With investment growing and rivals floundering, Octopus looks increasingly well-placed to fulfil his vision.

The road ahead is far from risk-free, however. Large losses and wafer thin margins – £46m loss in 2020 on turnover of £1.2bn, compared to £30m loss on turnover of £456m in 2019 – are par for the course for a high-growth, well-backed challenger, but cannot last forever, as Bulb found. And further licensing deals for Kraken are not guaranteed, with some potential buyers resistant to change. 

In the shorter term, Britain’s gas price crisis shows no signs of abating, and it is unclear how customers will behave when the price cap is hiked by hundreds of pounds in April. Octopus has recently taken on 580,000 customers from collapsed rival Avro Energy – an almost 24pc increase to its books which now stand at 3.1m. With the opportunity, however, comes risk. 

“They’re good at customer service,” says Investec’s Martin Young. “One of the challenges when you grow pretty rapidly is onboarding all these new people without disrupting your customer service.”

Jackson stresses Octopus’s focus on customer service is “relentless” with him joining other senior managers every Monday morning to go through 200 pages of customer reports sent through the night before.

Building an energy company was not the original goal but the sector was chosen for its reputation of high costs and poor service. The founders had been searching for tech platform opportunities having sold their software company. 

“One of the challenges in any sector is they don’t believe [the digital revolution] is going to happen to them,” he says. “We thought, the only way we can really bring this technology to bear is to build an energy company, to demonstrate how technology can make a difference.”

Kraken Technologies has been licensed to Octopus’s Big Six rivals EDF and E.ON, as well as Australia’s Origin Energy and others, serving 25m customers. Octopus hopes it will be serving 100m by 2027. Jackson says it means companies can cut operating costs by up to 75pc, and argues its cloud-based platform gives it an important role in the global shift to cleaner energy.   

“It’s the same platform, whether you’re in Australia, Tokyo, London, or Munich,” he says. “What that means is, when you learn more about how to optimise charging a car battery in Houston, the same optimisation is instantly available around the world.”

The technology is also helping Octopus weather the gas price crisis, giving it highly accurate demand forecasts that can help it buy energy at decent rates in advance and avoid some of its rivals’ buying mistakes. 

With such strong growth, a move to the public markets is an inevitable possibility, though is unlikely for now. “We have such outstanding private shareholders that are really focused on our long-term objectives,” Jackson says. “I think we’ll be able to create more value for society, for our shareholders, for our staff and for our customers than we would if we were public. 

“There’s no plans right now, but you wouldn’t rule it out at some point.”