Greg Jackson has told the BBC that he remembers the day the energy went off in his childhood home. Not a storm, not a fault. The supply was cut because it had not been paid for.
He grew up in Halifax in West Yorkshire and then in Saltburn-by-the-Sea on the Yorkshire coast. He was drawn to electronics and coding in the early 1980s, and at 16 he left school to program computer games. That did not last. He went back to sixth-form college to study economics and ended up at Pembroke College, Cambridge.
He grew up in Halifax in West Yorkshire and then in Saltburn-by-the-Sea on the Yorkshire coast.
What almost nobody connects to the software company is that childhood memory. Years later Jackson founded an energy retailer, Octopus, and the thing he is known for wanting is a bill that does not frighten people. But a retailer cannot be kind at scale if its systems are clumsy. Before turning 30 he had owned or run several small businesses with anywhere from 4 to 60 employees, including an e-commerce firm called C360 and a telemedicine provider, Consultant Connect. He knew what it was to carry payroll on a thin margin.
So Octopus built its own customer platform and called it Kraken. It ran on Amazon's cloud and held accounts, bills, meters and tariffs in one place. In an industry where the old suppliers ran on stitched-together legacy systems, this was unusual. And then came the turn nobody planned: other utilities noticed. Hanwha's Australian retail arm chose the platform in 2018. Good Energy licensed it in late 2019. In 2020 E.ON, npower and Origin Energy signed up. EDF agreed in 2021 to move about five million customers across.
The cost of success was a different kind of company. A retailer and a software vendor want different things, and in August 2024 Amir Orad was appointed as Kraken's own chief executive. By January 2025 the platform was reported to serve 60 million customer accounts.
Then came the separation. In December 2025 Octopus said it would spin Kraken off at a valuation of about US$8.65 billion, with Octopus keeping a 14 percent stake. Roughly a US$1 billion minority stake changed hands.
It is worth sitting with the oddity of that. A billion-dollar software company grew out of a man's refusal to treat a bill as a mere transaction. Jackson's own early failures and small firms taught him how fragile a customer relationship is when money is tight.
For a first-time founder the lesson is quiet. The product that wins is often the one built to solve the thing that hurt you personally, and you only discover it is a company when strangers ask to borrow it.