Octopus Energy Group will acquire a majority stake in the distributed energy resource management company Uplight, the pair announced today. Schneider Electric, an existing Uplight investor, is also investing, maintaining a minority stake and leaving Uplight as an independent company, albeit one with greater certainty and runway.
The financial terms of the final deal were not disclosed. But as Latitude Media reported last year, Uplight had been looking for an influx of financing — potentially via a buyout — to help it capitalize on AI-driven demand growth. At the time, sources told Latitude that Uplight was seeking a valuation of just over $1 billion. According to several analysts who spoke with Latitude about the potential sale last year, the technical integration challenges facing VPPs and the breadth of the AI opportunity mean that any potential buyer would need significant capital, and also expertise in systems integrations and energy technology platforms.
Octopus Energy represents just such an investor, Uplight CEO Luis D’Acosta told Latitude. “This investment allows us to explore new things with a new, big player in the energy space that has been running utilities and innovative programs themselves,” he explained.
Octopus’ partnership will help Uplight meet the moment for “bring your own capacity” that’s garnering so much interest from the data center sector in the race for speed to power, he added: “Instead of the very traditionally run programs through the utility only using their marketing and channels, now we have the opportunity to broaden our scope, bring the capabilities that Octopus has in order for us to be able to recruit and explore to bring [BYOC] to the next level.”
The timing of the recapitalization is purposeful, D’Acosta said. It comes as Uplight has just finished its integration of AutoGrid, the VPP operator it purchased from Schneider in 2023. That acquisition brought the device orchestration layer into Uplight’s existing customer engagement offerings, and was a key element of the company’s pitch when it set out to find investment last year.
That integration required some heavy lifting over the last two years, D’Acosta explained. With that work completed, and all of the company’s various pieces of technology and point solutions under one roof, Uplight needed an influx of cash for post-integration growth.
“After evaluating a lot of different options, we are extremely happy with this one,” D’Acosta said of the Schneider and Octopus investments, though he declined to share any additional details surrounding the deal.
The investment pathway as opposed to a wholesale acquisition at this moment allows Uplight to better take advantage of the significant tailwinds in the VPP market right now, he added. “There is an inflection point, we believe, so the amount of value that we can still deliver in the market and that we can deliver to investors will be better served with that velocity that a company of our size can actually deliver.”
Deepening the market
Uplight itself is a poster child for the VPP industry’s consolidation and evolution. The company dates back to 2019 when private equity investors facilitated the merger of six energy efficiency and utility customer engagement startups including Tendril, Simple Energy, EEme, EnergySavvy, and FirstFuel.
In 2021, Rubicon Technology Partners, a private equity firm, sold its majority stake in Uplight (at a valuation of around $1.5 billion), to a group of buyers co-led by Schneider Electric, which was aiming to add distributed resource management capabilities to its grid management portfolios. Schneider purchased AutoGrid in 2022, and then promptly sold it to Uplight the following year, adding its more than six gigawatts of DERs under management to Uplight’s portfolio.
Now, with Octopus Energy in the mix, Uplight’s original tech provides the customer-facing program and orchestration layer. It will sit on top of the back-office utility systems by Kraken, Octopus’ VPP arm which spun out at an $8.65 billion valuation in late-2025, and will plug into Schneider’s grid and asset-management tools, D’Acosta explained. In other words, billing, customer behavior, and grid operations will all be stitched together into one demand-side platform.
Octopus is already leaning in on the bring-your-own-capacity paradigm via a partnership with Voltus. As part of that partnership, the company supplies Voltus — which has previously specialized in commercial and industrial demand response — with aggregations of residential consumer devices in key markets including PJM, MISO, New York, and California.
As to whether Octopus will ultimately acquire Uplight outright, D’Acosta said it’s really too early to speculate on an eventual exit.
“Obviously, when your investors are strategic investors and very large companies, our role as a smaller company is to make sure that we are a critical component of their bigger vision, because eventually, yes, we might be acquired by one of them,” he said. But he added that acquisition isn’t the only potential exit. “There is a ton of opportunity for growth, and for [Uplight] to scale fast, now that we have the tech and the right partnerships to get it done… Maybe we can stay as an independent company — and IPO in the future too.”
