Team size: four in the UK, and seven additional lawyers globally    

What are the most significant cases or transactions that your legal team has recently been involved in?   

The last couple of years have been hectic for our legal team, having actively led negotiations for new market entries, mainly via acquisitions of existing supply businesses. Octopus Energy now operates in 14 countries worldwide.  

The team supported the agreement of a joint venture with a leading Japanese energy company —Tokyo Gas — to enter the Japanese market, alongside an equity investment with Tokyo Gas, Origin, Generation Investment and CPPIB, bringing total funding above £1bn over the last three years.  

Octopus set up a renewable generation fund business, backed by CPPIB, with an initial investment of $300m.  

Kraken Technologies also forms part of the Octopus Energy Group and has now licenced its proprietary customer billing platform to large global industry players, including, launching into the utility sector to support licensing to water and broadband customers.  

The stand-out deal for the last 12 months has been the acquisition of Bulb’s energy supply customers via a first-of-its-kind energy transfer scheme, a statutory process available to energy companies in administration, including a wholesale market agreement that is anticipated to enable savings of over £1bn to be returned to the government, and in turn to the UK taxpayers.   

What measures has your company taken to embed sustainability practices into its core business operations, and how does the role of the general counsel contribute to driving and ensuring sustainable practices within the company?  

Sustainability is at the core of everything that Octopus does. When it was first established in 2015, its founders set out to use technology and data to bring affordable green energy to the world and revolutionise customer experiences. The legal team have been instrumental in supporting the implementation of that vision.  

It was heavily involved in structuring the Kraken licensing deals to other energy supply businesses to help others in the sectors benefit from this same innovative technology, and the setup of the green renewable fund, both described above. It then supported the company in its vision to create a leading electric vehicle leasing business, which now delivers over 1,000 electric vehicles each month in hand with its innovative domestic products, which harness the power of electric vehicle batteries to supply electricity to the grid in times of need and provide customers with the cheapest charging.  

The team also led the acquisition of a heat pump manufacturing business in Northern Ireland to support the ambition to bring heat pumps to the mass market by developing an affordable solution comparable to the cost of a gas boiler replacement.