tenaska Power Services. Group revenue was £12.4B for FY24 (year-end April 30, 2024) on £136M EBITDA — a 0.7% margin that quantifies the price-cap squeeze on UK retail. The group is now marked at $9B (May 2024, Generation Investment Management + CPP Investments top-up); the combined group + Kraken implied enterprise value is closer to $17.65B in September 2026. The valuation-defining question is which of the four businesses actually justifies the mark.

Founding story

Greg Jackson is not the archetypal energy-industry insider. Before Octopus he founded ManyMoves (a peer-to-peer removals platform) and Zap Corporation, and had earlier roles at Cadbury Schweppes and Procter & Gamble — a consumer-goods and startup CV rather than a utility one. In 2014 he took a pitch to Octopus Group PLC, the London asset manager Simon Rogerson had founded in 2000. Octopus Group was already an unusual construct: a UK asset manager running venture capital, EIS funds, healthcare and real-estate strategies with a house style that mixed brand marketing and consumer product design more aggressively than the London incumbents. Jackson’s argument was that the UK Big Six retailers were operationally sclerotic — legacy billing systems, punitive customer service, opaque pricing — and that a technology-first supplier could take share. Octopus Group provided seed capital, brand, FCA-regulated infrastructure and its distinctive tentacle mark. The company was incorporated 14 October 2014 as Mercury Energy Supply Limited, renamed Octopus Energy in August 2015 and began supplying customers in December 2015.

Stuart Jackson (no relation) joined as CFO from OBI Strategy and Barclaycard; he ran finance, procurement, market-risk management, customer acquisition and data science — an unusually broad remit that put wholesale hedging, retail acquisition and analytics in one seat. James Eddison joined as CTO from Tangent plc, where he had built platforms for the UK Labour Party, Citroën and Hermes; Eddison conceived Kraken, the group’s proprietary utility operating platform, as the substrate under Octopus retail. That single architectural decision — build our own operating platform to industrial spec rather than buy SAP IS-U or Oracle CC&B — is the reason the group is now trying to spin out an $8.65B SaaS company in 2026.

The corporate structure is important. Octopus Energy is majority-owned by Octopus Group and management; outside investors (Origin, Generation, CPP, Tokyo Gas, Aviva, Trafigura) are strategic and financial minorities on the cap table. This is not the Ovo Energy model of one founder and a few external rounds; it is the Kraken-first, Octopus Group-anchored model of a British asset manager underwriting a decade-long consumer and software play.

How it works

Physically, Octopus does the same thing every UK supplier does: it hedges wholesale gas and electricity on the forward markets, buys spot on the day-ahead and balancing markets, and delivers the resulting energy to metered points across a customer base under supply licence conditions Ofgem regulates. What is different is the operating stack. Kraken is a cloud-native, event-driven platform that ingests half-hourly smart-meter data at scale, runs billing and CRM off the same event stream, and pushes automated actions (agent routing, tariff switching, discretionary compensation) off the same event bus. That single-system architecture is why Octopus consistently posts higher Trustpilot scores and lower complaint volumes than incumbents whose CIS was written in the 1990s and bolted to a CRM in the 2010s.

The Kraken customer-facing product is a set of dynamic tariffs. Agile Octopus publishes half-hourly prices for the next 24 hours at 4pm each day, tracking wholesale prices plus a peak uplift 4-7pm; customers with smart appliances or battery storage optimise their consumption against those prices. Cosy Octopus offers three off-peak windows (4-7am, 1-4pm, 10pm-midnight) at roughly half the flexible rate for households with heat pumps. Intelligent Octopus Go gives EV owners a six-hour off-peak block 23:30-05:30 at deeply discounted rates. Flexible Octopus is the standard price-cap-tracking tariff. The tariff design is not just marketing: it monetises the grid-balancing value of shiftable demand, which is exactly the capability Kraken sells to licensees whose legacy stack cannot support it.

On the licensee side, the physical unit is the metered account. Kraken charges its utility customers on a per-account per-year basis (undisclosed exactly but implied by the £380M / 75M account math at roughly £5-15 per meter per year, materially cheaper than SAP IS-U). The utility keeps its own supply licence, hedge book and brand; Kraken replaces the CIS/CRM/billing stack. Origin Energy is the flagship reference in Australia; EDF is migrating 5M UK customers; E.ON has moved 10M including former Npower; Tokyo Gas manages 3M Japanese homes on Kraken; Tenaska Power Services was the first US licensing deal.

Octopus Energy Generation is the fund-management arm — 12 renewable-generation funds under management totalling £5.8B AUM as of the CG Octopus Energy Sustainable Growth Fund I launch in May 2025, with £7B of green-energy projects under active management and a stated ambition of £20B by 2030. Octopus Electric Vehicles operates the UK’s largest EV salary-sacrifice scheme, packaging the car, insurance, servicing, maintenance and Electroverse public-charging credit into a single gross-salary deduction that saves employees up to 40% versus a retail lease.

Product and business overview

Four surfaces. Retail energy — the UK domestic and non-domestic supply business (10M+ accounts across 7.3M UK households as of January 2025 per Uswitch), plus growing operations in the US (Texas ERCOT, ~16,000 accounts end-2024), Germany (Shell Household Energy acquisition September 2023), France (~600,000 customers, #5 supplier, largest independent), Italy (~500,000, tripled in a year), Spain (~400,000), Japan and New Zealand. Kraken Technologies — the licensed utility SaaS platform, £380M contracted ARR November 2025, 75M contracted accounts, five external anchor licensees. Octopus Electric Vehicles — salary-sacrifice EV leasing, HSBC UK partnership for business customers, second-hand scheme launched 2024. Octopus Energy Generation — renewable-fund manager with 12 funds and £5.8B AUM, including the LSE-listed Octopus Renewables Infrastructure Trust.

The reason to separate them: three of the four are pure software or capital-light services with SaaS-like or fund-management economics; the fourth (UK retail) is a regulated commodity supplier with ~2% net-margin allowance under the OFGEM price cap. The valuation-defining question is what percentage of the $9B group mark rests on the software and fund-management legs versus the retail leg. The Kraken spin-out at $8.65B was announced precisely to force that question — publicly separating the software from the retail cash flows.

Business model and pricing

UK retail is priced quarterly against the OFGEM default tariff cap; typical supplier margin allowance sits at 1.5-2% of total supply costs, which is what generated £136M of EBITDA on £12.4B of FY24 revenue (0.7% blended, per Octopus’s own FY24 disclosure). Time-of-use tariffs (Agile, Cosy, Intelligent) generate margin from the wholesale-market arbitrage between shifted consumption and the price cap, plus grid balancing revenue from demand aggregation.

Kraken licenses at what appears to be a per-account per-year fee — company disclosures suggest £5-15 per meter per year, though this is not itemised in press releases. £380M ARR / 75M contracted accounts implies roughly £5 blended, materially cheaper per seat than SAP IS-U or Oracle CC&B, which typically cost multi-million-pound perpetual licences plus 20% annual maintenance for a comparable deployment. The SaaS gross margin should sit in the 65-80% range typical of enterprise software; Yahoo Finance and Axios coverage indicates Octopus disclosed Kraken revenue growing 4x in three years to over $500M.

Octopus Electric Vehicles takes a spread on the lease + a service margin on charging, insurance and maintenance. Octopus Energy Generation earns management and performance fees on AUM at institutional rates (typically 0.75-1.5% base + carry). Both are capital-light relative to retail supply.

Traction over time

Market analysis

The UK domestic retail market is roughly 28M metered households billing ~£40B annually at current price-cap levels — a large, low-growth, heavily-regulated pool with 1.5-2% supplier net margin. Structural forces: OFGEM’s quarterly price-cap regime keeps supplier margin thin regardless of wholesale volatility; the smart-meter rollout (targeted 100% by end-2025 but running behind) is the enabler for dynamic tariffs; the heat-pump transition (UK target 600,000 installations per year by 2028) shifts demand toward time-of-use products where Octopus is already the leader. The retail moat here is thin — a service-quality moat that competitors can close by re-platforming, which is exactly what E.ON, EDF and (via Origin) Australian utilities have done onto Kraken.

The global utility-software market is a different animal. There are roughly 3B billed energy meters globally; Gartner and independent analysts price the utility CIS/CRM/billing software market at $10-15B annually depending on scope. SAP IS-U, Oracle Utilities CC&B, Salesforce Energy & Utilities Cloud and Amdocs share the incumbent stack. Kraken’s pitch is that dynamic tariffs, DER integration and smart-meter data require an event-driven cloud architecture the incumbents cannot retrofit — a genuine architectural gap opened by the smart-meter and grid-decarbonisation transition. Kraken’s 75M contracted accounts represent 2.5% of the global meter base; the bull case sees this at 500M within a decade.

Octopus Energy Generation operates in a European renewables-fund AUM pool that has expanded from roughly £180B in 2018 to over £400B in 2025 per InfraRed and Preqin data, driven by pension and insurance-capital demand for long-duration index-linked cashflows. The £5.8B AUM makes Octopus a mid-scale specialist among Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners, Glennmont and Foresight peers.

Competitive intel

UK retail (retail-margin fight): British Gas / Centrica is the incumbent Octopus overtook; ~£8B market cap in September 2026 with a gas-trading, Rough storage and services business that Octopus cannot match. Trapped by legacy CIS systems and consistently outscored on customer service. E.ON Next, having acquired OVO’s retail arm in the 2026 transaction, is the ~25%-share second — importantly, itself a Kraken licensee, which makes the retail competition and the software licensing a single tangled relationship. EDF Energy UK is the fifth-largest at ~10% share, migrating 5M customers onto Kraken. ScottishPower is at 8% share.

Global utility software (Kraken’s fight): SAP IS-U and Oracle Utilities CC&B are the entrenched CIS incumbents on multi-decade enterprise contracts; Salesforce Energy & Utilities Cloud is the modern-CRM overlay layered onto them; Amdocs is the telco-to-utility crossover. Kraken’s competitive edge is architectural — event-driven, half-hourly-data-native, cloud-first — and its go-to-market advantage is that Octopus itself is the reference customer. The vulnerability is that Kraken has to win against a $2M-$50M enterprise-licence sale motion that SAP and Oracle have refined over 30 years. Amdocs’s telco-to-utility crossover is the most direct architectural analogue.

US retail: TXU, Constellation, Rhythm Energy, Reliant own ERCOT at scale that dwarfs Octopus’s ~16,000 Texas accounts end-2024. Arcadia and David Energy are the emerging demand-management SaaS challengers; the Octopus play in the US is Kraken licensing (Tenaska Power Services was the anchor), not retail growth.

European retail: Octopus is now the largest independent alternative supplier in France (~600K customers, #5 overall), tripled in Italy in a year (~500K), grew in Spain (~400K) with National Commission recognition, and entered Germany via the September 2023 Shell Household Energy acquisition. Incumbents there — EDF, Engie, Enel, Iberdrola, E.ON, RWE — are all several orders of magnitude larger by retail account count; Octopus’s angle is service quality, Kraken-powered tariff design and the same operating discipline that won the UK. Whether that generalises across regulatory regimes with different price-cap and hedging conventions is unresolved.

History and evolution

Six dated inflection points. First, the 2015 launch inside Octopus Group PLC. The corporate-anchor structure is unusual — most UK challenger brands are single-founder venture-backed — and it is what gave the group financial resilience through the 2021-2022 wholesale crisis when 30-plus UK suppliers went insolvent.

Second, the May 2020 Origin Energy transaction. This was framed as a retail-partnership deal but was really the seed of Kraken-as-external-SaaS: Origin took 20% of the group and Kraken deployment rights in Australia. Every Kraken licensing deal since then follows that template.

Third, the 2021 mega-rounds. Generation Investment Management ($600M in September) and CPP Investments ($300M in December) took the group from ~$2B to ~$5B in three months. Al Gore’s endorsement was as much a brand as a financial event.

Fourth, the November 2022 Bulb transfer. Bulb entered special administration in November 2021, costing UK taxpayers £3B in 12 months per the National Audit Office. The government-brokered sale to Octopus (~1.5M customers, approved by BEIS on 7 November 2022, completed 21 December 2022) was legally challenged by British Gas, E.ON and ScottishPower — challenges dismissed by the High Court in 2023. The Bulb transfer is the single largest reason Octopus overtook British Gas 26 months later, and the political sensitivity around it is a permanent feature of the group’s UK regulatory environment.

Fifth, the September 2023 Shell Household Energy acquisition in Germany, which established a foothold in Europe’s biggest single retail market alongside the France, Italy, Spain and Netherlands expansions.

Sixth, the December 30, 2025 Kraken standalone round at $8.65B. This is the move that transforms Octopus from a well-funded UK challenger brand into two things: a UK retail supplier at OFGEM margins, and a global utility-software company on a SaaS trajectory. The mid-2026 spin-out and the WSJ-reported $15B IPO scenario are the tests of whether the second thing is what investors are actually buying.

What people say

The case for. Trustpilot consistently shows Octopus at 4.6-4.9 across the UK, France (4.8), Italy (4.9) and Spain reviews; October 2025 Which? consumer survey ranked Octopus at or near the top for customer service among UK domestic suppliers, above every Big Six competitor. Glassdoor: 4.4 out of 5 across 2,289 UK employee reviews, 87% recommend to a friend, 4.5 for culture, 4.3 for work-life balance — among the highest-rated large private employers in the UK Energy, Mining & Utilities sector. Financial and industry press (CNBC 2024 Disruptor 50, Financial Times, Bloomberg, The Times) consistently frames Greg Jackson as the UK’s most successful cleantech founder of the last decade. On the Kraken side, RFP.wiki ranks Kraken as the highest-scoring alternative to SAP IS-U in the 2026 comparison; industry analysts describe SAP and Oracle as 20-year architectures Kraken has genuinely outrun on the event-driven and DER-integration axes. Origin Energy Australia (ASX: ORG) has publicly credited its 20% Octopus stake with material cost savings and account-quality improvements in its Australian retail business.

The complaints. The UK retail business is a 0.7% EBITDA-margin operation on £12.4B of revenue per Octopus’s own FY24 disclosure — the OFGEM price cap is a permanent structural ceiling. Consumer press has documented recurring specific complaints: billing errors after Bulb migration, threatening collection calls to paid-up accounts, confusing tariff switching between smart products and the standard variable, and unclear complaints handling on subsets of the base. Citizens Advice quarterly rankings have placed Octopus in mid-tier positions rather than always at the top. Politically, the Bulb transfer generated ongoing UK press criticism that Octopus received a public subsidy competitors were denied — a narrative that resurfaces whenever the group announces a valuation uplift. The 2021-2022 wholesale gas crisis exposed thin hedging books at multiple UK challengers; Octopus survived because Octopus Group PLC’s balance sheet backstopped it, which is not a moat that generalises to Kraken licensees in other jurisdictions. The Kraken commercial disclosure is thin — £380M ARR and 75M contracted accounts is a headline; net revenue retention, gross margin, contract length and price-per-seat are not published, and the $8.65B December 2025 valuation on that ARR implies a ~23x forward multiple that requires either accelerating growth or expanding margin to justify against SaaS comps trading at 8-15x in September 2026.

Outlook: the open question

Whether the Kraken spin-out compounds to a $15B-plus IPO on genuine SaaS multiples — vindicating the group + Kraken $17.65B implied mark — or whether the valuation collapses back toward a UK retail P&L that OFGEM controls, is a question with five specific answer-conditions that will resolve by end-2027. The group has real assets. Octopus is #1 in UK retail with 25% household share (September 2025 Uswitch) after overtaking British Gas in January 2025; the corporate anchor at Octopus Group PLC gave it hedge-book resilience through the 2021-2022 crisis that killed 30-plus UK challengers; the international footprint (US, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Japan, New Zealand) is unmatched among UK-origin retailers; Kraken licensing has crossed 75M contracted accounts including EDF, E.ON, Origin, Tokyo Gas and Tenaska; Octopus Energy Generation runs £5.8B of renewables AUM with a £20B-by-2030 stated ambition; the group is profitable on an EBITDA basis at the 0.7% cap-limited margin.

The failure modes are equally specific. First, the UK retail moat is service quality — a moat competitors close by migrating to the same Kraken software Octopus sells them. If E.ON Next, EDF and (eventually) Centrica all run on Kraken with modern CRM and dynamic tariffs, the service-quality advantage compresses toward zero and Octopus’s 25% share becomes contestable on price and brand alone under the OFGEM cap. Second, the Kraken SaaS pricing is currently thin per seat — the £380M / 75M account math is ~£5 per meter per year. Legacy incumbents will not price-cut on a $10M SAP IS-U licence to defend; they will bundle. If SAP or Oracle bundle a modernised utility stack into their existing ERP relationships with the top-100 global utilities, Kraken’s growth curve softens. Third, the $8.65B December 2025 Kraken mark implies ~23x forward ARR; SaaS comps traded at 8-15x through 2026, meaning the entry price for D1, Fidelity, Durable and Ontario Teachers’ anticipates either an IPO premium or continued 4x-in-three-years growth. Neither is guaranteed. Fourth, the political overhang of the Bulb transfer means every valuation uplift and every future OFGEM decision runs through a public-fairness screen the incumbents do not face. Fifth, Origin Energy holds ~23% of the group and any decision by Origin to monetise (public listing, secondary sale, share swap) would reset the reference price of the private mark.

Answer conditions: Kraken contracted accounts pass 100M by end-2026 with at least one new top-20-global-utility licensee; Kraken ARR crosses $1B by end-2027 with net revenue retention above 120%; the Kraken IPO prices at or above $8.65B and holds through four public quarters; UK retail service-quality lead holds even after Kraken becomes the competitor stack; group EBITDA margin rises above 2% before the next material OFGEM cap reform. Fail two of the five and the story is a highly successful UK retail supplier stapled to a good but not extraordinary SaaS asset — real, but a mark the market has to work harder to hold. Bull case: Kraken becomes the Salesforce of utilities, the group is worth $30B by 2028. Bear case: OFGEM tightens the cap, retail EBITDA compresses further, Kraken IPO prices at 12x ARR ($6-8B) and the group mark drifts back toward the December 2023 $7.83B print.

How to attack it

Build a Kraken alternative for the specific vertical and regional slices Kraken has not yet won. Kraken’s genuine architectural advantage — event-driven, half-hourly-native, DER-aware — is real, but Kraken is optimised for large-scale incumbent retail utilities (5M-plus account books) with heavy migration cost. A well-funded attacker builds for the segments Kraken cannot economically serve: community-choice aggregators in California and New York (5-500K accounts, DER-heavy, community-owned governance); municipal utilities in the US Midwest and Southeast; DER-first retailers in Australia post-Origin; heat-network operators in the UK and Nordics under the coming Heat Network Zones regulation; virtual power plant aggregators. Ship a modern-stack CIS/CRM/billing platform with native VPP orchestration, per-account pricing at ~£3 per meter per year (undercut Kraken by 40%), open-API integration and a 90-day deployment SLA. The specific wedge: DER-native architecture where Kraken is retrofitting; multi-tenant SaaS where Kraken is per-utility deployed; community-choice pricing where Kraken’s enterprise-sales motion is over-serving.

The exploitable weaknesses in Octopus’s current position: (a) UK retail EBITDA margin is 0.7% at FY24 disclosure — the cap-regulated business cannot cross-subsidise a price war with a well-funded challenger who targets specific dynamic-tariff-inclined segments; (b) the Bulb transfer’s political overhang means Octopus is uniquely constrained on aggressive competitive tactics that a new entrant is not; (c) Kraken’s five anchor licensees (EDF, E.ON, Origin, Tokyo Gas, Tenaska) are strategic conflicts — E.ON is both largest UK competitor and largest Kraken licensee, a governance tension that any new licensee will note; (d) Kraken’s £380M ARR against a $8.65B December 2025 mark leaves little room for growth-rate deceleration before the SaaS multiple compresses; (e) Octopus’s brand advantage is service quality, which is exactly the axis competitors migrating onto Kraken can close; (f) US Texas retail has only ~16,000 accounts end-2024 — a challenger who targets Texas hard with a modern time-of-use product and modern CRM can define the US retail brand before Octopus scales there; (g) the Octopus Group PLC corporate-anchor structure means the group has less venture flexibility on capital allocation than a pure private company; (h) the international expansion into Germany, France, Italy and Spain is at hundreds of thousands of accounts each — real but small — and incumbents at 10-50x scale in each geography have not yet begun to compete aggressively.

Adjacent-segment play

Kraken for adjacent regulated-utility verticals and for consumer VPP orchestration, sold to two different buyers. The same event-driven, half-hourly-data-native architecture that Kraken uses for electricity and gas transposes directly to water utilities (metered per-property consumption, dynamic leak-detection and demand management), broadband (per-subscriber usage billing, dynamic bandwidth pricing under net-neutrality-lite regimes; Kraken has already piloted this with a UK broadband client per TelcoTitans coverage), district heat networks (metered thermal energy under the UK’s forthcoming Heat Network Zones regulation), and EV charging networks (real-time pricing, demand response). Each is a $5-20B addressable software market with legacy incumbents (SAP, Oracle, sector-specific CIS players like Gentrack in water) whose architecture is a generation behind. The adjacent bet Kraken has already partly hedged is broadband; the untaken adjacent bet is water, where legacy CIS is 25 years old and the smart-water-meter rollout is beginning across the UK, US Sunbelt and Australia.

The second adjacency is the consumer VPP orchestration play — sold to residential solar-plus-storage installers, EV charge-point operators and heat-pump OEMs as a white-label demand-flexibility platform. Octopus’s own dynamic tariffs (Agile, Cosy, Intelligent) monetise this natively for their retail customers; the platform underneath could be sold to Sunrun, Tesla Energy, Wallbox, Daikin, Mitsubishi Heavy Industries and other DER OEMs as a residential-side aggregation layer that Kraken licenses today only through utility deployments. If successfully productised, this is a per-device SaaS with high gross margin and a completely different buyer set than the utility CIS business. AutoGrid (acquired by Schneider Electric in 2022) and Enel X are the closest analogues; neither has Kraken’s smart-meter data experience or its Octopus-retail proof point.

Sources and further reading

• Octopus Energy to spinoff AI unit Kraken at $8.65 billion valuation — CNBC, December 30, 2025
• Octopus Energy Group to spin out Kraken at valuation of $8.65bn — Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan, December 30, 2025
• Octopus Energy’s valuation increases to $9bn following further commitments from existing investors — Octopus Energy press release, May 2024
• Octopus Energy Valuation Increases 15 Per Cent — Origin Energy investor communications, May 2024
• Octopus Energy Group results for FY24 - delivered 0.7% profit margin, tripled non-UK customer base, and increased net assets to £1.7bn — Octopus Energy FY24 results, 2024
• EDF strikes deal to move its 5 million customers onto Octopus Energy Group’s Kraken platform — EDF Energy media centre, 2024
• Konnichiwa Kraken! Tech platform licensed by Tokyo Gas to manage 3 million Japanese homes — Octopus Energy press release
• Octopus Energy Inks $300M Partnership with Canadian Pension Plan Investment Board — BusinessWire, December 14, 2021
• Octopus Energy Group and CPP Investments announce strategic partnership — CPP Investments, December 2021
• Octopus overtakes British Gas as Britain’s biggest energy company — Yahoo Finance / The Telegraph, January 2025
• UK government approves agreement between Bulb and Octopus Energy providing certainty to 1.5 million customers — UK Government press release, November 2022
• Octopus Energy powers past 10 million customers globally — Octopus Energy press release
• Big six energy suppliers in the UK — Uswitch, September 2025 market share data
• How Kraken is trying to rival Oracle, SAP in AI utilities tech — Yahoo Finance, 2025
• Octopus Energy - Wikipedia — Wikipedia
• Kraken Technologies - Wikipedia — Wikipedia
• Octopus Energy Reviews on Glassdoor — Glassdoor