Connect with us

Published

on

Founders: Greg Jackson (CEO), Stuart Jackson, James Eddison
Launched: 2016
Headquarters: London
Funding:
$2 billion
Valuation: $7.8 billion
Key technologies:
Artificial intelligence, Internet of Things, machine learning
Industry:
Energy
Previous appearances on Disruptor 50 List: 1 (No. 8 in 2023)

Persephone Kavallines

Aiming to spark further transition to renewable energy, British-based power conglomerate Octopus Energy pulled in $800 million in new funding last year to expand internationally and is leveraging AI technology in its cleantech business.   

The fast-growth innovator is relying on Uber-like digital technology for its solar, wind, smart grids and meters, and offering flexible pricing based on conserving energy and balancing demands on the grid. The company also has rolled into electric vehicles, offering EV leasing packages, installation of home chargers, and mobile apps for EV owners to monitor grid signals and get discounts.     

Founded in 2016 by digital entrepreneur and angel investor Greg Jackson, Octopus Energy is seeking to disrupt traditional utilities with a tech-driven approach using AI, machine learning, cloud computing and data analytics. Last March, the utility introduced an in-house developed, gen AI-powered service, Magic Ink, to provide tailored customer interactions and help prevent power overloads.

More coverage of the 2024 CNBC Disruptor 50

Profitable and with operations spanning 18 countries, the company has more than doubled its retail business over the past two years and currently serves more than 7.2 million customers and 40,000 business accounts. The group’s Kraken software and data analytics system, which helps utilities track energy usage for efficiency, has been licensed to 54 million international accounts, up from 17 million in 2020, and the goal is to reach 100 million by 2027.

Last December, Octopus Energy received an $800 million funding boost from Al Gore’s renewable and sustainable energy investment firm and other existing investors, lifting the company’s valuation to $7.8 billion, a 60% increase from a prior investment round in 2021. In November, Octopus launched a $3.7 billion fund with Japanese utility Tokyo Gas to invest in offshore wind over the rest of this decade.

Energy investments grew worldwide to $2.8 trillion in 2023, with more than $1.2 trillion going to clean energy, according to the International Energy Agency. Renewables’ share of power generation is projected to rise to 35% by 2025 from 29% today.

Octopus Energy is pursuing the clean energy movement on a global scale through acquisitions and licensing deals. Over the past few years, the company has launched operations in several developed markets including Australia and Germany. The electricity provider has big ambitions for the U.S. market. It acquired Silicon Valley-based AI and machine learning startup Evolve Energy in 2020 and established a U.S. subsidiary in energy-centric Houston. Signally its expansion strategy, the company signed a licensing deal last June to begin offering its Kraken technology platform to U.S. licensees, with the first going to North American energy manager Tenaska Power Services in Texas for its battery sites.

Sign up for our weekly, original newsletter that goes beyond the annual Disruptor 50 list, offering a closer look at list-making companies and their innovative founders.

Continue Reading

Environment

Google and Anthropic announce cloud deal worth tens of billions of dollars

Published

on

By

Google and Anthropic announce cloud deal worth tens of billions of dollars

Google, Anthropic agree to cloud deal worth tens of billions of dollars

Anthropic and Google officially announced their cloud partnership Thursday, a deal that gives the artificial intelligence company access to up to one million of Google’s custom-designed Tensor Processing Units, or TPUs.

The deal, which is worth tens of billions of dollars, is the company’s largest TPU commitment yet and is expected to bring well over a gigawatt of AI compute capacity online in 2026.

Industry estimates peg the cost of a 1-gigawatt data center at around $50 billion, with roughly $35 billion of that typically allocated to chips.

While competitors tout even loftier projections — OpenAI’s 33-gigawatt “Stargate” chief among them — Anthropic’s move is a quiet power play rooted in execution, not spectacle.

Founded by former OpenAI researchers, the company has deliberately adopted a slower, steadier ethos, one that is efficient, diversified, and laser-focused on the enterprise market.

Anthropic launches Claude Sonnet 4.5, its latest AI model

A key to Anthropic’s infrastructure strategy is its multi-cloud architecture.

The company’s Claude family of language models runs across Google’s TPUs, Amazon’s custom Trainium chips, and Nvidia’s GPUs, with each platform assigned to specialized workloads like training, inference, and research.

Google said the TPUs offer Anthropic “strong price-performance and efficiency.”

“Anthropic and Google have a longstanding partnership and this latest expansion will help us continue to grow the compute we need to define the frontier of AI,” said Anthropic CFO Krishna Rao in a release.

Anthropic’s ability to spread workloads across vendors lets it fine-tune for price, performance, and power constraints.

According to a person familiar with the company’s infrastructure strategy, every dollar of compute stretches further under this model than those locked into single-vendor architectures.

Google, for its part, is leaning into the partnership.

“Anthropic’s choice to significantly expand its usage of TPUs reflects the strong price-performance and efficiency its teams have seen with TPUs for several years,” said Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian in a release, touting the company’s seventh-generation “Ironwood” accelerator as part of a maturing portfolio.

Anthropic takes a page from Palantir as AI battle with OpenAI goes global

Claude’s breakneck revenue growth

Anthropic’s escalating compute demand reflects its explosive business growth.

The company’s annual revenue run rate is now approaching $7 billion, and Claude powers more than 300,000 businesses — a staggering 300× increase over the past two years. The number of large customers, each contributing more than $100,000 in run-rate revenue, has grown nearly sevenfold in the past year.

Claude Code, the company’s agentic coding assistant, generated $500 million in annualized revenue within just two months of launch, which Anthropic claims makes it the “fastest-growing product” in history.

While Google is powering Anthropic’s next phase of compute expansion, Amazon remains its most deeply embedded partner.

The retail and cloud giant has invested $8 billion in Anthropic to date, more than double Google’s confirmed $3 billion in equity.

Still, AWS is considered Anthropic’s chief cloud provider, making its influence structural and not just financial.

Its custom-built supercomputer for Claude, known as Project Rainier, runs on Amazon’s Trainium 2 chips. That shift matters not just for speed, but for cost: Trainium avoids the premium margins of other chips, enabling more compute per dollar spent.

AWS outage ripples across internet, puts pressure on Amazon ahead of earnings

Wall Street is already seeing results.

Rothschild & Co Redburn analyst Alex Haissl estimated that Anthropic added one to two percentage points to AWS’s growth in last year’s fourth quarter and this year’s first, with its contribution expected to exceed five points in the second half of 2025.

Wedbush’s Scott Devitt previously told CNBC that once Claude becomes a default tool for enterprise developers, that usage flows directly into AWS revenue — a dynamic he believes will drive AWS growth for “many, many years.”

Google, meanwhile, continues to play a pivotal role. In January, the company agreed to a new $1 billion investment in Anthropic, adding to its previous $2 billion and 10% equity stake.

Critically, Anthropic’s multicloud approach proved resilient during Monday’s AWS outage, which did not impact Claude thanks to its diversified architecture.

Still, Anthropic isn’t playing favorites. The company maintains control over model weights, pricing, and customer data — and has no exclusivity with any cloud provider. That neutral stance could prove key as competition among hyperscalers intensifies.

WATCH: Anthropic’s Mike Krieger on new model release and the race to build real-world AI agents

Anthropic’s Mike Krieger on new model release and the race to build real-world AI agents

Continue Reading

Environment

JB Straubel’s Redwood snags $350M to deploy more US-made battery storage

Published

on

By

JB Straubel’s Redwood snags 0M to deploy more US-made battery storage

Redwood Materials, founded by former Tesla CTO and cofounder JB Straubel, has raised $350 million in new funding to scale its US-made battery storage systems and critical materials operations. The company is ramping up to meet surging demand from AI data centers and the clean energy sector.

The oversubscribed Series E round was led by Eclipse, with participation from NVentures, NVIDIA’s venture capital arm, and other new strategic investors.

As global supplies tighten, the US is racing to secure domestic production of critical materials like lithium, nickel, cobalt, and copper. In July, Redwood and GM signed a non-binding memorandum of understanding to turn new and second-life GM batteries into energy storage systems. Redwood launched a new venture in June called Redwood Energy that repurposes both new and used EV battery packs into fast and cost-effective energy storage systems.

Redwood says large-scale battery storage is the fastest and most scalable way to enable new AI data center rollout while unlocking stranded generation capacity and stabilizing the grid. Battery storage also helps industrial facilities electrify and balance renewable energy output. The company aims to deliver a new generation of affordable, US-built energy storage systems designed to serve the grid, heavy industry, and AI data centers, reducing dependence on imported Lithium Iron Phosphate batteries.

Advertisement – scroll for more content

Redwood will use the new capital to expand energy storage deployments, refining and materials production capacity, and its engineering and operations teams.

Read more: Redwood is repurposing GM’s EV batteries into energy storage


The 30% federal solar tax credit is ending this year. If you’ve ever considered going solar, now’s the time to act. To make sure you find a trusted, reliable solar installer near you that offers competitive pricing, check out EnergySage, a free service that makes it easy for you to go solar. It has hundreds of pre-vetted solar installers competing for your business, ensuring you get high-quality solutions and save 20-30% compared to going it alone. Plus, it’s free to use, and you won’t get sales calls until you select an installer and share your phone number with them. 

Your personalized solar quotes are easy to compare online and you’ll get access to unbiased Energy Advisors to help you every step of the way. Get started here.

FTC: We use income earning auto affiliate links. More.

Continue Reading

Environment

Rivian to lay off about 4% of staff to possibly lean down ahead of 2026 R2 launch [Update]

Published

on

By

Rivian to lay off about 4% of staff to possibly lean down ahead of 2026 R2 launch [Update]

A report this morning detailed American EV automaker Rivian’s plans to lay off a portion of its current workforce as it tries to conserve cash while gearing up for the launch of its newest model, the R2, next year.

Update 10/23/25: As promised, Rivian followed up with more details of this morning’s report regarding layoffs. The following letter from Rivian founder and CEO, RJ Scaringe, was sent out to the automaker’s workforce moments ago:

Hi Team, 

I am writing to share a difficult update. 

With the launch of R2 in front of us and the need to profitably scale our business, we have made the very difficult decision to make a number of structural adjustments to our teams. These changes result in a reduction in the size of our team by roughly 4.5%. 

These are not changes that were made lightly. With the changing operating backdrop, we had to rethink how we are scaling our go-to-market functions. This news is challenging to hear, and the hard work and contributions of the team members who are leaving are greatly appreciated.  

To ensure we move forward with clarity, I want to summarize the areas most impacted. 

  • Streamlining the Customer Journey: To provide a seamless experience for our customers, we are integrating the Vehicle Operations workstreams into the Service organization to create fewer customer handoffs and clearer ownership. We are also integrating the Delivery and Mobile Operations into the Sales organization to ensure the purchase experience is as seamless as possible with a single touchpoint throughout the entire sales process and to delivery. 
  • Elevating Our Marketing Efforts: Historically we have had multiple functions that collectively capture what would typically be housed in a single marketing organization. We have made the decision to form a single marketing organization, and while we recruit our first Chief Marketing Officer (CMO), I will be acting as Interim CMO. Our Marketing Experiences team, led by Denise Cherry, and the Creative Studio team, led by Matt Soldan, will both report directly to me for now. 

These changes are being made to ensure we can deliver on our potential by scaling efficiently towards building a healthy and profitable business. I am incredibly confident in R2 and the hard work of our teams to deliver and ramp this incredible product. 

Thanks again everyone. 

RJ


Not much backstory here, so we’ll get right into it.

A report from the Wall Street Journal this morning shared brief details of Rivian’s layoff plans, which could affect approximately 4% of the current staff. At the end of 2024, Rivian’s workforce tally sat around 15,000 people, so the reported layoff could affect as many as 600 individuals, possibly more.

Advertisement – scroll for more content

Other outlets have pointed out that EV automakers like Rivian have faced a tougher market following the end of the $7,500 federal tax incentive. While that may be true to a certain extent, most of Rivian’s R1 variants didn’t qualify, unless it was a lease, and the automaker has deployed its own incentive programs.

In fact, Rivian’s Q3 2025 deliveries exceeded expectations. It remains speculative at this point until we receive an official statement from Rivian explaining the plans to lay off staff, but this could be a preemptive decision based on market forecasts.

Furthermore, Rivian is closer than ever to launching R2 in 2026, which has the makings of becoming a bestseller in the EV industry if sales match a mere portion of the hype surrounding it. The layoffs could also be a lean-down to conserve funds through the home stretch of that development process before beefing back up again in 2026 or 2027 when demand is (ideally) higher.

We really do not and will not know the reasoning behind the decision until Rivian shares more information.

We reached out to Rivian for comment and were told the automaker will have more to share this afternoon. We will update this story as new information becomes available.

FTC: We use income earning auto affiliate links. More.

Continue Reading

Trending