About Mat Clothier.

Mat Clothier is an independent advisor, non-executive director, and former CEO and CTO with a 25-year career building B2B software companies.

Mat is best known as the founder, CEO and CTO of Cloudhouse, the EIS-backed application compatibility and IT operations software business. He founded the company in 2009 and launched the Cloudhouse product business in 2011, building it from an idea into an international software company with multi-million-pound revenues and teams across the UK, North America and Asia-Pacific. Along the way he raised over £18m of equity across successive rounds, navigated complex shareholder dynamics at board level, and negotiated a transformational £20m OEM licence agreement with a global cloud provider.

Cloudhouse software runs in some of the most demanding regulated estates in the world. Customers won and held during Mat's tenure include the UK Home Office, the Ministry of Justice, NATS, Royal Mail, Jaguar Land Rover, GE Healthcare, NYSE, National Australia Bank, Westpac, ANZ, Australia Post and New Zealand Post.

He built an M&A track record on both sides of the table. In 2020 he acquired the core enterprise product of a Silicon Valley software company to create Guardian: sourced off-market through his own network, negotiated entirely over video during lockdown, and diligenced in-house with no external advisers, at under 1x revenue for a profitable product. When a tax structuring issue emerged that everyone involved had treated as terminal, he found the solution that let the deal complete. Guardian has since repaid the consideration several times over.

Prior to Cloudhouse, Mat founded and ran three earlier technology businesses, beginning in 2001: Static Burst, an early managed service provider built from £500 in his first year at university to 26 staff and sold in 2008; Partner Advantage, a digital distribution business bringing US software vendors into the UK channel; and Exstream Soft, a joint venture formed to build a subscription version of Microsoft Office. That last piece of work took him to Redmond to put the model to the Microsoft board, on the path that led to subscription Office and ultimately Microsoft 365. Between them they gave him direct experience of the full company lifecycle, from formation through scale and exit, several times over.

Mat's technical background is unusually deep. Having been both CEO and CTO of his own companies, he retains hands-on capability in software architecture and engineering, with current depth in cloud platforms, agentic AI, and modern B2B SaaS infrastructure. This combination - operator-level commercial scar tissue and current technical fluency - is the basis of the advisory work he now does.

That is not a claim held at arm's length. In early 2026 he put the whole of Cloudhouse onto a single question for a month: how far could AI actually accelerate the way the company built and ran itself. The month produced MVPs for two new products and a next-generation version of Guardian that had been scoped as an eighteen-month programme. The operating model change that followed took a seven-figure sum out of the annual cost base while accelerating product delivery rather than slowing it. That experience is now a repeatable playbook he runs for other software companies and their investors.

In May 2026 Mat transitioned out of the Cloudhouse CEO role and into a portfolio career, continuing as a Founder Director on the Cloudhouse board. He now works with founder-led and private-equity-backed software companies, taking selective non-executive, chair, advisory, and consulting engagements. He has a particular focus on businesses scaling from startup to scale-up, AI-native product strategy, international market entry, and cloud platform decisions of strategic significance.

Mat works from Somerset and London, and is comfortable working internationally. Having built a software business in the UK and launched it across the United States and Asia-Pacific, he actively welcomes engagements anywhere in the world.