The money is moving. Is the energy sector paying attention?
Late in May, Main Capital Partners, a Dutch private equity firm managing around €7 billion in assets, announced that it had acquired a majority stake in Ferranti, a Belgian provider of mission-critical billing and operations software for utilities. The deal is pending regulatory approval.
Whilst this might not be of interest to many outside of the niche entech sector, if you spend any time watching where capital flows in the energy transition, this deal is worth thinking about. Not necessarily because of Ferranti specifically (although this is a big stake in the ground), but because of what it represents. Private equity has arrived in utilities software, and it is not leaving.
This is not a coincidence
Ferranti is not an isolated case. In June 2025, Cobepa, a long-term Belgian equity investor, acquired a majority stake in Itineris, another utilities CIS provider based in Ghent, with a growing footprint in the US. In December 2025, D1 Capital Partners led a $1 billion standalone funding round into the gold child - Kraken Technologies - , the AI-powered operating system spun out of Octopus Energy, valuing the business at $8.65 billion. That round included Fidelity International, Durable Capital Partners, and Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan Board. In May 2024, Blackstone and Vista Equity Partners jointly acquired Energy Exemplar, a global provider of energy market simulation software.
These deals are happening across different geographies, different fund sizes, and different software categories. What they share is a common investment logic - the energy transition is a software problem, the companies solving it have sticky recurring revenues and high switching costs, and the market is still relatively early.
This all comes together to make what we’re seeing as a significant shift.
Why utilities software, and why now?
The utilities sector is undergoing a level of operational complexity it has never had to manage before. Smart metering rollouts, distributed energy resources, demand flexibility, real-time grid balancing, decarbonisation targets, and evolving regulation are all landing simultaneously. The software platforms that sit at the heart of utility operations, managing everything from meter-to-cash billing to customer information systems to market communications, are no longer just back-office admin tools. They are key pieces of infrastructure that will enable us to keep the lights on.
And infrastructure-grade software businesses, with deep sector expertise, long customer relationships, and revenue that renews year after year, is exactly the kind of asset private equity likes. Q1 2026 saw 13 deals in the utilities and energy space with an aggregate value of $67 billion, the most in a single quarter on record. This is not a temporary blip – it shows that we’re moving toward technology as infrastructure.
It’s also worth considering the geographic trends - the Belgian corridor is particularly active right now. Ferranti and Itineris are both headquartered there, both built on Microsoft Dynamics platforms, and both now majority-owned by PE investors executing very similar buy-and-build strategies. The fact that two of Europe’s leading utilities software businesses, operating in the same niche, have both attracted majority PE investment within twelve months of each other is not a coincidence.
The different faces of PE in this space
However, not all the capital flowing into energy software looks the same.
At the smaller, specialist end, you have firms like Main Capital and Cobepa. These are long-hold investors with genuine software expertise who understand the dynamics of vertical market SaaS. They are not looking for a three-year flip; they are interesting in building platforms, pursuing add-on acquisitions, and backing management teams for the long term. Their presence in a deal is often a signal of strategic intent rather than financial engineering.
At the mega-fund end, firms like Blackstone and KKR are operating at a different scale and with a different thesis. KKR’s $50 billion strategic partnership with Energy Capital Partners, announced in late 2024, was framed around solving the challenge that we spoke about in our summary of the Future of Utilities: Energy Transition event – the bottleneck of the aging electrical grid. Blackstone has invested over $10 billion since 2021 in grid capacity and is building a vertically integrated model spanning power generation, electrical services, and data infrastructure. These firms are not just buying software companies; they are taking positions across the entire energy stack.
Then there is the growth equity and institutional capital tier, most visible in the Kraken deal. When Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan and Fidelity International join a funding round for an energy technology platform, that is a signal that the make long term and deliberately to deliver results over the long term. They’ve done their deep due diligence here.
What this means for the sector
For utilities, it’s clear that the software vendors they work with today are increasingly likely to be PE-backed – which brings both opportunity and obligation. PE-backed businesses move faster - investing in their product, looking for international expansion and seeking acquisitions. For utility customers, that means more capability, potentially more integration pressure, and almost certainly more commercial sophistication on the other side of the table.
For the software companies themselves, the dynamics are also changing. The era of the independent, founder-owned national champion in utilities software is not over, but it is fast becoming a shrinking sector of the market. Gentrack remains publicly listed, which is a different ownership model with its own accountability structures. But the trend toward consolidation under PE ownership is accelerating, and the question for any utilities software business not yet in a sponsor’s portfolio is probably not whether to take investment, but when and on what terms.
For those involved (and watching) the energy transition, it’s clear that investors have spoken - the software enabling utilities to manage the energy transition is not a nice-to-have but rather mission-critical infrastructure. And mission-critical infrastructure, with strong recurring revenue and structural demand growth is exactly the kind of asset that attracts long-term capital.
Ferranti’s deal is just the latest data point but signals the continuing move from technology provider to infrastructure enabler.