Octopus Energy & Its 'Kraken' Spinoff: What It Is and Why You Probably Don't Need to Care
So, Octopus Energy is spinning off its "secret sauce," the tech platform they call Kraken.
The official line is a real gem of corporate-speak. They're doing it to "minimize conflicts of interest." Give me a break. You don't just casually decide to carve out the heart of your company and send it off into the wild because you're suddenly concerned about appearances. You do it for money.
Lots and lots of money.
The Wall Street Journal is whispering about a potential IPO for this new, seperate Kraken entity. The valuation? A cool $15 billion. Fifteen. Billion. Dollars. That's not a number you stumble into by accident. That's a number you plan for, you scheme for, you build a whole narrative for.
And the "conflict of interest" line is the narrative. It’s the clean, respectable story you tell the public while the investment bankers are popping champagne in the back room. The real story, the one they don't want you thinking about, is so much more cynical.
You're Not a Customer, You're the Demo
The Demo Client
Let's rewind. If you're wondering what is Octopus Energy, you've been told it's a disruptive energy provider. A plucky British upstart that took on the legacy giants like British Gas and won, now powering millions of homes from the Octopus Energy UK to Octopus Energy Houston. They have these slick customer-friendly plans, like "Agile" tariffs where you get paid to use electricity, or "Zero Bills" for a decade. They look like the good guys.
But that was never the whole truth.
The Octopus Energy CEO, Greg Jackson, admitted it himself. He said, "We created Octopus as the ‘demo client’". Read that again. The entire energy company, with its 7.7 million UK households, was a demonstration. A proof of concept. It was the showroom model for the real product: Kraken.
This whole time, we thought we were customers of an energy company. Turns out, we were just beta testers for a piece of software they wanted to sell to other utilities. The relationship between Kraken Octopus Energy wasn't a company and its tool; it was a product and its marketing budget.
This is a bad move. No, 'bad' doesn't cover it—this is a fundamentally dishonest way to build a company. They built a brand on being the people's champion, the consumer-friendly alternative, all while the endgame was to cash out on the tech and sell it to the very dinosaurs they claimed to be disrupting.
It's genius, in a completely soulless way.
The Big Reveal: You Weren't a Customer, You Were a Case Study
Just Like My Phone Company
This whole thing reminds me of my old internet provider. They started out small, promising better service, no data caps, real human support. For a few years, it was great. Then they got bought by one of the big guys, and overnight, everything changed. The prices crept up, the support vanished, and suddenly I was just another account number in a database. It ain't about the customer anymore once the real money shows up.
The "creative" stuff Octopus did—the smart tariffs, the Octopus Energy solar buyback programs, all of it—wasn't just about being a better energy company. It was about stress-testing Kraken. It was a live-fire exercise to prove their AI-powered platform could handle the most complex billing and grid-management scenarios imaginable.
Every "perk" was a feature demonstration. Every satisfied customer was a data point in a pitch deck.
And now that Kraken has $500 million in committed annual revenue from other companies, the demo is over. The showroom is closing. The Octopus Energy company we thought we knew is now just the first and biggest client of a future tech giant. They've proven the concept, and honestly...
So what happens now to the millions of people who signed up for the revolution? Are they still the priority? Or are they now the legacy clients of a company whose main focus is a multi-billion-dollar software IPO? When you call the Octopus Energy contact number, are you talking to a company that cares about your power, or one that's just trying to keep the lights on in its own demo house?
Then again, maybe I'm the crazy one here. They built a massive, successful business. Maybe this is just what success looks like in 2024. You build something people love, then you sell the machine that built it for a fortune. Maybe I’m just naive.
But I doubt it.
So Much For Being Different
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