Explainer
Kraken is the customer and billing platform built by Octopus Energy and now licensed to utilities around the world. Here is what it is, who runs on it, what it does well and what a migration onto it really involves, from people who have led several.
By Christopher Fagan, Managing Partner, PEF Consulting Partners
Kraken Technologies is the software business of the Octopus Energy Group. Its product, Kraken, is a cloud platform that runs the customer side of a utility in one system: accounts, meter data, tariffs, billing, payments, collections, customer contact and the industry data flows that connect a supplier to the market. Octopus built it for its own UK launch in 2016, then started licensing it to other suppliers, and the group announced in September 2025 that Kraken would become a standalone company. A funding round in December 2025 raised around $1bn at a valuation of $8.65bn, about £6.4bn, and the British Business Bank invested £25m in January 2026.
Octopus’s own retail businesses are the reference customers, but most Kraken accounts now belong to licensees. In the UK that includes E.ON Next and EDF, which moved millions of customers onto the platform. Overseas it includes Origin Energy in Australia, Tokyo Gas in Japan, Plenitude in Italy and a growing list of North American utilities and energy managers. Water companies have begun to follow, and Kraken has said publicly that it has more than 70 million customer accounts contracted worldwide. If you are a UK supplier, the odds are that at least one of your competitors already bills from it.
Three things set Kraken apart from the billing systems most utilities grew up with. First, it is one platform rather than a stack: billing, CRM, payments and industry flows are not separate products stitched together, which removes a whole class of reconciliation problems. Second, it was designed around half hourly data and frequent product change, so time of use tariffs, smart meter data and flexibility products are native rather than bolted on. Third, it comes with an operating model. Kraken expects customer operations to be organised so that one person can see and resolve the whole account, and licensees who keep their old team structures tend to get a fraction of the benefit.
The platform is the easy part. A Kraken migration is a data migration from a legacy estate such as SAP IS U, Gentrack, Junifer or Oracle, an operating model change for every customer facing team, a replumbing of industry data flows and a regulatory continuity exercise, all at once and under a go live date the business has usually announced to the City. The decisions that matter are the client’s, not the vendor’s: how customers are sequenced, what the acceptance evidence is before each move, how prepayment and vulnerable customers are protected, and who signs off that billing is right afterwards. On the programmes we have led, including the first water utility migration onto Kraken and the recovery of a large supplier’s billing position after one, the difference between a clean migration and a painful one was almost never the software.
Moving to Kraken does not remove a supplier’s own obligations. Market wide half hourly settlement, the smart meter 2G and 3G comms hub replacement, Ofgem’s debt relief scheme and the consumer standards all still have to be delivered by the licensee, and a migration that lands in the middle of them needs careful sequencing. Kraken’s native half hourly design is an advantage for MHHS, but the data cleansing, the agent appointments and the testing are still the supplier’s job.
Kraken is strongest in retail energy supply, where it was born. Water is newer ground, and the first migrations have shown that water billing, with its unmeasured charges, occupier changes and social tariffs, needs more design work than a gas and electricity book. Network businesses are a different thing again. The commercial model is a long term licence priced per account, so the business case rests on the operating cost you can take out, and that depends on the operating model change you are prepared to make, not on the platform alone. The honest answer is that Kraken is an excellent system for a supplier that is willing to change how it works, and an expensive one for a supplier that is not.
Related reading: Kraken migration and assurance, Kraken implementation partner for energy suppliers, Kraken migration explained, Kraken vs SAP S/4HANA vs Oracle Utilities, the Kraken migration readiness check, billing integrity and revenue assurance.
Kraken was built by Octopus Energy and is being spun out as a standalone company. A funding round in December 2025, backed by investors including D1 Capital, Fidelity, Durable Capital and Ontario Teachers’, valued it at $8.65bn, and Octopus keeps a minority stake of about 13.7%. It operates as a software and services business with its own leadership under chief executive Amir Orad, selling to competitors of Octopus’s retail arm.
Energy retail is its home market and where most accounts sit, but it is now licensed by water companies and is being used for other utility style services. Each new sector needs real design work, because the billing rules differ.
For a UK supplier with a few hundred thousand to a few million accounts, plan for twelve to twenty four months from contract to the last customer moved, depending on the legacy estate, data quality and how much of the operating model changes at the same time. Programmes that promise less usually move the risk into the months after go live.
Licences are agreed privately and priced per account per year under long term contracts, so published figures are rare. The licence is usually not the largest number: the migration programme and the operating model change are, and so is the cost of a migration that goes wrong.
No listing has been filed so far. London and New York have both been discussed as venues for a future listing, but no timetable has been confirmed.
Yes. Kraken Technologies, Kraken Technology Group and Kraken Tech are all used for the same business: the software company Octopus Energy built and is now spinning out.
No. We work on the client side only and have no commercial relationship with Kraken or any other platform vendor, which is what lets us tell you plainly whether it is the right choice and hold the programme to account once you have chosen it.
Thinking about Kraken, or already on the way? A confidential conversation with someone who has led these programmes costs nothing and usually saves a great deal.