UK renewable energy provider Octopus Energy said this week that utility technology platform Kraken is spurring $500 million with dedicated annual revenue from other utilities and energy providers.
The Kraken IPO will ultimately be valued at $15 billion and could occur within a year, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Kraken was actually the company’s first product, according to Octopus CEO Greg Jackson. “We created the octopus as a ‘demo client’,” he told the Journal earlier this year. The demonstration client has since grown to power 7.7 million households in the UK and another 2.8 million other places.
The spinoff will help Kleiken handle non-octopus utilities and power providers, which are therefore not octopus, helping to minimize conflicts of interest, the company said. Octopus originally ran a spinoff last year.
Founded in 2015, Octopus became the UK’s largest energy provider, overtaking UK gas, which was founded more than 200 years ago.
Part of that growth comes from creative marketing and strategies to acquire customers.
One called zero invoice allowed homeowners to eliminate energy invoices for 10 years if they purchased a fully electrified property. Another, tariffs it calls agile encourage customers to shift their use of electricity to the times when there is surplus in the grid. In some cases, consumers can perform large amounts of laundry for free.
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As Octopus collected data from these projects, we used the AI model built into Kraken to sift through it to determine how an increase in the amount of renewable energy would work on the grid.
For utilities and power providers, Kraken can call power sources when needed, such as EV chargers, smart thermostats, household batteries, renewable energy, solar, so-called distributed energy resources. We also built a customer management system that covers everything from billing, meter management, customer relationships, and more.
