Farewell from Alice and Andy

Alice

I’ll always be grateful for the opportunity and experience of co-founding Piclo with James and Andy. I still vividly remember the day my friend Andy brought “this guy” he’d met at a sustainability meetup back to my flat for lunch. After several hours of explaining peer-to-peer energy, I remember thinking two things: this is interesting and these guys need me. At 28, ready for my next adventure and deeply interested in how our energy systems needed to transition towards a more sustainable future, I joined full-time a few months later, and we began what became the wild ride of Piclo (then called Open Utility).

As a UX, product and service designer by training, the majority of my last 12 years has been spent designing, testing and growing Piclo’s digital products. There have been several products along the way: from peer-to-peer energy trading and smaller prototypes like PPA matching, to the largest and most recent; the Flexibility Marketplace. One particularly fond memory during our peer-to-peer energy days was travelling to Cornwall to the Eden Project and seeing our renewable energy matching visualisations displayed on large screens for visitors. There’s also no better feeling than two parties making multiple successful trades on a marketplace that you designed and built the product & team that brought it to life.

One of the most challenging, and ultimately most rewarding parts of my role has been the people. Hiring, managing and growing a team is never easy, but it’s something I can look back on with genuine pride. Seeing former colleagues go on to exciting new roles, and in some cases become friends, is one of the most gratifying outcomes of my time at Piclo. Second only to the people is the product itself. While the product hadn’t been my direct responsibility since March 2024, when I took over company operations, I’m proud to have helped design a marketplace operating in one of the most complex and technical sectors there is. Feedback from users along the lines of “Piclo works much better than X” always brought a quiet smile, even during the harder moments.

Building a new business to solve difficult, emerging problems in the energy industry is never straightforward, and there’s no denying we’ve faced our share of challenges since those naïve early days in 2013. I’m proud of so many of our achievements, not least that the three of us remained a strong founding team through all the ups and downs. But all good things come to an end. With mixed emotions, Andy and I are stepping away from Piclo, leaving the company in James' very capable hands, supported by an experienced & dedicated team.

We remain friends of the business, and the whole team, and will be cheering Piclo on from the sidelines as we head off on new adventures of our own.

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Andy

Alice has captured the human side of this really well: the people, the product craft, and the sheer complexity of building in energy. I’ll add a few reflections of my own.

In the early days we built a lot with very little, and we learned fast. That habit of shipping, learning, and adapting is what took us from a scrappy start-up to a platform used in critical parts of the energy system.

We didn’t just build a product or a platform. We helped define a market. When we started, “flexibility” wasn’t yet a mature, widely understood category. Over time, Piclo became one of the places where the energy flexibility market was shaped in practice - what “good” looks like, how participants engage, and what it takes to run something that’s fair, reliable and trusted.

We also scaled in ways that still feel slightly improbable when I look back. Piclo evolved from a marketplace concept into an end-to-end system used across three continents, supporting customers in multiple countries, and serving organisations ranging from innovators to incumbents. Working with blue chip utility clients across the world who are depending on our platform to deliver the transition to an abundant energy future was sometimes daunting. It forced us to raise our game and I’m proud that we did.

One milestone that stands out for me was deploying what I believe was one of the first SaaS products used directly in a System Operator control room. That was a real “this matters” moment, and the kind that makes it all the hard work feel worth it.

And then there’s the culture. In a company like this, culture is how work actually gets done. It determines how you build, how you decide, and how you treat people under pressure. I’m proud of the team we built, the standards we kept, and the number of excellent people who chose to spend part of their careers at Piclo. I’ve learned a huge amount from them.

There’s still plenty for Piclo to do. Energy will keep throwing up big problems, and Piclo has always been strongest when it’s solving the ones that matter. I’m proud of what we built and I’m excited to see what the team does next.

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James

I am forever grateful to Andy and Alice for deciding to put their faith in me and joining me on the journey to create a world powered by abundant, cheap and clean energy.

What a roller coaster it has been over the past 12 years. 

It has been a story of two acts. The first act, Open Utility, was focused on peer-to-peer energy trading. We were ahead of our time. As a coincidence, the European Commission recently published proposals to stipulate that time-based matching of renewables will be required in order to classify PPAs as clean. The three of us were the original pioneers of that model, just 10 years too early. 

But failure is part of growth. We persisted, and adapted our model. We learnt our lessons and approached things differently into act two: the Piclo Flex era. We started our journey into flexibility 9 years ago (our first prototype of Piclo Flex was created by Alice in December 2016!!). Yes, we were early again with Flex Markets - but this time we weren't too early. We are now perfectly positioned as "flexibility" is taking over the world, and our open marketplace is at the heart of it all. 

Piclo simply wouldn't be here without my co-founders and good friends Andy and Alice. Trying to change the world is always pretty hard, and although it has turned out to be harder than I think any of us naively thought when we embarked back in 2013, I hope they are proud of the legacy they are leaving behind. I thank them from the deepest part of my heart and am excited to see what they get up to next… 

As we embark into the 3rd act for Piclo, I know Andy and Alice will be rooting for us from the sidelines.

Our foundations are strong. The timing is now. Let's go get this!