Octopus Energy has appointed former Sisense CEO Amir Orad as the chief executive of its technology platform Kraken.
The energy provider, part of Octopus Group, said the decision to appoint a dedicated CEO for its platform was made to meet its growth goals.
Kraken is the underlying tech platform behind Octopus’ energy business. The system, based on machine learning, automates much of the energy supply chain and is used to manage networks and support field operations.
The Kraken platform is used by Octopus Energy, but is also part of a separate revenue stream for the company, which licenses the platform to other firms globally such as EDF, Origin, E.ON and Tokyo Gas.
In total, Kraken is used for 54 million energy accounts, around seven times the number of households serviced by Octopus Energy.
“This appointment will enable Kraken to keep scaling whilst maintaining its unparalleled reputation for successful migrations and rapid innovation as it helps utilities digitise and transform, globally,” said Octopus Energy founder and CEO Greg Jackson.
“[Orad] has a rare combination of deep technology expertise, experience growing cloud businesses and most importantly, delivering success for clients.”
Orad ran the New York-based embedded analytics platform Sisense for over eight years. He has also previously led the Nasdaq-listed software firm Nice Actimize.
“Very few companies in the world serve a true purpose of making it a better place. Even fewer do that at scale and can impact hundreds of millions of people,” Orad said.
“Finding that Kraken does exactly that and is doing so while harnessing the most cutting-edge technologies of AI, analytics and the cloud has resulted in an instant match.”
Octopus Energy was valued at $9bn this year after existing investors, including Al Gore-chaired Generation Investment Management, increased their stake in the business.