Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us both here in the room and also online for the Kraken Investor Briefing. I know many of you, but my name is Tony Lucas. I'm the CFO at Origin, and I'd like to start by acknowledging the traditional custodians on the land which we gather here in Barangaroo, the Gadigal people from the Eora Nation, and pay my respects to their elders past, present, and emerging. The format of today is a presentation from the Kraken team that'll go for about an hour. Then we'll have 30-45 minutes of Q&A which we'll moderate here. That will be microphones in the room and a webcast for online participants. Before we get into the Kraken presentation, I'd just like to touch on yesterday, where we reissued FY 2026 guidance for Octopus Energy.
That revision was driven by regulatory changes and also trading outcomes in the U.K. retail business. It didn't change the Kraken story. The earnings outlook for Kraken is unchanged from what we told you and shared with you in February. The team and I are happy to talk through those changes either later today or offline. To the substance of today, about a decade ago, Origin identified that the energy transition would change the way in which energy businesses operate, the way that the market clears, the way that customers will play an increasing role in helping balance the energy demand, and the products that they would need would change.
Technology, data and energy were all gonna play a significant role in the transition, and Origin needed to become as good as it is with energy trading with data and technology. For energy utilities, the technology stack underpinning this sector is holding it back. It's old. Most large energy businesses still run on dozens of disconnected platforms, billing, metering, CRM, compliance, comms, none of which were designed to talk to each other, and they're all becoming expensive to maintain. This is the problem Kraken set out to solve and why we got involved. Origin's been a customer and shareholder of Kraken for more than six years. In that time, we've been consistently impressed with the product and the people behind it.
What attracted us to Kraken and to Octopus at the time was a shared vision on what the energy transition and the convergence of data and energy would look like in the future, and this combined with a well-governed, scalable architecture would be critical to the future of the energy system. Kraken has delivered that future for us. It's given us the foundation to serve customers better, to run our operations more efficiently, respond faster to change, to regulatory change, and to innovate, and more recently to deploy AI to help us reduce our cost to serve. This briefing comes at a genuinely interesting point. We're aiming for separation still on target this calendar year, middle of this calendar year, and the broader technology landscape, AI in particular, is moving fast.
The opportunities in front of Kraken are real, and we're delighted the team is here today to share some of their perspectives with you. With that, it is my pleasure to welcome the Kraken technology team. We've got Amir Orad, Tim Wan, James Magill, and other colleagues from Kraken here today. With that, I'll hand over to Amir.
I'll start.
Oh, Tim, to start?
Thank you.
Okay. Thank you.
No, great. Good morning, everyone. Thank you for coming. Let me just do the customary disclaimer that's necessary. My name's Tim Wan. I'm the CFO at Kraken, and I'm excited to kick off our Investor Day presentation. Now, our purpose at Kraken is straightforward. We are the operating system for utilities. The value we unlock for utility is quantifiable and immediate. Our clients achieve 100% migration success, a critical advantage in this industry, along with material business improvements. This includes 40% efficiency gains, 3x increase in customer delight, and the agility to innovate faster. This value is translating to strong business momentum. We're a mission-critical platform. We're managing over 90 million accounts globally, supported by over 99% gross retention rate. Financially, we are well over AUD 500 million in contracted ARR, which grew 10x over the last five years.
Operationally, we're processing 15 billion data points per day and managing more than 15 GW of flex power, demonstrating our proven solution for utilities at scale. Amir will share exactly how we do this, how we've achieved the opportunity, and the opportunity ahead, and I'll be joining him afterwards for Q&A. With that, let me bring up Amir.
Passing the baton.
Yes.
All right. First, thank you for being here today, and thank you for the Kraken team that flew from many different countries here, including James Magill, the founder of the company, hiding here at the back, who actually thought about all of this a long time ago. What I wanna do is spend 30, 40 minutes going through a spectrum of what we do, what are the benefits, the underlying platform, talk about AI, which is always a hot topic these days, and really talk about the momentum we're having, and then we'll have time for questions. First, the mission of the company is very simple, and actually, the introduction almost defined the mission. We're here to create the technology that redefines utilities to unlock the new energy systems that are required for the future.
The way the grid operates today is unattainable given the changes, fundamental changes, that have not been going on for the last 100 years. All of them are recent and fresh. We actually have another metric we're thinking about, which is not a financial metric, but we would like to improve the lives of a billion humans within a decade, and we think we can do that. All of you are aware of what's happening in the energy markets, but it's really important to look at it in one place to understand the magnitude of change. That change in just a few years is literally more than the entire 80-90 years before that. Energy is becoming two-directional, from one way to two way, which changes fundamentally how you do things, how you balance the grid, how you build for people. It's becoming distributed.
The amount of energy points grew by 500x, not percent, 500x in the last 15 years. We have the fact it's intermittent with renewables, and it's much more volatile. On the flip side, we all know about data centers, AI, increased loads, it's electrification, et cetera, et cetera. All of these events, issues, challenges are hitting our clients in each and every country. This is not unique to Australia or the U.K. or France or the U.S. Each and every country is dealing with all of these challenges at the same time, different pace, kind of different criticality, but they're all happening all over the world. The problem is that the underlying infrastructure of utilities, which has been static and powerful and effective for so many years, is not fit for purpose anymore.
In the U.S., the average CIS, Customer Information System, the average is 29 years old. Imagine the 50% above average, 29 years old. They have dozens of those systems that are hotchpotched together, stitched together to provide valuable service. Just the maintenance costs in the last five years, six years, have doubled of these systems, and this is all public information. When we try to change those systems, over 50% of the projects, per Gartner, over 50% of those projects fail if you look by timeline, business impact or cost, over 50%. It's a very strong, rigid, but difficult to change infrastructure, which was really, really good and effective before all the changes that are happening these days. That's driving the need for someone like Kraken.
The quote above is actually from a CEO in Australia that I've met last time I was here, and I'll quote him. He said, "My technology stack is limiting my ability and my team's ability to dream." It's a really interesting quote. We believe there's another way to address this challenge. We believe there's a fundamentally different way to deal with this challenge, and I couldn't ask for a better quote than Michael Lewis. This is from E.ON UK about the project we've done with him. What do we do? Why do we win? I'll start with a very strong statement, which I usually keep for my wife, but Kraken is the most loved operating system or technology for utilities, and I'll show you that backed by multiple third-party research projects. There's four dimensions that drive why we win and why people prefer Kraken.
The first one is we approach the challenge as an operating system that replaces numerous technologies at once. We do not believe that the future can be reached or achieved by replacing one system after the other. It's too risky, too painful, and if you do all of that, you'll still not reach the end game. An end-to-end singular operating system that replaces all this fragmented foundation. Number two, what's critical in this market? Like other enterprise market, that's even more given the mission criticality, we have 100% migration track record, 100%, and it's a result of a combination of a system and a unique technology, and I'll share how we work. We'll go through each one in a minute. We unlock meaningful, quantifiable business results. Again, we'll go one by one.
All of that allows us and our customers to thrive even more in the AI era. When Kraken started, the focus was being data-driven and machine learning-driven. Now we call it AI, but this company, this technology, was born with intelligence at the heart of it. Let's zoom in one by one. First, I mentioned an operating system versus just a cluster of fragmented solutions. An operating system means we have one underlying data model underneath what we do, with a singular AI foundation that is built-in to the operating system, covering all the events and activities in it, and an extremely agile code base. If you have an operating system covering so many areas in the business, you have to be very dynamic. The technologies we replace get refreshed every six, 12, 18, 24 months. We update the system 200 times a day.
We're on version 230,000th right now. It's probably in 10 minutes. By the time we finish this presentation, we'll be on a different version. It is built in a sovereign secure cloud instance, which means we are allowed and able to deploy it in countries and environments which requires the highest level of scrutiny for such mission-critical systems. For example, we just announced Saudi Arabia the other week. Strong, sovereign, secure environment to run their entire electric system. This operating system sits on an underlying interoperability layer, which means we bring out of the box the connectivity and the built-in technology to connect your different trading systems, distribution networks, various assets, physical assets from generators to EVs, and even your real-time local regulatory requirements. It's a fully open system.
When Kraken started with the first client, Octopus, it was very much built for that client. The client told us, "You're not flexible enough." Over the last five years, we built a lot of technology to make it fully open. We went to the other extreme, where today we have hundreds of APIs, MCP servers for AI queries, no-code flows where you can build using business logic, new business applications, and even a marketplace for third parties to put capabilities on top of Kraken. This is the operating system. When we come into a utility, we come into a retail utility, a distribution one, a water one, all of them start at the same place, dozens, we just didn't have room on the slide, literally dozens of legacy systems. Some of them are 30, 40, 50-year-old.
Some of them are not being updated at all at this point. It's old code, no one is touching. Some of them are so hard-coded, if you have a new regulation, you can literally not meet that regulatory requirement. If you want to modernize something, let's say offer a new energy product, all you have to do is change this system, this system, this system, this one, this one, this one, this one, this one. It's a nightmare. People in the market would acknowledge the pain of doing that. Instead, we move it all to one system, agile, all the data in one place with all the functionality. The content of our platform, of our operating system is really divided into five layers. They're very important to understand because we believe the future of energy requires all five layers to be combined.
You cannot read each one separately. The first one is humans. We provide the technology that engages directly with the end users and helps shape their behavior. If you give them the right incentives, real-time communication, right custom, financial products or energy products, you're able to change their behavior in order to balance the grid. That includes technologies from CRM to AI agents to dynamic tariffs, and I can go on and on what's under that. That is one layer. For example, when you come into a customer in this area, their CRM system, let's say Salesforce, will be removed and Kraken will replace that. That's one example of the dozens of items we replace. Then there's the business operation.
We come in, and at the same time, this is not optional, at the same time, we go in and replace how you run the majority of your business operations. From billing, the most fundamental ones, to payments, debt management, compliance, and each and every business workflow you can imagine to run a large B2B or B2C utility or distribution company, it's very similar. That's where we deploy, as you'll see later, both copilots and full autonomous agents to help those business processes. Thirdly, the physical layer. It's great that we can service the humans, the customers, but more and more people are deploying smart physical assets, EVs, solar panels, smart homes, thermostats, large grid-scale batteries. All of them, if they're not managed in real-time, create a sub-optimal environment on a good day or actually the opposite, literally a challenge on the grid.
We are physically today, right now, connecting, dispatching, optimizing over 800,000 assets in real-time every day to balance the grid. When you can shape the human behavior and shape the physical behavior of assets and all the business workflow in the middle, magic starts to happen. Now, all of this is pinned by the intelligence layer. This will bring all the data of your company into a singular place, accessible in a AI machine learning infrastructure, and a technology that has the mission criticality, the security, the agility that you need for 2030 versus 1980, which was the last wave of innovation in this space. Now, what that does is allow us to migrate extremely well because of the technology, because of what we do.
Most migrations, if you think about what I mentioned before, if you want to modernize, you're a CEO of a large utility, and you want to modernize your infrastructure, you would have a project to upgrade your CRM, and you'll spend three, four, five years doing it, and then you have a project to change your call center and maybe your smart meter data, right? Each one will be a project, and each one will be very binary. You will spend a few years documenting what you need to do, then do the upgrade, then go do the next project, do the next one.
If you think about it, even at 95% success rate, 98%, if you do it one after the other, after the other, we can all do math, 98% to the power of 10, 20, 30 systems, and you understand why these projects almost always fail. Instead, Kraken comes in, and we have an end-to-end system that we can turn on on day one and establish your new digital entity next to the old one. Obviously, it allows us to leapfrog and kind of move away from a lot of technical debt people have. Then what we do, we don't move the entire company over. That will be crazy. It's high risk. What we do is move a single customer to the new platform, a single customer to the new digital platform we set up, which is end-to-end, so it gets all the functionality of that person.
Guess what? If there's an issue, because we update 200 times a day, we update it. The day after, we find one more. Then two, five, 10, we get to do 10,000 a day, 50,000 a day, 100,000 a day. We start slow, really accelerate as things get more complex, accelerate, and at the end, slow down to finish the project. This allows us to finish an average utility migration of dozens of systems within 1-2 years. Some less than one, couple more than two, but 1-2 years on average. You cannot do that, I mean, it sounds great. Everyone should do that, right? You cannot do that without two fundamental technical capabilities. Number one, an end-to-end solution. You cannot move a customer, even one, to a new system that only does bills.
What about all the other stuff? You cannot do that if you don't have the ability to change all the time, 'cause if you cannot change all the time, then you'll be stuck, you know, every day and have to wait months for the upgrade of that technology. This is fundamentally a different architecture, approach, methodology. When you can do that, it really unleashes a totally different experience, which is why we're so proud of the track record and why if you look at the market, almost any other technology company in enterprise software in general and in this space specifically have such a high failure rate or slow, slow, long process to make a change. The results speak for themselves. I won't go through each one. You can see the success rate. We've done it more than 40 times.
This is not once or twice or one country or another. You can see the speed of migration. This is all based on public data. Kraken can do just on a unit of time, much more, migration. There's much more movement because of the approach we're taking. Okay. Now, it's not enough to have great technology, and it's not even enough to have a great migration. It's all about what happens on the other side of the migration. Now, obviously, we picked and choose, so we don't have a single client that all of this happened within one client, that we have in each and every client a subset of this happening, and I'll go one by one. The first one is the consolidation, which is obvious, but much more important, the efficiency gain.
We have customers that reached 40% higher or lower cost to serve, more efficiency, and much at the same time, so less spend per service cost and much happier end customers, which is really important because in the new age, if they are happier and trust you more, they'll let you manage their assets, move to new pricing plans, et cetera. EDF, for example, told us publicly on the record they did in one year 30 times more changes to their business than we did with another very old shall not be named technology company. The innovation is much faster 'cause all the systems are connected. It's one operating system. Employees are happier, not only the end users. Employees are happier. When you let us control the physical assets, we're now in aggregate dispatching 15 GWh a day.
That's enough power to keep the lights on for a million homes for context. That's like multiple nuclear reactors. The ability to shape human behavior and shape assets and choose when to use them allows us to shift the energy, which obviously allows to reduce the classic duck curve and the max capacity, which is always a bottleneck in the energy systems. I mentioned AI as the last point. These days, everyone like to ask me questions about AI, so let's zoom in for five minutes and talk about what we're doing there and how the market looks at it as well. First, I mentioned we built this technology foundationally thinking about data and machine learning at the bottom. We didn't call it AI or LLMs, we called it machine learning and data.
That, because it was built in recent times and built for that from the ground up, we have the foundation for all your AI and data needs of today and the future, and it's really important. Let's go one by one. First, the infrastructure. Having a unified data model all running on a modern database that is accessible in real-time to machine learning and AI models means that can be the starting point for your needs. It is verticalized. All we do is energy, and utilities, and energy is, you know, 95%+ of that. It's verticalized and domain specific and codified to the energy needs and provides the context for your models down the road.
Out of the box, and I'll show you examples, we have in the product numerous productivity tools which are running on various technologies within the AI family, LLMs, prediction models, and the like, and tools to manage and optimize your assets. You can configure those tools yourself. You don't rely on Kraken or some SI to come in and make changes. That's what we provide. As important, we are big believers that vendor lock is an evil thing, okay? You should not be forced to use our AI models. You can use your own AI models. It's all open, and you can plug your own models on top of Kraken on the data embedded in the Kraken apps in various ways. You can literally run inside the Kraken window a third-party application in that. Fully open. I mentioned data.
To understand the magnitude of data, today, right now, every day, we process already more than 15 billion new data points, some of them in such high speed that we're talking about 20 times a second. We have telemetry of generation assets, batteries, solar panels, market data. We have the device data, almost 1 million devices we connect to all the time, and all the information about them. Literally, your car's battery status and is it fatigue or not, so you don't turn it on and off all the time and impact your car's battery if you have an EV. Customer data for what is already contracted to be over 90 million accounts and homes.
All the information in one place from the meter data all the way to your debt situation, to what you said last night to the agent on the call center and the bill you got home. All of that is connected. All of that is combined from the beginning. AI loves data and context, and that provides it. We provide technologies from the three layers of different AI use cases. We started already five, six years ago with massive amounts of machine learning predictive models, massive amounts to optimize the grid, which we use every day. We then added two years ago copilot technologies. Copilots are where we provide LLM-based technologies, large language models, to amplify the behavior of an agent. It does not replace the person, it amplifies the person. I'll show you live information in production. It's running worldwide, what it does.
Think of from real-time summaries of a phone call that came in to what you should tell the person, you know, before they ask the next question, to a suggested email response, et cetera, et cetera. We've recently launched full agentic autonomous agents that can replace humans. Imagine it's middle of the night, there's some outage somewhere, everyone are calling in, you don't have enough people on the call center. The machines, the AI can answer fully autonomously within the limits and boundaries of the regulations you let it act upon by itself. All three are real production working systems, some of them five years old, some two years old. I mentioned the copilot production results from two years of information. Number one, and this is classic for Kraken, you'll see both efficiency and higher satisfaction.
Usually, they come at the expense of each other, right? If you are more efficient, people are less happy. More efficient and more happy. 30% productivity gains to the agents that are guided by the copilot. They save time per call, and the customers on the other side of the phone call or email are happier. The number on the top left, 89%, is the one as a geek I like the most. This means that when AI recommended an answer or behavior to the agent, 89% of the time, they say yes, do exactly what's recommended. If you write an email today in Gmail and it offers some suggestions, it's like saying, "Your email is good enough. Keep it as is and send it."
89% accuracy rate, if you like, where we just let the AI do its thing. Live data in multiple customers all over the globe. The other question I get asked a lot. This is not our slide, too many words here. The other question I get asked a lot when I meet investors is around, "Yeah, but AI is coming out, and some kid can just tell AI to write your entire product, and, you know, everything will change." I met Ernst & Young, and they built this really smart framework, which is, they call it the SaaS Battleground Indefensibility. It's a long name, but they did a really smart thing.
They analyzed the entire SaaS universe and divided it into those four, seven, nine dimensions based on functionality and criticality, and we even have company names for each one as a sample. They said, "Look, if you're on the right-hand side, good luck." Right? It's not gonna be fun because if you're a point solution automation software, single purpose, no network effect, no switching cost, you're screwed. That's one extreme. The more you go to the left side, you're getting to deep vertical SaaS, companies like Epic in the healthcare space. Domain system authority, that's where the actual information is kept, where you have the data ownership, high switching cost, you have the complexity of the domain expertise. Compliance, things like Okta, regulatory expertise. They actually call it liability transfer value, which is a smart way to say it.
Infrastructure, real mission critical. It's a very interesting framework. Zooming in on the left, you can say that we're really smart or really strategic or really lucky. Very objectively, if you read the description, there cannot be a more extreme example than Kraken sitting in that bullseye. Because if you look at infrastructure software, we are literally the real-time system managing those assets in real time. Just for context, take money. We're moving around tens of billions of dollars a year just in the money going through the mission-critical systems, reading those smart meters, multiple times a second or every few minutes. As mission critical as it gets. Governance, we both provide the tools to adhering to endless regulatory requirements and tools to monitor the regulatory reality at scale. You can go on and on.
When we come in, people remove SAP and Oracle, which are the examples here. They actually turn them off, and we become the system of record, that's the official name, or system of authority where that information sits. It does not sit elsewhere. We are that repository for all that information, and obviously the deep vertical expertise which comes with the compliance and the necessary things. But it's not just defensibility. We actually see something more exciting happening. The more AI is capable, the more we thrive with it, which is really interesting. I'm not talking about internal efficiencies. I'm talking about the actual business value of the technology. AI needs rich data and rich context to be effective.
If you go to a utility today, you'll find that that context and data is locked in multiple spaghetti systems, so the AI cannot tap into all of that information. The more people want to deploy modern AI tools, they come to Kraken to be that layer that removes this old spaghetti, and they put AI on top. They need to connect to a modern system, MCP service, real-time technology. Agile AI models change literally every day. You have to keep up with that. Try and change your 30-year-old system every day, doesn't work. Obviously, what we see in many countries, AI driving energy usage, which requires grid modernization and flexibility to balance the grid load.
If you think about the future, when AI gets even stronger, you can think about a future where the entire grid is agentic, and you can optimize at any moment all the human behavior, all the assets, and really get maximum efficiency, which today is really hard to achieve or impossible to achieve. Too many moving pieces, too many rigid technologies. If you fast-forward it, you can imagine a much more efficient grid, and everyone benefits, including our planet. Everyone benefits from it. To close, I mentioned we're the most loved utility, and I promised you to show you the numbers. These are three objective third-party sources. First, we had one of the top three consulting firms do, as part of the demerger from Octopus and the round we had. They went and interviewed not people we recommended.
They went and interviewed people they found, the entire industry, Kraken customers, other vendors, everyone. Kraken Net Promoter Score came back at 84. That's more than the Apple, Zoom, I don't know, pick the company you like the most. Slack, 84. The legacy vendors came at 21, and it was a subset that was actually negative. We chose not to write here who they are, but 21 was second, and there's actually a worse subset. That is our customer base. In the U.K., The Times just released a few months ago the list of the top companies to work for in the U.K., in the main newspaper. They went after the biggest companies, so 2,000 and above employees, which are huge companies, right? Hospitality chains, et cetera, travel.
For the first time, we had three energy companies in the top 10 companies to work for. All three are Kraken clients. The employees of those companies are much happier than ever before, and it makes sense. You hire good people that really want to do their job, and you give them lousy tools, they don't like it. If you give them better tools to do their job, you empower them, they actually like it. It's not, you know, they have one screen versus 20 to use every day, they like it. Lastly, the end user, the customer, the homeowners that we service or being serviced through the Kraken technology are on average, if you measure Trustpilot, which is like an industry score, three times happier after Kraken than before, and happiest in, on a comparative set.
We're very proud of that because you can achieve one of those three, usually at the expense of the other two. To achieve all three together, we believe says a lot. I shared what we offer, why it's important, the technology behind it. Let's talk about business momentum. We have just crossed a few months ago the 90 million accounts on the platform. Not all of them yet in production, but signed, being delivered, 90 million. The recent addition, which we announced last week, is it two weeks ago? Time flies, was in Saudi Arabia. It's a classic example that the national electricity company chose to move its entire infrastructure on top of Kraken, kind of country-level decision, if you like, and these are the types of big partnerships we're looking at as we continue to grow.
I mentioned customers love us, but put the love aside, which is very nice. Let's talk about the business translation of that love. The length of a contract today with you is very long, 5-10 years, and there's a lot, you know, that ask us even for more, but we are doing 5-10 years. Our gross retention rate is over 99%. We mentioned the Net Promoter Score. 75%, this is new, this is from the last 18 months. 75% of our customers now use more than one Kraken product. One of the ways to really measure if someone enjoys working with you, do they buy other products? We do. 75% now have purchased more than one product, and that drives business momentum and unit economics. It's a very large market.
We can go now and debate the exact figure in each dimension here. What's really important is it's a large market to begin with, just in energy, power, and utilities, and if you add other utilities like telcos, it's even larger, but it's large enough either way. What's important to understand is even as is, in this market, because of the energy transition, many companies are switching. It's a large market. Even before the growth of the market, within that market, there's major transition from the 29-year-old systems to modern ones. Then the market is growing very fast because of those smart assets, energy optimization, grid optimization needs that are coming to play. There's more EVs every day, more solar panels every day, more batteries every day, almost exponentially. That is driving the growth of the market.
You have both a large market that is changing, almost a generational shift, and it's growing due to those new technologies that no one thought about, you know, 10 years ago. We like this slide. I don't think we can say a lot about it. 10x in five years, you can reach your own conclusion. Kraken is officially this year becoming fully separate from Octopus. I've been in the role for two years. We have built and evolved our leadership team over those two years because we're already running completely separate from Octopus for the last two years in every operational way. It's just the legal holding that is now the last step removed that is happening in the next few months.
We built a leadership team that is extremely experienced but brings a combination of enterprise software, SaaS, scale, and energy expertise all together. It's a very unique blend because of our maniacal focus on one domain and a super important domain. To sum it up, it's just the beginning. If you think about the opportunity, if you think about the needs, if you think about the dramatic change in landscape, if you think about the exponential adoption of those technologies, if you think about the win, win, employees are happier, end users are happier, and your P&L is better, we believe there's a massive opportunity to build a company here and one that lasts for many, many years to come. With that, we'll stop here. Tim and I will be happy to take your questions.
Hopefully, this was a good foundation for the next 30 minutes. Okay. How are we doing? We sit here?
Yeah, we just sit here.
Yeah. You guys sit anywhere.
Hold on. I've switched slides.
Swiped.
Q&A. Okay.
The mics.
There we go. Yeah. Just very quickly.
So we'll do some questions in the room, but for those online, type your questions into the chat, and we'll ask them on your behalf. Thanks very much.
Hello. All right.
Hi. It's Dale Koenders from Barrenjoey. I thank you for the presentation. Really exciting sort of outlook. There's a lot of focus on sort of what you've delivered so far. Are you able to help us with sort of what's your BHAG or what does success look like in the next three or five years or what are the next targets that you're thinking about?
From a business point of view, we would like to be at the forefront of that energy modernization, and each and every company that is looking to transform, we'd like to do that with them, and that is the focus of the business. That requires global presence, that requires to continue to add capabilities to this end-to-end platform. It requires continuing the track record because trust is really important here and to keep providing value to the existing clients, right? Continuously to innovate. Almost all our expense is on technology innovation. Most people, most spend, everything goes to more API, more capabilities to continue that flywheel.
You set targets for customer numbers and annual recurring revenues that you've already achieved.
He sets all the targets, not me.
Amazing success story. When do you think we will be in a place to set the next set of targets or?
Can you hear me? Okay. Yeah, we're not sharing any new numbers today. I would say if you step back and look at the business, that we're still very early in penetration just in the existing TAM, that we really have a long runway for compounding the growth over time. You know, we, you know, the way we think about the business over the long term, we'll have world-class operating margins. We'll continue to have a strong growth rate. We're in investment mode right now, and we'll continue to, you know, our focus is really to grow the business and win share.
Hi. Amy Miles from Macquarie. Really interested in the U.S. You went very early in the U.S. market, but it hasn't probably been as successful, or doesn't appear to have been as successful in terms of getting that conversion rate like in the U.K. or in Europe. I'm interested to understand what the resistance has been in that market when you've told us that they're running on 29-year systems, which really, I'm surprised they still work.
I think I would debate the question. The U.S. focus of the company started in earnest in the last two years. Two years ago, we had no executive in the U.S. We had maybe a dozen employees. We had a couple of tiny clients just to demonstrate the technology. Since then, we have landed and publicly we're able to share that because that's not always the case, one of the largest utilities in the U.S., National Grid. For context, that's only New York and Massachusetts, right? And for someone living in New York, that's where energy is quite complex because too much snow, so snow and energy don't like each other.
That has been announced last year, and I can tell you that I'll be on stage with the CEO of National Grid next week, and she will share the progress of the project, and it's way faster and more impressive than people are used to in the U.S. Now, the U.S. is 50 countries almost, and each one will make a decision at its own pace. It will take time, but I expect us to announce every few quarters another big name in the U.S. I don't see any unique challenge besides the fact we started later, and we're getting the initial wins and expect to continue growing there.
Should we see momentum that when you get the first customer converted, that the pace to get a second customer, if it takes you two years to do the first customer, it should take you 12 months to do the second because the problems are sort of the same between the different customers?
Yeah. In general, if you look at Kraken, your mental model should be that there's a flywheel. In every country, it's not unique to the U.S., it was in U.K., then Australia, then Japan, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, and so on and so on. The first customer takes more time than the second one for two reasons. The sales process, everyone say, "Yeah, but you're working in this other country, and they're so different." You have to show them that you can do it in their country, in their distribution network, in their trading environment, et cetera, to get the actual delivery and deployment in that country. The second client benefits from both. You know that country already, and you have a local reference they trust way more.
100% should expect that once you are in a country, the first one leads to second one, third one will be faster. It will not be at the end one day each per deal, but it's definitely gonna be faster than the initial entrance to a country. By the way, the same is around margins, et cetera. The first deployment in a country or a market takes more energy than the second, than the 10th, and that's why the flywheel is quite economical over time.
Just one final question. Your deal with Saudi Arabia is sort of slightly different in that it was a joint venture arrangement. Are we gonna see more of that style because of, I guess, security concerns or other issues out there in the marketplace?
Yeah. Let's talk about the deal in Saudi Arabia 'cause we just announced it, and it's very exciting. There are actually three deals in Saudi Arabia all wrapped under one relationship. The first one is they picked Kraken after a long due diligence process to be their partner for the next few dozen years to transform the grid. Period, end of story. Number two, because as you can guess, we have exactly zero employees in the Gulf, they said, "Hey guys, you need to have people in the region." We asked them to help us set up a site there, and we decided to build a JV that helps deploying Kraken in the region for them and future clients. That's the second one.
It's a very specific JV for delivery, so we can leverage local talent and expertise versus pretend to know everything about it. Thirdly, they said, "We are such big believers in the company, we would like to enjoy part of your growth." They invested in the company, and we told them we are very happy to do that. As long as there is no impact on decision-making, then we're more than happy to join the cap table, and we did in a small, very small minority position. Three deals, I think it shows the power of the partnership. The actual licensing deal is classic. The JV I think we'll see more in countries we have no presence and lesser cultural access, if you like. If it's another country in Europe, it's not as needed. There will be some continents we know less.
The investment, look, if someone is excited to invest at the company value, it's all good.
Yeah, good day. Rob Koh from Morgan Stanley. Just a question on some of the other horizontal and verticals that you're looking at. Can you talk to how your roots in utilities helps you with like water and telco a little bit? Related to this question, I guess there's a possibility in the NEM that more than half of the subs end up on a Kraken system, depending on how your sales processes go. Is there a natural limit in a market to how much you can do?
It's a really good question. Let's divide into two. First, not horizontals, verticals. We are in energy. We did find that with two utilities, let's go one by one. Water is extremely similar to energy utilities, especially in vertically integrated regulated markets like the U.S., for example. Very asset rich, vertically integrated, so we generate the water, if you can define it as generation, distribute the water, and then sell it and bring it to your home. They send you a bill, you call them up when you have an issue, a leak, et cetera. Very similar. Some companies actually do water and energy combined. Essential Energy here in Australia using Kraken both have water services and distribution services. Not only it's very similar, it's actually under some locations under the same entity.
We found that to be a very high priority, and we started to service. By now we have 20% of the U.K. water running on Kraken-enabled platforms. We have already the beginning here in the region, and we expect to see more. It is, I would say, a slower market than the energy companies. If that's possible. It is a mission-critical important market. Telcos are different, more competitive, more modern, but there's multiple energy companies that provide telecommunication services like broadband. We do see again some similarities, and we have already a couple of impressive telco clients, and we expect to see more. To be very clear, the focus today is 100% energy because the energy transition, the momentum, and the need of the market.
Okay. I guess the second part of my question was, is there a natural limit within a market?
Our view is if you look at the market share of, you know, Microsoft at the time, SAP today in the market, Oracle in some markets, once you become really good at it, usually you have a large market share, but it's very natural in this market, and there's a lot of precedents not unique to us.
Okay, thanks. Maybe just one last question from me. I was curious to see that you include a non-financial part of your mission statement to improve the lives of more than a billion people if I'm not mistaken. Can you share how you're thinking about that? Do you actually have internal targets? Yeah, just what kind of metrics you're looking at.
I'll show you something. I carry this on me. There's no way you can see what's on it, but if we had the camera. It says, literally it says on one side, "Kraken's big green dent in the universe." That's this side. It's called a challenge coin. The other side is "1 billion people." Okay. I carry it on me, and some people carry it on them also. We do believe in the positive impact of the company, the green impact and the impact it has on people. We have a metric. We even defined the time frame. We said within a decade. We didn't say this decade, but within a decade. If you think about it, a household is say four humans, right?
A vehicle, a factory, but we believe we are doing something good, and we want to remember every day that there's a direct impact on people's lives and a positive one. Preventing water leakage. You know, we all care about the lights on, just think about not having water. The things we touch are really important systems. It's not a financial metric, but it is one our people are really passionate about. Anything to add, Tim?
Yeah, I mean, it's 10x kind of where we are today. As we continue to make progress, I would hope that we would be in a position to reset that from AUD 1 billion to maybe AUD 2 billion. But let's get to the first billion first.
Hello. Hi, Olivia Sioud from Skip Capital. I'd love to understand the migration process a little bit more. I know you mentioned it takes 1-2 years to get fully migrated, but I'd love to understand, is that a window of time where your clients end up seeing ROI on their investment? Then how do you kind of go about the migrations?
The second question, I can spend a lot of time, so someone here needs to stop me at some point. Start with the first one. Because of the unique way we do the migration, you see local value immediately because the customers get better service. You can start innovating for those customers. The employees, I just got a report from a CEO that I'm on the exec quarterly review with, and they have started the migration a few months ago, and she sent me highest in, it's called eNPS, highest employee satisfaction in the company are the team that is working on Kraken. You see some of the business metrics really quickly, unlike the traditional approach where you wait years writing documents, praying the system will work.
Now, if you look at the total ROI, obviously it takes more time than on day one. The measurement I defined, I gave you is when we get all accounts live in production, there is immediate unit-level business benefits from day one. We have customers that innovated new products literally after one month using Kraken. Those products were only eligible for the people benefiting from Kraken versus the entire org. What is the total ROI? Depends how you look at it and do you capitalize it, et cetera. It's a very open-ended question, but no one is doing Kraken out of their goodwill. There's direct business benefits in the product. How we go about the migration is extremely open-ended. Do you have a specific question, or we can chat after that if you like much more.
Yeah, I guess I'm just curious to understand, you know, for a best case customer.
Mm-hmm
when and how you're able to, I guess, achieve success on being able to see, you know, return on the OpEx reduction side. Just trying to understand like that particular part of the process versus other benefits, in you know, employee-
I'm not evading you. It's really client by client. E.ON UK, public information, let go 7,000 people as part of the Kraken project, massive instant savings, hundreds of millions of operational pounds a year. Other organizations have a very different culture. They're not letting go anyone and very strong unions. They're not letting go anyone, but they're giving better service and starting to cross-sell as part of the relationship and using natural kind of, you know, movement of talent as part of that. It's the question is very different by client. We're given the platform to totally transform their culture.
Client by client, they choose different mechanisms to leverage that, but the outcome at the end in each and every case, it's quite amazing how repetitive it is, happier employees, happier end users, lower cost, higher innovation, better regulatory stance, better energy transition momentum.
Thanks.
Amit Kanwatia from Jefferies. Maybe just a question around your pipeline and in terms of I mean, you've said a billion lives that you'd need to touch 10 times growth in customers over the last few years, five years. Well done on that. If you can speak to in terms of pipeline, where you're spending most of the time, in which markets, geographies. Obviously, we've seen customers like, I mean, you've got EDF and E.ON in the U.K. market. They've got presence in their home markets as well. If you can touch base on that. Then in terms of the competitive response, which is in terms of SAP, Oracle, I think they are developing their own kind of modern tech platforms, as well as some of the other players investing into this space.
Okay. You ask a few questions, and you kick me when I say too much. First, where we focus. We are very, very focused, but it's in multiple geographies. Our focus is on the large utilities. Think of it as few top hundred energy companies. We're not targeting the small ones with 100,000 accounts here and there. Not yet anyway. We do that in most Western markets. We don't do it in China, but we do it in other parts of Asia. We do it in North America. We do it across all of Europe and then some parts of MENA, Middle East and Africa. I can tell you that our pipeline today is bigger than the pipeline it was a few months ago, which is bigger than it was a few months before that.
The movement of the pipeline is in one direction, the right direction. In terms of what you mentioned, we do have some clients that started, made a decision company-wide, so multi-country, National Grid, multiple states on day one. We have others, especially early on, that picked one country. As you can see, we're quite happy. You can imagine that the direction of travel that we expect to have more countries, and more decisions, positive decisions over time from those clients. It depends on the way we do decision-making, centralized versus local. Maybe we just did a project within a local country a year or so ago, so we want to wait a bit before we go through another one. The timeline can be a bit different.
We have multiple real examples, we're not public, of companies in Europe that started in one country and added another, and another, and another. We think that's a direct response to delivering good value and real service, high-quality service to them. SAP and Oracle, look, those have been great companies. I started my career in tech 26, 27 years ago, and they were still great companies back then. They are on a very different strategy, different topology, different architecture, and different focus. They're not end-to-end operating systems. They're a bunch of tools they bought, acquired, built, or do not have. They're not focused on utilities. If at all, some of them are letting go of the people that the few that were focused on utilities. They were not born in the AI data cloud era.
They built it on at various levels of success. Some of them make way more money than we do building big data centers. God bless them. That's okay. It's not what we do. I respect them. They've been very successful. Objectively, there are big differences in how we think, build, and go to market than they are. Over time, I think we'll see the results of that.
Yeah. Thanks. Thanks for that. Maybe just another question on the pricing structure. I mean, you've said the contract length in terms of 5-10 years, very high retention rate, close to 100%, 99%. If-
Over 99%.
Over 99%, yeah. If I think about the pricing structure, I mean, given the value that you add to the customers in terms of their cost to serve, if you can provide a bit more color, how does pricing moves? Is it by multiple products, suite of products? Is it growing in line with inflation, or have you got any partnership in terms of targets, cost to serve benefits that the customers derive?
Let me take a few, and I'm sure Tim will add more. Number one, we don't do risk-sharing business kind of partnership on outcomes. I found that to be creating weird relationships with our customers with a very simple, predictable price. Pay us per asset we service, be it a human meter, EV, what have you, and we'll deliver a lot of value. If you don't want us to deliver value, you know, then don't migrate that asset to the platform. It's quite simple. Number two, our prices or the unit, the ASP, if you like, over the last few years went up. As we showed more, demonstrated more value, more success, added more capabilities to the platform, we're getting paid more on a per unit basis.
We do have adjustment to inflation and other, objective kind of, indexes to ensure that we don't wake up one day after 20 years with a weird relationship. It has to be healthy for both sides. Definitely we have that alignment. What else do you have? You had a bunch of questions there on pricing. What did I miss?
No, I think you got them. I think we do all those things.
He approves.
Yeah. Yeah, useful. Just a final one from me, just on the capability. I mean, if I think about the business in terms of migration, if you can provide a comment on, I mean, how many customers can you migrate? How the business, I mean, how capable in terms of the manpower, partnership approach with the SIs and things like that?
I'll make it very short 'cause we're monopolizing the time here. Number one, we will not be taking deals if we didn't think we can deliver them. Number two, we've been growing our footprint on the delivery side internally, but more importantly, externally. By now we have a few very strong strategic partnerships all the way to the top of the firm. If you think about, I'll name a couple, Accenture or Ernst & Young. You know, I met John, the CEO of Ernst & Young, and we made sure we're very aligned. They see benefits, our clients see benefits, we see benefits. Their percentage of involvement in our delivery efforts has been growing year-over-year, which I think is a very important sign.
In terms of the technology, we are seeing acceleration of migration efforts with stronger AI tools, 'cause migration is a mix of human, industry expertise and technology, and AI is actually a good tool to blend those three dimensions together to get some lift. Not massive, but the trend is clearly making it more efficient.
Thank you.
Thanks. I'm James from TDM Growth. Thanks for coming. Just interested in your conversations with customers existing or new, particularly since Christmas, what people are terming "Cloud Christmas." There seems to be a step-changing functionality. Appreciate a lot of what you've talked about in AI, and I agree with a lot of it. Just in terms of customers' willingness to commit to long-term contracts to pay subscriptions, has there been a change in either length of sales cycle, sentiment from customers? Has there been anything that's substantially changed since Christmas, and that could be positive or negative?
From a business point of view, zero change. Zero. None. From a content point of view, we're asking more questions how they can deploy AI capabilities with Kraken and thanks to Kraken. I would say a year ago we did not ask that, and that's exciting 'cause it happens to be what we do. When we spoke about it a year ago, we kind of glazed over and said, "move on to the next slide." That's the only change. Zero impact on all the other stuff you mentioned.
I think you touched on it briefly, but just internally adopting AI tooling, have you noticed, as a leader of the organization, culturally, is it sweeping through the organization in terms of how quickly you can deploy things? Is the 200 leases, is that increasing? Have you noticed any substantial changes in internal operating cadence or cultural impact on your staff?
Two years ago, we didn't have those tools, right? Two years ago in a couple of months. Obviously relative to that, it's totally different. We have seen in the last 12 months material increase in internal interest, experimentation, tooling. We've made available more tools, and people usage has been growing. Is it the end of the journey? No. It's a journey, and we're in a very delicate space. We want to make sure people use it responsibly, not just throw it over the fence and do something crazy. The trend is one directional.
Yeah. I think if you talk to other CFOs, they would tell you AI tools, and AI enablement investments are probably becoming a bigger part of their IT budget than any part. It's probably the fastest growing part of our budget as well.
Amir, we might just go online to Tom Allen from UBS who has asked.
I thought you have a question. I was like, "What?
I know. There you go. I'll ask you later on. Amir, could you please comment on how Kraken thinks about the value of each customer and quantify the upside on value per customer when customers adopt multiple products within the Kraken product suite? For example, what does orchestration of customers' distributed assets mean for realized value per customer?
When you say customers, you mean our clients or the end customers?
I think we mean clients.
Okay. I'll give the non-numeric, and then Tim can add a numeric lens. First, we love all our clients, and we truly partner with them. Those are big strategic long-term decisions. There is a flywheel in Kraken. The more clients we have, the more clients we will have. The more we enter a new country, the more clients in that country we will see, per the question here about that effect. The innovation, because we have a single code base that grows every few minutes, if we get an innovation from National Grid for something called Supplier Choice, only in the northeast of the U.S., but once we do it with them, one day we'll see it in, you know, Portugal, and we'll be able. So there's a flywheel of capabilities across clients.
When it comes to flexibility, when we connect to EVs, every client we work with has a different mix of physical assets. As we integrate with them and master the operation, the next client will find it easier. There is some, I want to say network effect very gently 'cause it's not a physical network effect, but there's a network effect of knowledge and experience and best practices of doing that as you connect to more devices, more assets, et cetera. From a business model point of view, how do you think about it?
Yeah, I mean, I think we shared today kind of our gross retention rate, and you can kind of imply that that means our net expansion rate's actually higher than that. The terminal value of every customer is incredibly high just given the contract value and the contract length. That's one. Two, because the contract value is high, the sales and marketing is relatively low for our business, the payback for our sales and marketing cost to acquire is in months. Which is unlike many horizontal SaaS companies that you see. So at scale this business will generate an incredible amount of, I would say, very high operating margin. Now, the business model in a way is tricky because the more successful we are in the short term, meaning the more customers we sign, the more investments we actually make on delivery upfront.
In the beginning, generally a customer will have some negative margin, but within a 12-24 month period that quickly turns and accelerates. It's an investment that we're making in now. To the degree that we're more successful, there's a little bit of gross margin compression, but we think it's definitely worth the investment.
By the way, the history of this space, and some of you I believe know this market for many years, it works also the other way, which means if you're a new technology company with only one client and you've signed a second one and you don't deliver well, this has a negative flywheel effect on your referencability. You'll probably get one more. If you also don't deliver them well, it's very hard to continue. This is a market of trust, really complex, really mission-critical. The positive flywheel is literally a reverse image, and some vendors in this space, you know, years ago have been through the opposite approach. You have to be very professional about it, deliver extremely well, which is why it's so important, and you get the positive flywheel. If you're doing the opposite, you know, you get the exact negative effect.
Hi, it's Guus from Platypus Asset Management. I just had a question on a comment you made earlier on agents. What does it look like letting agents plug into your system for customers and end users, and how do you protect your own IP, your own data? How far do you let them plug in and take advantage of your system?
Yeah. The first thing I would say is we need to separate technology from business and regulatory decisions. To your question about AI, there's an extreme spread these days at the level of comfort level by country, by regulator, and by customer in how much they want to let AI be involved in decision-making. Some are saying, "Never," like, "We don't want any. We're curious technically over time, but at this point don't touch it." Others are saying, "We want tomorrow morning to plug some AI agents we built for internal efficiencies." The last group that says, "Let's already have the end users talk to a machine before it talks to you." A commercial agreement, such as we cannot just go and read all the data, et cetera.
Lastly, we're not a front-end company. So if you take Salesforce, they changed it last week I think, used to charge per seat, and if an agent replaced the human, they lost a seat and it was not good. We get priced by the assets we process and do all of this with. So if there's a human at the front end, our agent, a third party agent, a third party tool, great. The more value to the client, the better, 'cause we're the underlying operating system that connects to the physical assets, the meter data, the business process. Hence, I would say our relationship with those front-end type agents is a bit more positive than some companies that make money controlling front end and are terrified from agents replacing the front end.
Hopefully that answered some of the. It's a wide topic, but.
Michael Evans from Quest Asset Partners. Can I ask about the end of last year you were talking about a possible IPO in 2026? Is that still on the plans, and has the recent change in valuations challenged the AUD 8.65 billion, which I presume the Saudis paid?
I never spoke about some IPO in 2026.
Yeah, I mean.
'Cause he would literally slap me if I did.
No. Yeah, I won't slap you. No, I mean, I think we're really just focused on building the business and winning share at this point, and just, you know, our experience is when you build a great business for the long term, that will create different paths to liquidity. I would say we're building the infrastructure to operate at scale, and we're making the investment necessary to operate as if we can, one day be a public company, but no decisions have been made.
The Saudi investment at that price, has that been challenged by the change in valuations of SaaS companies?
Well, I mean, I would leave valuation to the professionals in this room in terms of what's fair or not. Certainly, there's been no change to any of the round. Everybody is satisfied, you know, it's funded already.
Mm.
Nothing's changed.
Okay.
Yeah.
Thank you.
Good day again. Can I ask another question about data, and if you've got any data monetization strategies? I know you've got a Kraken software marketplace. I guess there's probably lots of wholesale traders out there who'd love to get their hands on some of the flow data and orchestration data that you have. Just how you think about that, please?
No. The data is of our customers. We're a custodian. We're not going to use it for anything. The one thing we do extremely different than I would say 99% of software companies, we give our customers full access to their own data, which is a crazy concept, but most software companies try to like hug and lock and make it very difficult for a customer to access their own data, and I think that's an excellent business strategy for a very short-term relationship, but a really bad one for the future. We're the opposite, as I saw here, which is why we're such a good partner for AI, 'cause they can actually access their data on a modern stack, but it's their data, their rights 100%.
You probably get the sense that Amir can keep talking forever on this, but just the last couple of questions. If, if there's any questions online as well, if there's any last questions, please send them through. Good way to stop it.
Yeah. It's great. Thank you.
No questions? All right.
All right. Thank you, everyone.
Just finally, we would like to thank obviously Amir and Tim and the team for traveling such a long way to be here with us today. It's been a wonderful partnership we've had over many years, and we're very excited about the future prospects of Kraken. Obviously you hear it here today, but thank you again, and thank you all very much for coming today.
Thank you.