Chief Operating Officer at Cloudax with thirty-five years in software, having founded, scaled and sold two data businesses: Vehicle Data Services to Auto Data Network, and Advanced Checking Services to GB Group PLC.
David Blockley is Chief Operating Officer at Cloudax. He brings thirty-five years in software, most of it spent founding companies, building the systems underneath them, and running the operations that turned them into businesses somebody wanted to buy. He has done it twice: two data companies founded, scaled and sold, both built on licensed data from the DVLA. He started in 1997 with The Internet Farm, later iFarm, a web development company whose first customer was Linn Products, the Scottish manufacturer of some of the finest hi-fi systems in the world. His team built Linn's website, its intranet, and later the user interfaces for its products, then an ecommerce music streaming site for its sister company Linn Records. Alongside that came SCOTEX, a stock-trading platform allowing privately-owned Scottish companies to trade their shares on the open market, and iManage, the first website content management system built by a Scottish company, which he used to win a run of websites for Scottish Enterprise. The work that pointed to everything after was Carwatch UK: combining DVLA vehicle data, ABI insurance data, Police (PITO) data and MIAFTR data into a customer-facing ecommerce site, backend systems, databases and hosting built to compete with HPI. In 2004 he founded Vehicle Data Services, obtained a licence from the DVLA for vehicle data, and combined it with data from the Association of British Insurers, the Finance and Leasing Association and the Police Information Technology Office to build a database of over thirty-six million records serving the automotive and insurance industries. It was sold to US company Auto Data Network. He did it again in 2006 with Advanced Checking Services, this time licensing driver data from the DVLA and building the systems to deliver electronic driving licence checks. Taking licence data direct from the source authority, with the driver's consent, removed the fraud risk inherent in paper-based checking and gave employers fast online access to their drivers' records. By the time of sale, the business was running over seventy thousand checks a year for more than five hundred customers including Stagecoach Bus, First Bus, FedEx and Greggs PLC. Advanced Checking Services was sold to GB Group PLC, where David stayed on for a year as Director of Strategy. Not everything worked, and he is direct about it. Integral Ecology, founded in 2013 to develop Exevia, an app and back-office system for accurately recording and reporting business mileage, never reached live launch. After two successful exits it taught him the lessons that only a failure teaches: fail fast, fail cheap, and secure customer commitment before you build. At Ingeniuus, the software and app development business he founded in 2018, he won an early contract with Glasgow City Council through CGI to deliver a Bluetooth beacon tourist trail application for the 150th anniversary of Glasgow architect Charles Rennie Mackintosh. GoGlasgow launched on time and within budget with fifteen beacons installed across the city. He also supported Candidate ID, managing and overseeing their offshore development team ahead of their sale to global recruitment software company iCIMS. Most recently he was Head of Sales at Willo, the human-first candidate screening platform, taking it on a global journey with its sales and customer success teams. At Cloudax, David owns the operating side of an enterprise voice AI business: delivery, process, and the discipline that keeps thousands of enterprise calls a day running as they should. Few people have spent as long turning licensed data and hard compliance requirements into products that large organisations trust.
David Blockley is Chief Operating Officer at Cloudax. He has spent thirty-five years in software and has founded, scaled and sold two data businesses: Vehicle Data Services, sold to Auto Data Network, and Advanced Checking Services, sold to GB Group PLC.
David Blockley serves as Chief Operating Officer at Cloudax, owning the operating side of the business: delivery, process and the operational discipline behind an enterprise voice AI platform handling thousands of calls a day.
David Blockley founded iFarm Limited (originally The Internet Farm) in 1997, Vehicle Data Services in 2004, Advanced Checking Services in 2006, Integral Ecology Limited in 2013, and Ingeniuus Ltd in 2018.
Yes, twice. Vehicle Data Services was sold to US company Auto Data Network, and Advanced Checking Services was sold to GB Group PLC, where he continued for a year as Director of Strategy.
Advanced Checking Services held a DVLA licence for driver data and delivered electronic driving licence checks, taking data direct from the source authority with the driver's consent to remove the fraud risk of paper-based checking. At the time of sale it was running over seventy thousand checks a year for more than five hundred customers, including Stagecoach Bus, First Bus, FedEx and Greggs PLC.
David Blockley brings three and a half decades of building software products on licensed, tightly regulated data sources (DVLA, ABI, the Finance and Leasing Association and the Police Information Technology Office) and running the operations behind them, alongside two successful exits and senior enterprise sales leadership.