A conversational AI startup created by a pair of (now 20-year-old) teen co-founders has won a place a highly competitive, virtual-first, six-month accelerator program for early-stage founders preparing for their first institutional funding rounds.
The EWOR Traction Fellowship offers up to €500,000 in immediate investment.
The client that first put Cloudax on the map was won at a 50 Cent concert. Oliver Hobson, then 17, got talking to a man in the crowd who ran a substantial recruitment group. He liked what Hobson and his school friend Leo Motley were building, and gave the pair their first paying contract.
Back then, Cloudax built websites and apps and ran advertising campaigns, drawing on the pair’s already advanced technical skills. Today the company serves clients in regulated industries including legal, insurance and financial services, running thousands of calls a day through its AI agents.
It has grown fast enough that Gamma Communications, the FTSE 250 telecoms group, selected Cloudax from a benchmark of 50 competitors as a core part of its AI voice strategy.
“We chose Cloudax for ultra-low latency, multilingual capability and, above all, their speed of execution. They’re a core capability in our AI voice strategy,” said David Macfarlane, CEO, Gamma Enterprise.
Motley and Hobson met at The Manchester Grammar School and founded Cloudax at just 15 – Motley had already built a product used by more than 324,000 people by the age of 13. For the first few years, they never withdrew a penny of profit and put everything back into the business. They tried everything: Building websites and apps, running ad campaigns, going to networking events across Greater Manchester, even selling door-to-door around local shops.
The turning point came at 18, when the pair joined the NatWest Accelerator and met the owner of a large Manchester call-centre operation. He described problems every contact centre knows: Forecasting staffing, long hold times, absence through illness, and the constant pressure to lift customer satisfaction and efficiency.
This helped something clicked, and in 2024, Motley and Hobson went all in on conversational AI: Software that answers calls, handles customer conversations and takes pressure off overstretched teams.
The call-centre owner backed them with a £2,000 deposit. Six months later they delivered, and he became their first conversational-AI client. He remains a client today. A first enterprise contract with a billion-dollar company followed soon after.
That traction has now earned Cloudax a place at EWOR as Traction Fellows, a programme that backs the founders it believes can build companies worth billions, with funding of up to €500,000 and mentorship from people who have done it before. Motley and Hobson are mentored by Paul Müller, co-founder of Adjust, which was acquired by AppLovin in a deal reportedly worth around $1bn.
Cloudax now works in partnership with established names including Gamma, Avoira, Mobysoft, Worldpay and TelXL, and its work was showcased as part of Gamma’s AI strategy on the main stage at the company’s GX event.
This year, Cloudax has opened its first offices at No.1 Spinningfields in Manchester, and now has close to a dozen people working across the business.
Behind the two founders sits a board and leadership team with unusual depth for a company of its age. Chief financial officer Andy Reiss spent 14 years as director of research at AllianceBernstein in New York, and later advised No.10 and HM Treasury on enterprise policy at the Cabinet Office. Board member David Ordman was group chief financial officer of IHS Towers and a key member of the team that led its 2021 New York Stock Exchange IPO. Non-executive director Garry Gormley founded FAB Solutions, after more than five years running multi-site consumer operations at Bupa UK.
Looking ahead, Cloudax is extending beyond voice and chat into video in an attempt to become the company enterprises turn to for AI-powered conversation, in every format. It plans to raise at an eight-figure valuation later this year.
