Yahoo Finance ‘I totally understand why people are sceptical’: the co-founder of collapsed energy giant Bulb on his new venture
Britain’s fast-changing energy industry may be just the place for reinvention. In the wake of the unprecedented collapse of Bulb Energy, its co-founder, Amit Gudka, is trying to make the best of his next chapter: by plugging into the global battery boom.
Sitting in a central London coffee shop, not far from the offices of his new venture, Field Energy, Gudka explains how he has swapped home energy customers for battery projects and why he believes he should be given a second chance.
It has been almost three years since Bulb Energy became Britain’s biggest gas and electricity supplier to go bust amid a string of more than 20 company collapses – leaving taxpayers holding what looked to be a £6.5bn bill – and one year since Gudka successfully raised £100m for his new battery storage startup.
Gudka, 40, says he understands that there may be former Bulb customers who wonder whether he should be running another energy company. Some energy insiders share that scepticism after Bulb’s incredible rise (courting the likes of Boris Johnson on the way) and costly collapse left a deep stain on the energy supply industry.
“I can completely understand that scepticism,” he says. “When you set up a second business, you’ve already learned a hell of a lot from the first time around. There are also a lot of learnings to take away from what happened at Bulb to take into a new business as well.”
For anyone who has built a business and then seen it fail – there’s a lot of emotional attachment
The energy entrepreneur left Bulb months before the company’s stratospheric rise came to an abrupt end in the autumn of 2021 as energy market prices soared to record highs, pushing the company into special government administration.
Bulb had been the brainchild of co-founders Gudka and Hayden Wood. Gudka – a gas and electricity trader at Barclays and a DJ who ran the Man Make Music record label and club night – teamed up with Wood to launch Bulb in 2015 in the wake of a shake-up of the market by energy regulator Ofgem that was designed to encourage competition. Wood courted the limelight, evangelising about how Bulb would disrupt the lumbering energy supply market with slick tech and renewable energy, while Gudka was less public. The pair cashed out £4m each in shares in 2018.
The collapse sent shockwaves through the industry, casting Bulb’s 1.6 million customers and its 650 staff into uncertainty and threatening to saddle the government with more than £4bn in costs – a figure that had risen to £6.5bn by November 2022 as wholesale prices soared further amid Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
As energy market prices have come down, the cost of the collapse has fallen. It is now expected to be “fiscally neutral” for the government after Octopus Energy was allowed to buy its erstwhile rival with the promise that it would pay the government back almost £3bn of state support.
For Gudka, the collapse of the company is still a sore point. “It was hard. It was pretty devastating,” he says, weighing each word carefully. He pauses. “I think anyone who has built a business and then seen it fail – whether you’re in it, or out of it – there’s a lot of emotional attachment. It was very sad. And even harder for the employees who were still there.”
Gudka had left the company nine months before its coffers ran dry, but he was still on the board of Bulb Energy’s parent company at the time of the administration and was involved in the process of winding the business down. The process is expected to complete this September.
“In the end, I think it was a good outcome for Bulb’s employees. It was a really great team and I was still in touch with a lot of them after I left,” he says.
There are no warm words for co-founder Wood. The pair, who built what was once Britain’s fastest growing startup and a darling of senior government figures, have had scant contact beyond Gudka’s attendance at quarterly board meetings.
“That was the extent of our contact. I see him at industry events and stuff,” he adds. The apparent coolness between the pair has fuelled industry rumour that Gudka’s departure followed a falling-out.
Gudka swiftly moved on, alighting on a different corner of the energy market that he saw as ripe for disruption: the growing market for storing renewable energy.
Today, Field, which is registered as Virmati Energy, operates a 20 megawatt-hour (MWh) battery site in Oldham, Greater Manchester, that can provide enough electricity to power more than two-thirds of the town’s households for one hour if called on to do so. It has another 20MWh battery project in Gerrards Cross, south Buckinghamshire, which began operation in April 2024, and a construction pipeline of projects totalling 390MWh. The business is also looking at opportunities in Spain, Italy and Germany.
Gudka characterises the move into the booming market for batteries as a return to his longstanding interests in the mechanics of Britain’s energy market.
The Cambridge University graduate was a keen observer of Britain’s energy generation capacity in his trading job at Barclays for almost seven years before he left to establish Bulb Energy.
“This brings together a lot of my energy market experience,” he says. “It had been in my mind for quite a while and by 2020 we had a glimpse at how important it is to scale up this technology.”
This was, notably, the year upended by the Covid-19 pandemic. For energy markets, the lockdown restrictions caused a sudden slump in energy demand and meant that the UK’s green electricity supplies threatened to overload the grid. That provided a temporary preview of a grid system run mostly on renewables and the importance of battery technology to store wind and solar power.
Gudka says his departure was discussed with Bulb’s board and agreed in October 2020. It was announced the following February, only a few months before a sharp rally in market prices drove its costs well beyond what it could sustain.
“The intention was to leave with everything on a stable footing,” he says. “The audit has just been signed off, there was a rolling hedging policy in place, a sizeable team and the fundraising process had been kicked off. There is always risk in business but at this point things felt pretty stable.”
Gudka believes that Bulb would have survived the energy crisis – which also wiped scores of other, smaller suppliers from the market – if the timing of its final fundraising process had been sooner.
“If it had started three months earlier, it probably would have been closed by the time the markets really started moving. At that point credit lines were pulled and it was the lack of credit in the end which ultimately led to this outcome,” he says.
Tellingly, the top lessons that Gudka says he has taken into his latest company are both financial: strong financial management and very healthy capital headroom.
He says his first move in setting up his new business, in which he holds a minority stake, was to hire a chief financial officer. He has also raised £235m in equity and £40m in debt, which he says is more than enough to carry out its plans.
Field was first backed by London-based Giant Ventures in 2021. It then raised a £77m round in 2022 – £30m in equity and £47m in debt. Its equity backers included Plural and LocalGlobe, while the debt facility came from Triple Point Energy Efficiency Infrastructure. Last year, it raised a further £200m from DIF Capital Partners.
“We’re staying ahead of the curve in terms of capital-raising,” he says.
Gudka believes investing in batteries puts him ahead of the curve on Britain’s electricity system overhaul too – and perhaps even on the road to his own reinvention.
CV
Age 40
Family Married with children.
Education Undergraduate in maths at Cambridge University.
Pay Undisclosed.
Last holiday Japan.
Biggest regret “You always wish that you’d started things sooner.”
Best advice he’s been given “Someone told me to try the 21-day no-complaint challenge. It’s made me much more positive in my daily interactions since.”
Phrase he overuses “It is what it is.”
How he relaxes Playing and watching cricket.
