Octopus Energy Group is moving into the final pre-listing stages of separating Kraken Technologies, its energy-platform software arm, from its retail supply business — a structural shift that City advisers say could in time deliver one of London’s most consequential tech IPOs in a decade.
Speaking at Innovation Zero in London earlier this month, Greg Jackson, founder and chief executive of Octopus Energy Group, again pointed to Kraken’s path towards 100 million licensed customer accounts by 2027 and described separation of the platform from the wider group as a “when, not if” decision. That guidance, alongside fresh licensing wins on three continents, has revived chatter among bankers in Mayfair and Canary Wharf about a possible 2027 or 2028 listing — and where it should sit.
Octopus has consistently maintained that London is the natural home for any IPO. After Arm’s blockbuster New York debut in 2023 and the steady drift of fast-growing private UK companies towards US capital markets, the firm faces familiar pressure to pivot. The Treasury’s listings-rules and AIM-reform package, due before year-end, has been described in government briefings as pitched, in part, at exactly this kind of company.
Account count climbs, three new licensees
Kraken’s externally licensed account base has now passed sixty million, according to figures cited in industry trade press following the Innovation Zero session, with new or expanded contracts signed in Korea, Italy and Australia over the last six months. Hanwha’s energy arm, Eni’s Plenitude business and Origin Energy — itself a 20% shareholder in Octopus Energy Group via a A$507m deal struck in 2022 — have each rolled Kraken into additional customer segments since late 2025.
The platform handles customer onboarding, billing, smart-meter data ingestion and tariff optimisation across roughly seventeen markets. In the United Kingdom alone, Kraken sits behind Octopus Energy’s 6.7m retail customers and the bulk of EDF’s residential book, meaning a single software stack now touches the bills of well over a third of British households. That concentration has, predictably, drawn attention from Ofgem, which earlier this year opened an informal review of “shared back-office dependencies” across UK suppliers. Industry sources expect non-binding guidance rather than enforcement when the review concludes this summer.
From in-house tool to listed business
Kraken began as Octopus’s internal billing engine in 2015, when the group could find no vendor able to process UK smart-meter volumes at challenger-bank speeds. Jackson has long argued that Kraken’s economics — high gross margin, multi-year contracted revenue, deep switching costs at energy incumbents — look closer to a SaaS company than a utility supplier. Reports last year placed the wider group’s valuation in the £7bn–£9bn range, with most analysts assigning the bulk of that figure to Kraken rather than supply.
Carve-out work is now well advanced. Octopus has installed separate finance and people leadership for Kraken, established a distinct Holborn headquarters, and indicated that group accounts will, from financial year 2027, present Kraken as a separately reportable segment. CPP Investments, an investor since 2021, is understood to be among the institutions pressing for a clearer path to listing.
London listing — but not yet
A 2026 IPO is not on the table. People close to the company indicate that a float is more likely in late 2027 or 2028, conditional on Kraken hitting the 100-million-account target and producing two clean years of segmental disclosure. The timing puts the listing squarely into the post-AIM-reform era — and into the next general-election window — turning Kraken, almost by accident, into a test case for whether the Treasury’s tech-listings push has any teeth.
For the City, the prize is real. UK-grown software businesses of Kraken’s scale — recurring revenue, defensible moat, founder still at the helm — are vanishingly rare on this side of the Atlantic. Holding on to this one would do more for London’s tech narrative than any number of policy white papers.
Discussion
Sign in to join the discussion.
No comments yet. Be the first to share your thoughts.