Devrim Celal– Kraken
In this episode of Leaders in Cleantech, David Hunt is joined once again by Devrim Celal, Chief Flexibility & Marketing Officer at Kraken, nearly six years after their first conversation in 2019—back when Devrim was CEO of Upside Energy.
Since then, Upside Energy was acquired by Octopus Energy and evolved into Kraken, now one of the world’s leading energy technology platforms, serving tens of millions of customers and optimising flexible power at global scale.
Rather than a linear success story, Devrim reflects on the last decade as a series of distinct phases: early uncertainty, pivotal strategic pivots, the acquisition decision, rapid scaling within Octopus, and now Kraken’s transition into a fully independent global company.
The conversation explores leadership at scale, the reality of building culture through growth, the trade-offs founders face between conviction and adaptability, and what the future holds for flexibility, storage, EVs, data centres and grid optimisation.
This is a thoughtful, honest discussion about long-term impact, not short-term hype—and what it really takes to build enduring companies in the energy transition.
Devrim Celal:
Devrim is the Chief Flexibility and Marketing Officer at Kraken. Overseeing Kraken’s flexibility and product capabilities, the cloud-based flexibility platform controls and optimizes distributed energy resources such as batteries of all sizes, EVs, solar and wind generation or heat pumps with machine learning and AI to match electricity supply and demand, helping the electricity grid deal with the natural volatility of renewable generation. Kraken is currently contracted to manage over 42 GW of power.
Previously, Devrim was the CEO of Upside Energy, which was acquired by Kraken in 2020. Before starting Upside Energy, Devrim’s professional career saw him take up executive roles with blue chip management consultancies and finance companies such as Publicis Sapient, Kearney and Lansdowne. He also holds an MBA from Yale University. In 2023, Devrim joined the Elexon Board, which manages the Balancing and Settlement Code of Great Britain’s energy system, as a Non-Executive Director.
About Kraken:
Vienna-based innovator enspired is known for pioneering automated energy trading and Kraken is the most-loved operating system for energy.
Powered by Utility-Grade AI™ and deep industry expertise, we help utilities modernize their entire operations – from their customers relationships and billing to generation, through to optimising when your EV or heating and cooling at home uses energy.
Kraken uses this powerful technology to analyse more than 15 billion data points a day, coordinating across the whole energy system to bring down costs, revolutionise customer service, and make energy more reliable, efficient and resilient.
Kraken has grown in just a few years to manage over 70 million customer accounts, quadrupling our contracted revenue in the last three years, to $500m.
The technology is proven across major global utilities in 30 countries, bringing down cost-to-serve by 40%, delivering best-in-class customer service and employee satisfaction at utilities – three of the UK’s top ten best employers amongst big companies run on Kraken.
And we manage the largest virtual power plant of residential assets in the world, over 2.5GW, enough to power a city of around 3 million people.
Created as part of the Octopus Energy Group in 2016, Kraken has been operationally independent for some time and officially announced its separation from its parent company in September this year. This strategic move allows Kraken to fast-track investments into its technology, expand into new energy markets and regions, and drive innovation – all while building on its utility roots.
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