2025 was, on balance, a good year for UK business. And I would be right to say It did not always feel that way in real time.

There were the familiar frustrations: taxes rose again, political promises went unmet, and the drought of IPO on the London Stock Exchange continued to prompt uncomfortable questions about Britain’s competitiveness.

Yet beneath the surface noise, the picture was far from bleak. The FTSE 100 delivered a historic 21% return in 2025, closing the year at record highs and crossing the 10,000 mark on the first trading day of 2026. UK companies raised over $8 billion in venture capital, with investment up 3% in the first half of 2025 compared with the second half of 2024 (HSBC). Meanwhile, 426,000 new companies were incorporated in H1 2025 (NatWest), including record AI companies – pointing to a broad-based recovery in entrepreneurial confidence.

So there were the bad and the good.

I began a personal exercise in September: tracking what I considered the most consequential business developments of each month in the UK – the positives. Doing so forced me to read widely, pay attention to stories that never quite broke into headlines, and sit with events long enough to judge whether they represented noise or genuine signal.

By the end of the year, that process made one thing clear. If I had to name a Business and People of the Year, the decision came down to two contenders: Revolut, and the Octopus Energy / Kraken Technologies duo, led by Greg Jackson and Amir Orad.

Revolut

Revolut’s case is straightforward and compelling.

In 2025, it reached a $75 billion valuation ((~ £58 billion) putting it comfortably within FTSE 100 territory — around fifteenth by market capitalisation, ahead of long-established banks such as Barclays (£56b) and Lloyds (£45 billion).

Its net profit surged to $1 billion, up from $428 million two years earlier – 53% CAGR.

Its customer base expanded to 65 million users globally, and product expansion continued apace as Revolut pushed further toward its ambition of becoming a one-stop financial services platform for individuals and businesses alike. Even symbolically, Deutsche Bank’s move into a Revolut-branded Canary Wharf building captured the sense of a generational shift underway.

By almost any conventional metric, Revolut would be a deserving Business of the Year.

Yet my choice ultimately landed elsewhere.

The Octopus & Kraken Year

In January 2025, Octopus Energy overtook British Gas to become the largest household energy supplier in Great Britain.

To put the headline in perspective, this represents the most significant reshaping of the UK retail energy market in decades. A challenger founded in 2015 displacing an incumbent with scale, political leverage, and regulatory familiarity on its side.

At that moment, Octopus ceased to be “disruptive” and became structurally important, embedding itself as a core infrastructure in the modern Britain fabric.

In an industry where growth typically slows once scale is achieved, Octopus demonstrated clear operational maturity. I have used Octopus as my energy provider for the past four years, and the quality of customer service has given me no reason to consider switching — an experience that aligns with its consistently strong customer satisfaction record. While supplier-level switching data is not fully disclosed, it is difficult to explain Octopus overtaking British Gas without sustained net inflows of customers, particularly given that overall population growth alone cannot account for the scale of its market-share gains.

Midway through the year, the company’s innovation agenda shifted visibly from pricing and customer service toward infrastructure. Vehicle-to-grid offerings, smart tariffs and distributed energy integration pushed Octopus into territory that most utilities discuss in theory but struggle to implement in practice. Energy was no longer being treated merely as a commodity, but as a software-orchestrated system connecting households, transport and the grid itself.

Then came the inflection point.

By July 2025, reports emerged that Octopus was preparing to demerge Kraken Technologies, its proprietary software platform, at a valuation running into the high single-digit billions. This reframed the entire enterprise. Octopus was not simply a utility with good internal technology; it was a platform company whose core asset happened to be software, operating at global scale.

Over the summer and into autumn, Kraken’s footprint became impossible to ignore. Tens of millions of customer accounts across Europe, North America and Asia were now running on its systems. These were core utility operations — billing, customer management, grid optimisation – being onboarded on the Kraken platform. Areas where switching costs are high and trust is hard-won – Kraken won it easily.

In September, Kraken was formally spun out as a standalone company, with its own leadership, governance and commercial trajectory. This was the culmination of a long-held strategy, executed cleanly, without destabilising the parent business — a rare feat in itself. This demerger is phenomenal and set the start of a new journey for Octopus, which will now focus squarely on utility services and Kraken, which will now focus on software business and scaling the same.

The year closed with decisive external validation. In December 2025, Octopus sold a minority stake in Kraken at a valuation of roughly $8.5–9 billion, backed by major institutional investors. This was genuine price discovery, not aspirational storytelling. Capital markets independently confirmed that Kraken was not merely valuable within Octopus, but competitive on a global software stage. What makes this particularly striking is that Kraken was developed internally to serve Octopus itself: a technology built inside a company barely a decade old, creating close to $9 billion of value within what many still regard as a commoditised industry with limited scope for shareholder returns. For that, Greg Jackson and Amir Orad have my utmost respect.

Why This Edged Out Revolut

Revolut’s growth is extraordinary. But Octopus and Kraken achieved something rarer.

They won a fiercely regulated domestic market, built world-class infrastructure software within that market, and then successfully separated and monetised that software globally — all while continuing to grow the core business. That combination of operational excellence, strategic clarity and disciplined capital thinking is unusual in any year and rarer in its industry. In 2025, it stood apart.

Consequently, Greg Jackson, CEO of Octopus Energy, and Amir Orad, CEO of Kraken Technologies, are my People of the Year, in recognition of the masterful leadership that has guided Octopus and Kraken to this point.

Footnote:

  • I began this piece by noting my surprise at not seeing Octopus recognised in any major 2025 awards. I am pleased to relegate that observation to a footnote, given that Octopus was ultimately named Britain’s Most Admired Company 2025, becoming the youngest business ever to receive the honour — a recognition that is more than well deserved.