Octopus Energy boss Greg Jackson says choosing London for Kraken’s £7bn IPO would be a “no brainer” if the UK can demonstrate it can lure fresh capital back into the market
Greg Jackson, chief executive of Octopus, has indicated that opting for London as the venue for Kraken’s highly anticipated £7bn flotation would be an obvious decision—provided the exchange sustains its impressive global performance throughout 2025 and proves it can attract significant new investment into Britain.
In what marks the strongest indication yet that the company could favour London over New York for the eagerly awaited listing of its technology subsidiary, Jackson revealed to City AM his preference for launching on the London Stock Exchange, keeping his “cutting-edge tech company” firmly within the UK.
“I’d really love it to be in London,” he said in an interview, adding: “If we start to see the capital coming back into the market, if we start seeing the direction reverse, it becomes a no brainer.”
Last December, Octopus Energy offloaded a stake in Kraken to new investors, securing a $8.65bn (£6.4bn) valuation and setting the stage for a possible public offering within the next few years. Since then, an intense battle has erupted between London and New York over which financial centre will secure the landmark flotation, as reported by City AM.
Losing out on the tech spin-off’s market debut would represent a significant setback for London’s reputation as a premier global exchange, further compounding years of lacklustre performance and a shortage of new listings. Last month, Mr Jackson, who established Octopus in 2015 and transformed it into Britain’s biggest energy supplier, cautioned ministers and London Stock Exchange (LSE) executives that Kraken’s management might be forced to opt for New York unless the UK demonstrated greater “hustle”.
He criticised the “Byzantine rules” that discourage pension funds from supporting UK equities and cash-strapped scale-up enterprises.
The entrepreneur made his latest remarks as his company secured a further £25m investment into Kraken from the British Business Bank (BBB), an arm’s-length organisation created to channel taxpayer funding into UK businesses. The capital injection was part of a broader shake-up of regulatory barriers and investment designed to enable UK companies to expand domestically without needing to seek investor capital overseas.
In conversation with City AM, Business Secretary Peter Kyle championed the Kraken stake as proof that ministers were “hustling”, describing it as the “biggest and riskiest equity investment from the BBB” and pledging similar multimillion-pound initiatives in development.
“This is a faster, bigger, bolder and riskier approach from government,” he said. “I am behind this. I am there to shoulder the risk for how these things unfold. We need to have more confidence in private investment… because we are the start-up founder of Europe.”
For years, British entrepreneurs have found it difficult to secure the funding required to grow their ventures from fledgling start-ups to IPO-ready businesses.
Many have been compelled to seek investment capital from overseas or—as seen with tech innovators Oxford Ionics and Quantinuum—accept acquisition bids from American competitors and investors.
Neither of the primary backers in Kraken’s December funding round—Fidelity International and the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan Board—are UK-based, raising concerns that its new investors might push for a foreign listing.
However, Greg Jackson suggested the BBB’s investment would ensure Britain has “a seat at the table” when those decisions are made. “At the moment we’ve only got one British investor,” he noted. “All the rest are global.”
When questioned about whether this investment demonstrated the “hustle” he had previously advocated for, Jackson responded: “It’s a great example of it. If you look at the fact we’ve seen this decline from 40 per cent of pension assets being deployed in the UK to four per cent, you only reverse that by changing rules. And you change rules by relentlessly identifying what should be done, and pushing it.”
The Octopus founder emphasised that alongside behind-the-scenes regulatory work, Britain needed to improve at channelling entrepreneurial energy and excitement—what he termed “animal spirits”. When Kraken announced its initial funding round, the New York Stock Exchange celebrated by displaying the company’s name in Times Square and broadcasting a congratulatory announcement across its trading floor.
Mr Jackson called on the LSE to champion these success stories “publicly and loudly”, suggesting that major capital raises and initial public offerings in London should be prominently displayed across Piccadilly Circus.
“The big thing is, of course, companies have got a huge responsibility to this themselves,” he added. “By stimulating these conversations, we have the opportunity to create the noise I grew up in the 1980s during that wave of that strike privatisation. And they were news events as much as [they] were financial events. Let’s start trying to recreate that.”
