Before he was an energy mogul, Amit Gudka ran a club night. He was a Cambridge maths graduate who spent about seven years trading gas and electricity at Barclays, and in his spare hours he DJed and ran a record label called Man Make Music. Few of Bulb's million customers knew that.
It matters, because it shows the two lives he was trying to square. The trader saw a market built by insiders for insiders. The music man saw people who just wanted something that sounded right. Together with Hayden Wood, a management consultant who had advised the big suppliers, he decided that bills should be simple, green and kind.
That same year both founders cashed out £4 million of shares, a quiet detail that would later look very different.
The two pooled savings and asked friends for money, then took funding from JamJar Investments. In 2015 they founded Bulb. They called customers members. One flat tariff. Emails in plain English. A referral scheme that paid both sides £50. There was almost no advertising budget. People simply told people.
The curve was steep. About 15,000 customers in January 2017. Around 1.13 million by March 2019. In August 2018, DST Global and Magnetar put in £60 million, reportedly at a valuation of £400-500 million. That same year both founders cashed out £4 million of shares, a quiet detail that would later look very different.
Then the market turned on them. In 2021 wholesale gas prices surged, and Bulb had promised fixed prices it could not cover. In February Gudka stepped back from day-to-day work to start a battery company, saying the business was stable when he left. By September Bulb was asking the government for a bailout. In November Ofgem put it into special administration, a first for a UK energy supplier. The government set aside £1.7 billion, and the Office for Budget Responsibility later put the possible liability at £6.5 billion. Octopus completed its takeover in December 2022.
Years later Gudka admitted it was hard. He called the collapse pretty devastating and said that if the last fundraise had started about three months earlier, Bulb would probably have survived. He and Wood, he said, have had little contact since. He went on to launch Field, a battery storage business.
The insight is not about bad luck. It is about timing and runway. A company that grows by promising customers a stable price is, underneath, a bet on its own balance sheet. The founders who survive start the next raise while they still look strong.