Assaf Biderman

Chief Corporate Development & AI Officer Kraken Technologies

Last Reviewed: September 18, 2026

Executive Summary

Assaf Biderman is Chief Corporate Development & AI Officer at Kraken Technologies, the utility software platform that grew out of Octopus Energy and now runs energy accounts for utilities across several continents. He came to it from two decades at the boundary between academic research and commercialisation: a co-founder of MIT’s Senseable City Lab and its Assistant Director for technology transfer, he co-invented the Copenhagen Wheel and founded Superpedestrian to build a business on it. That business raised 125 million dollars, put shared e-scooters on the streets of eleven US states and seven European countries, and then wound up at the end of 2023. The Kraken role puts the same instinct — take research-grade technology and make it operate at utility scale — against the energy transition rather than urban mobility.

Career Highlights

• Co-founder of MIT’s Senseable City Lab, a researcher there since the lab’s establishment in 2004, and its Assistant Director overseeing technology transfer and commercialisation.
• Co-inventor of the Copenhagen Wheel, MIT’s smart electric bicycle wheel, and founder and Chief Executive Officer of Superpedestrian, the company built to commercialise it.
• Superpedestrian’s work drew the Red Dot Luminary award, Red Dot’s highest distinction, plus inclusion in TIME Magazine’s 25 Best Inventions of 2014 and the James Dyson and Thomas Edison awards.
• Raised a 125 million dollar Series C for Superpedestrian in mid-2022 from Jefferies, Antara Capital, the Sony Innovation Fund by IGV and FM Capital.
• Superpedestrian’s LINK service reached eleven US states and seven European countries before the company withdrew from eighteen US cities at the end of 2023 and wound up, auctioning more than 20,000 scooters in January 2024.
• Credited with more than 150 patents and scientific publications spanning robotics, human-computer interaction and urban systems.
• Early human-computer interaction work exhibited at the 2006 Venice Biennale of Architecture, the Centre Pompidou in Paris and the Ars Electronica Center.

Professional Journey

Biderman’s career began in research rather than business. Trained in physics, he spent several years at the MIT Media Lab working on human-computer interaction, publishing in the field and accumulating patents, with installations shown at the Venice Biennale of Architecture, the Centre Pompidou and Ars Electronica. When MIT established the Senseable City Lab in 2004 he was there from the start, and his role there has always had a commercial edge to it: MIT-side descriptions give him responsibility for technology transfer and commercialisation, which is to say for getting the lab’s work out of the building.

The Copenhagen Wheel was the clearest example. A self-contained electric drive and sensor package built into a bicycle’s rear hub, it turned an ordinary bike into an instrumented electric one, and it became one of MIT’s most recognisable projects. Biderman founded Superpedestrian to manufacture it, and the company collected an unusual density of design and engineering honours — the Red Dot Luminary award, a place in TIME’s 25 Best Inventions of 2014, and the James Dyson and Thomas Edison awards.

Superpedestrian then pivoted from consumer hardware to shared micromobility, running the LINK e-scooter fleet on the strength of vehicle-side intelligence: scooters that diagnosed their own faults and enforced riding rules onboard rather than through a back-end. It scaled to eleven US states and seven European countries and raised a 125 million dollar Series C in mid-2022. Eighteen months later the money ran out. Biderman told staff shortly before Thanksgiving 2023 that new funding and a merger were close; instead the company withdrew from eighteen US cities on 31 December 2023, explored a sale of the European business, and auctioned more than 20,000 scooters the following month. It is the hardest chapter in his record and the one that most shaped what came next.

At Kraken Technologies he has moved from building vehicles to building the software layer under the energy transition. Kraken began as Octopus Energy’s internal customer and grid platform and was spun out as a business licensing that system to other utilities; Biderman leads its AI strategy and corporate development, work that sits squarely between the research he still does at MIT on how AI, data and urban systems intersect, and the operational demands of utilities serving customers at national scale.

Education

No source consulted in this review states an institution, degree or field for Assaf Biderman. MIT and speaker-profile biographies say only that his early training was in physics. His formal education could not be established and is deliberately left unrecorded rather than guessed.