Being first to market with a breakthrough technology can give you a huge advantage – but you must also do the hard yards to realise the potential.
Jeff Dewing, founder of facilities management platform Cloud, told me in 2022 that he hoped its upcoming Mindsett Internet of Things platform would deliver a business with a £200 million valuation by 2025.
He’s not there yet; however he believes a tipping point is coming.
“Mindsett has gone better than planned in terms of its capability. But what we’ve learned is that it’s not gone to plan in terms of speed – because we laser-focused on global deals as we wanted something to move the dial,” he tells BusinessCloud.
“When you’re looking at global deals, you are negotiating with hundreds – if not thousands – of stakeholders, which means it’s like walking through treacle.
“We’re talking to three, four global players, all of which are desperate to roll our products out – but they’re having to convince 1,000 other people first.
“If you’re going to focus on big deals, then you’ve got to be prepared for the treacle.”
Game-changer
Jeff is speaking to me after returning from the Middle East, where they “do things differently”. Given that his entrepreneurship podcast is named ‘doing the opposite’, you can see the appeal.
“In Dubai they’re prepared to make decisions in two and three weeks because they want to get things moving. They’ve removed the bureaucracy,” he explains. “So suddenly that becomes attractive if you want to accelerate.
“Once a global deal breaks, it’s a game-changer. But you’ve just got to do the slog for two or three years before you actually can get that break.”
Rewinding a little, Jeff founded Cloudfm Group – now trading as Cloud – in 2011 and the smart facilities management firm has been an ever-present in our PropTech 50 ranking over recent years.
Awarded the Queen’s Award for Enterprise in the Innovation category in 2019, it has continued to invest heavily in the research and development of technology products.
Its subsidiary Mindsett was born as a collaboration with PhDs from the University of Essex and behavioural scientists. The proprietary compliance, energy management and predictive maintenance solution is designed to manage assets to optimum performance.
The Mindsett PRISM® monitor is a patented box plugs straight into a distribution board and can monitor multiple circuits, reporting on Apparent Power, Real Power, Power Factor, Voltage, Frequency and multiple harmonic dimensions, to provide the actual energy consumption per asset and the asset’s performance in real-time.
Working with integrated software, an asset ‘fingerprint’ measures infinite engineering parameters with infinite sensors that it claims will never go out of calibration. Cloud’s data scientists and analysts, track and interpret deviations in these unique fingerprints to create predictive maintenance which evolves exponentially via AI and machine learning.
Laser focus
Explaining the focus on huge deals, Jeff says: “If someone buys 20 boxes off us then I’m going to need 1,000 clients. If I have 1,000 clients, I’m going to need 500 salesmen.
“So I’m laser-focusing my three big-hitting BDs on three global deals.”
Cloud itself is in a healthy state after Jeff rethought the business when COVID could well have sunk it. Group revenue for the year ended 31st July 2025 was £40.8m, down from £47.4m in 2024 after a major client entered administration; but profitability improved with the statutory EBITDA of £1.7m in 2025 a £1m increase on the prior year.
Mindsett, effectively funded by its sister company, employs 25 people but offers a far greater opportunity, says Jeff – and it goes well beyond energy, with a dozen paid trials all over the world.
“The route to market is via energy. If you want to save the planet, only the population can do that – our technology allows the person on reception [for example] to take an action and see the result,” he says. “With that instant gratification, they are engaged.
“We’re saving energy by getting people to behave differently, rather than getting a decision-maker somewhere to change a chiller for an inverter or lightbulbs to LEDs. The average Joe can’t make those decisions. What they can do is change their behavior on how they consume energy, because they can see the impact it’s having.
“We’re doing a trial with a leading technology provider in Singapore and they found, by chance, that our product warned them of a cyber-attack a week before their systems did. It could tell that their CPUs were behaving differently on their servers.
“We’re also in a negotiation for investment in R&D from a massive medical equipment company that wants to roll this out across all their CT and MRI scanners in Europe.
“What that does for us is expose us very quickly on scale; the product is scalable, whereas CloudFM as a technology and FM business isn’t really scalable because it needs great people to operate it, whereas Mindsett doesn’t.
“Anybody can operate it and anyone can install it. And we’ve only got to be getting £15-16m of SaaS revenues to value the business at half a billion. So essentially that’s the target.”
£1bn potential
An American real estate services giant is “pitching the technology as their innovation piece to all new bids globally”, adds Jeff.
“So we’ve already had massive penetration. It’s just getting to that point where every stakeholder involved says: ‘Yes, this is the goose that has laid the golden egg. Let’s push it.’ That’s the tipping point we’re waiting for.”
There is a constant stream of interest from private equity, venture capital and family offices, according to the entrepreneur. “We hold them back because we cannot value the business properly today – it’s not generating enough revenue.
“But what we are very clear on – as are the investors – is that when we get this one global break, our business will be valued from £150m to £1bn, subject to the size of the orders that are coming in. We’re looking for investment by 2028 to accelerate, so we can go harder and bigger.
“We are the only company in the world with a global patent that can do this stuff. No one can get near it. Everyone else is second guessing it, whereas we have scientifically proven it.
“That’s the big gap between Mindsett and everything else in the market. And we’re the only company that delivers an IoT solution that gives you more information without using a single sensor.”
Retirement
Jeff, who has lived in Portugal for a few years now, is 61 and considers himself retired – but it’s not what you may think.
“My definition of retirement is never having to be anywhere at any time!” he laughs. “I’ve been retired for three years because I’ll never stop doing what I’m doing.
“The ability to do something great; solve somebody else’s problem; and to watch people around you grow and get the rewards of that growth… that’s what gets me out of bed every day.
“I’ll never stop doing that until the day I die.”