Leo Motley

Biography

Leo Motley is the Co-Founder and Director of Cloudax and an EWOR Traction Fellow.

Leo has been building since before most people start thinking about careers. He wrote his first app at 7, and by 13 had shipped software used by over 324,000 people. It was a formative proof that execution and distribution matter more than credentials, and that conviction has defined everything since. He has shipped multiple open-source projects, built a commerce site generating six figures in annual revenue with zero advertising spend, and created PlateSnap, a UK vehicle lookup service used by drivers across the country.

Leo and co-founder Oliver Hobson met at school at 13. From the start, they were relentless, trying everything from e-commerce and app development to social media marketing and web design, spending evenings teaching themselves new skills, attending networking events, and going door to door promoting their services to local businesses. That hunger to figure it out, whatever it took, became the foundation of everything that followed.

At 15, they founded Cloudax. The pivot to telecoms came organically. While building bespoke apps, they were approached by a Manchester entrepreneur who owned several large call centre businesses and needed help making his operations run around the clock and more efficiently. They solved the problem. He became their first client and remains with Cloudax to this day. That conversation set the course for everything the company has become.

They landed their first major client, an eight-figure recruitment business, while still at school, and later made history by becoming the joint youngest people to sell into a FTSE 250 company. Cloudax is backed by EWOR. The EWOR Fellowship is the world's most selective founder fellowship, with roughly a 0.1% acceptance rate. Cloudax has delivered for some of the world's largest enterprises.

Cloudax is supported by a board with deep roots in telecoms, finance, and contact centre operations. Andy Reiss, now CFO at Cloudax, previously spent 14 years at AllianceBernstein in New York as Director of Research, and served as Deputy Director and Policy Adviser at the Cabinet Office, advising No 10 and HM Treasury on enterprise policy. David Ordman, formerly Group CFO at IHS Towers and a key figure in its New York Stock Exchange IPO. Garry Gormley is one of the UK's leading voices in contact centre transformation and customer experience. Through EWOR, the team also benefits from mentorship by unicorn founders who have built companies valued at over a billion dollars.

Under Leo's technical leadership, Cloudax launched its contact centre solution, the fastest on the market, chosen by some of the world's largest companies for its speed and innovation. Leo personally led the company through ISO 27001 certification and registration as a UK Communications Provider. Cloudax now handles thousands of calls daily, serving enterprise clients across legal, insurance, and financial services. It is a standard most early-stage startups take years to reach.

Educated at The Manchester Grammar School, Leo combines deep technical ability with the commercial instincts of someone who has been selling and shipping since childhood.