Description
Octopus Energy Group is a British renewable energy group specialising in sustainable energy. It was founded in 2015 with the backing of British fund management company Octopus Group, a British asset management company. Headquartered in London, the company has operations in the UK, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Australia, Japan, New Zealand and the United States. As of September 2021 the company has over three million domestic and business customers, making it the fourth largest energy supplier in the UK.
Octopus Energy Group operates a wide range of business divisions, including Octopus Energy Retail, Octopus Energy for Business, Octopus Energy Services, Octopus Electric Vehicles, Octopus Energy Generation, Octopus Hydrogen, Kraken, Kraken Flex and the not-for-profit Centre for Net Zero. The company also supplies software services to other energy suppliers.
History
Octopus Energy was established in August 2015 as a subsidiary of Octopus Capital Limited. Trading began in December 2015. Greg Jackson is the founder of the company and holds the position of chief executive.
By April 2018, the company had 198,000 customers and had made an energy procurement deal with Shell. Later in 2018, Octopus gained the 100,000 customers of Iresa Limited, under Ofgem's "supplier of last resort" process, after Iresa ceased trading. The same year, Octopus replaced SSE as the energy supplier for M&S Energy, a brand of Marks & Spencer, and bought Affect Energy, which had 22,000 customers.
In 2018 Hanwha Energy Retail Australia (Nectr) chose the Kraken platform, developed by Octopus to provide billing, CRM and other technology services to support its launch into the Australian retail energy market.
In August 2019, an agreement with Midcounties Co-operative saw Octopus gain more than 300,000 customers, taking its total beyond 1 million. Three Co-op brands were affected: Octopus acquired the customers of the GB Energy and Flow Energy brands, and began to operate the accounts of Co-op Energy customers on a white label basis, while Midcounties retained responsibility for acquiring new Co-op Energy customers.[
In both 2018 and 2019, Octopus was the only energy supplier to earn "Recommended Provider" status from the Which? consumer organisation. In January 2020, Octopus was ranked first in a Which? survey and was one of three recommended providers. In January 2021, Octopus was ranked second and was one of two recommended providers, becoming the only energy provider in the UK to have been named as a recommended provider four years running.
In January 2020, ENGIE UK announced that it was selling its residential energy supply business (comprising around 70,000 UK residential customers) to Octopus. The same month saw the launch of London Power, a partnership with the Mayor of London.
In 2020 Octopus completed two funding rounds totalling $577m, making the company the highest funded UK tech start-up that year.
In November 2020 Octopus acquired Manchester-based smart grid energy software company Upside Energy, which in June 2021 rebranded as KrakenFlex.
The same month saw Octopus launch the not-for-profit Octopus Centre for Net Zero (OCNZ), a research organisation tasked with creating models and policy recommendations for potential paths to a green energy future.
In February 2021, CEO Greg Jackson said on a BBC News interview that Octopus does not operate a human resources department.
In March 2021 the Financial Times listed Octopus at number 23 on their list of the fastest growing companies in Europe.
In July 2021 Octopus rose 12 places on the UK Customer Service Index to 17th, making it the only energy company in the Top 50.
In 2021, Octopus built the UK's first R&D and training centre for the decarbonisation of heat. Located in Slough, the centre will train 1000 heat pump engineers per year and develop new heating systems.
In September 2021, Octopus was appointed as the Supplier of Last Resort (SOLR) for Avro Energy, acquiring Avro Energy's domestic customers and increasing their customer base to 3.1m customers.
In November 2021, Octopus announced in Manchester that it had signed a deal with the city region as part of a bid to become carbon neutral by 2038.
