Octopus Energy spins off its Kraken utility billing and AI platform (techcrunch.com)

Octopus Energy announced it is spinning off Kraken, its utility billing and energy orchestration platform, after securing roughly $500 million in committed annual revenue from other utilities and energy providers. Kraken — originally Octopus’s first product, with Octopus acting as its “demo client” — already serves the parent company’s customer base (about 7.7 million UK households and 2.8 million elsewhere). The move is intended to remove conflicts of interest as Kraken signs external clients, and The Wall Street Journal reports an eventual IPO could value Kraken at about $15 billion and occur within a year. For the AI/ML community, Kraken is notable as a production-grade AI-driven control and customer-management stack for modern grids. It combines forecasting and optimization models that analyze large operational datasets (from dynamic tariffs like Agile and experiments such as Zero Bills) to schedule generation and distributed energy resources (DERs) — solar, EV chargers, home batteries, smart thermostats — and to manage billing, meters, and customer interactions. The spinoff signals strong product-market fit for software that uses real-time inference and historical training data to enable demand response, renewables integration, and neutral platform deployment across incumbents, accelerating vendor-neutral AI adoption in utility operations and creating rich datasets for further model improvement.