For me, the most important business story of September out of the UK was the news of Kraken being spun out of Octopus Energy to become an independent company — valued at $10 billion.

In an earlier post I made on Twitter, I expressed how impressed I am with the success of the company. It’s a peerless story and one that makes for a great study: how a radical focus on customer satisfaction, enabled by technological innovation, can create tremendous shareholder value — even in a sector as old as energy.

The Financial Times reported: Octopus Energy is spinning off its software arm after several years of rapid growth, in a move it said would allow Kraken to speed up expansion across the world and achieve its target of serving 1bn people in the next decade.

The FT, quoting Greg Jackson, noted how he described the initial target of Kraken serving 100m accounts as now “embarrassingly low” and said: “It looks like it’ll beat that and can now aim to serve a billion people over the next decade.”

To achieve this billion-people goal, Kraken is becoming an independent company. It deserves it, as I noted in an earlier post.

Why do I think it’s the most important business story of September?

  1. Kraken was developed internally to help Octopus deliver a peerless customer experience. On the strength of Kraken, in less than a decade, Octopus has become the no. 1 energy provider in the UK, overtaking British Gas.
  2. Kraken has fundamentally changed how energy is priced, supplied, and sold — so effectively that even Octopus’s competitors are now implementing the technology.
  3. Creating a $10 billion valuation in the UK energy sector for such a young company is unprecedented.
  4. It accelerates the energy transition. Kraken is not just software — it’s infrastructure for integrating renewables, electric vehicles, and smart grids. Its scale-up could speed up decarbonisation in multiple countries.
  5. It highlights a new model of value creation in utilities. Historically, energy companies competed on price or supply scale. Kraken demonstrates how data, software, and innovation can be the true differentiators in a centuries-old industry.

Hopefully, my excitement is obvious in the post. 😊

My note on Octopus and Kraken – on Twitter