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Bulb Energy

Energy techUK
New to Unitard
💀 Dead / Bankrupt
Peak $1 BillionToday
~-100%
from peak
  1. 🦄
    Became a unicorn
    ~2021
  2. 📈
    Peak valuation
    $1 Billion ’21
  3. 💔
    Became a Unitard
    Nov 2021
  4. 💸
    Last valuation
    Wiped out
Capital raised
$79M
Total raised
$25.8K/day
Raised per day

Total raised averaged per day over approximately 8.4 years from founding to bankruptcy or shutdown. This is not measured cash burn. Methodology

Funding: Wikipedia/Sifted
Current status
Special administration 2022

The rise & fall

6 moments · 2013–2022

The key moments, with employee sentiment along the way.

2013
Founded in London
A green-energy challenger to Britain's Big Six, selling renewable power on simple fixed-rate tariffs.
Wikipedia
2021
The peak: 1.7 million households, a $1B tag$1B
Rapid growth on cheap fixed tariffs makes Bulb one of the UK's biggest challenger suppliers — on just ~$79M raised.
Sifted
2021
Wholesale gas goes vertical
The 2021 gas-price spike turns Bulb's fixed-rate tariffs ruinous; dozens of small UK suppliers fail around it.
Sifted
From the inside · Glassdoor reviews, 2021
Glassdoor reviews exposed the grind behind the green branding: employees described the flagship Energy Specialist role as an overqualified, metric-obsessed call-centre job with months-long email backlogs — and said leadership downplayed the money trouble even as special administration loomed.
Nov 2021
Into special administration — joins the Unitard Club 💔
Too big to fail like the others: the government backstops a special administration to keep 1.7 million customers' lights on.
Sifted
2022
Customers handed to Octopus Energy
The customer base is transferred to Octopus, closing the book on the biggest UK supplier failure of the gas crisis.
Sifted
$1Bof peak value erased · 8 years

💬 entries paraphrase anonymous, unverified reviews posted publicly on Glassdoor ↗; dated facts carry their source.

How it happened

Bulb was a UK green-energy supplier that grew rapidly to serve roughly 1.7 million customers, reaching about a $1B valuation by 2021. It collapsed in November 2021 when soaring wholesale gas prices made its fixed-rate tariffs unsustainable; placed into a government-backstopped special administration, its customer base was later transferred to Octopus Energy.

Source: Sifted

Where they went

Current roles as self-reported on LinkedIn, retrieved 2026-08-21. See our methodology.

Disclosed investors (4)

Historical funding participation; lists may be incomplete and do not establish current ownership or investor losses.

* Lead in a funding round · Crunchbase ↗ · 2026-10-23 · Methodology · Leaderboard

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