Leaders in Cleantech – Details, episodes & analysis

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.

Social links: 

• Devrim Celal on LinkedIn:

In this episode of Leaders in Cleantech, I speak with Juergen Mayerhofer, CEO and co-founder of enspired, the Vienna-based company using fully automated, AI-driven trading to optimise flexible power assets – especially grid-scale batteries – across multiple European markets.

Juergen shares how he stumbled into energy via Austrian gas market liberalisation, fell in love with physical energy systems, and eventually founded enspired in early 2020 with the simple but powerful idea that flexibility is the key resource for integrating more renewables. We talk about how the company has scaled from its first pump storage and thermal assets in Germany to managing ~5 GW of flexibility (including over 1.3 GW of batteries), now active across ten markets and expanding into new geographies.

We dig into why enspired thinks like a software and R&D company rather than a classic trading house, how they use automation, machine learning and reinforcement learning in practice, and why they’ve chosen to publish independently verified revenue performance instead of leaning on AI buzzwords. Juergen also reflects on the realities of founding just before COVID, expanding rapidly across borders, and building a diverse, high-performance culture designed to move into new countries in weeks, not years.

About Juergen Mayerhofer:

enspired CEO and co-founder Juergen Mayerhofer holds an MBA in energy management and has worked in the energy sector for over 20 years, contributing to the expansion of renewables in the grid in various expert positions. Under his bold and devoted leadership, enspired evolved from a small-scale startup with a workforce in the single digits into a successful institution with global recognition. As an enthusiast and first mover in BESS optimization, Juergen is a highly respected and trusted figure in his field as well as the power industry at large.

About enspired:

Vienna-based innovator enspired is known for pioneering automated energy trading and cross-market battery storage optimization across Europe with an advanced technical infrastructure running on billions of data points, AI, machine learning, and reinforcement learning. The self-developed optimization platform is operated 100% in-house, which makes it highly flexible in adapting to new markets and changing market conditions. By optimizing the power assets of their customers across all available energy markets, enspired unlocks essential flexibility to integrate more renewables while providing grid stability, enspired's commercial strategy achieves maximum revenues with minimum degradation, extending asset life and profit over time. As the first and only BESS optimizer with published portfolio performance, enspired is tackling the lack of monetary transparency in the industry by granting insight into real, independently confirmed revenues. In 2024 alone, enspired enabled 2.5 million tons of emission savings and aims to integrate 50 GW of flexibility by 2035 to achieve the ultimate goal of accelerating the energy transition. 

Social links:  
Juergen Mayerhofer on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/juergenmayerhofer/ 
enspired on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/enspired/ 
enspired website: https://www.enspired-trading.com/ 

About Hyperion Search:
At Hyperion Search, we specialize in building world-class teams for the cleantech and energy transition sectors. We focus on leadership roles but also recruit strategically critical individual contributors who drive business growth. Whether you’re a founder scaling a startup, a board member guiding a scaleup, a VC/PE investor, or a corporation committed to energy and mobility transitions, we find the talent that will deliver impactful, sustainable results.

Linked In: https://www.linkedin.com/company/hyperion-search-ltd 
Website: www.hyperionsearch.com 

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🎙 Episode 150 – Jan Lozek, Managing Director & Founder, Future Energy Ventures
In this milestone episode of Leaders in Cleantech, David Hunt is joined by Jan Lozek, a veteran investor and the founder of Future Energy Ventures, one of Europe’s largest and most influential climate tech VCs.
Together, they explore the evolution of cleantech investment, the challenges and opportunities facing founders today, and why Europe is uniquely positioned to lead the energy transition—despite global headwinds.
 
🔥 In this episode, we discuss:
Jan’s personal journey from the 1980s Green movement to launching Future Energy Ventures
The shift from hardware-heavy to software- and AI-led cleantech startups
Why team dynamics and diversity are critical investment criteria
The growing competition and collaboration in the VC ecosystem
U.S. unpredictability, Trump tariffs, and why Europe must seize the moment
The importance of long-term thinking, founder resilience, and learning from failure
What excites Jan most for 2025 in EVs, heating, and AI in energy
 
🧠 Quote of the episode:
“Deploying new technology is change—and change is done by people, through people.” – Jan Lozek
 
💡 Who should listen?
Cleantech founders, VC & PE professionals, climate tech enthusiasts, policy influencers, and anyone curious about scaling sustainable innovation.
 
🔗 Connect with Jan & Future Energy Ventures:
[Website] https://www.fev.vc
[LinkedIn] https://www.linkedin.com/company/future-energy-ventures/
[Jan Lozek on LinkedIn] https://www.linkedin.com/in/janlozek/

🌍 About the podcast:
Leaders in Cleantech brings you insightful conversations with the people driving the clean energy and sustainability revolution—founders, investors, and changemakers shaping our net zero future.