Varun Bhanot

Bhanot began his career in investment banking. While training with a personal trainer at a gym in London, he found personal training old-fashioned and expensive, and thought there must be a way to automate the experience at scale using AI and data-driven hardware so that people could get it at home. He said he walked away from investment banking because he refused to accept that looking after your health had to be a luxury good.⁠[1][1][2][2][1]

He is a graduate of the Postgraduate Diploma in Entrepreneurship programme at Cambridge Judge Business School, which has since evolved into the Master of Studies in Entrepreneurship degree programme.⁠[1]

In 2021, Bhanot founded MAGIC AI (one ranking gives the founding year as 2022). To raise start-up capital, he imported about 200 treadmills from China during the COVID-19 pandemic and sold them online, making about £50,000, which he used to build the first version of the product; on the show he also said he took out a £10,000 loan from Virgin StartUp to fund the prototype. AI expert Sunil Jindal later joined as co-founder to refine the mirror’s capabilities.⁠[3][1][4][4][5][5][4]

He recalled that when the company started, computer-vision fitness was not yet a thing: there was no playbook to follow and no manufacturers with experience making that kind of hardware. The team spent months troubleshooting technical problems and rebuilt the same systems three or four times.⁠[3][3][3]

The MAGIC AI Mirror is a wall-mounted mirror with a camera behind the glass that watches the user; its proprietary ReflectAI software corrects form, counts reps, and gives feedback in real time. Coaches based on real-life athletes appear in the mirror as holograms, with ambassadors including former England cricket captain Alastair Cook, footballer Jesse Lingard, and sprinter Asha Philip.⁠[4][4][4][2]

On July 21, 2023, London-based MAGIC announced that it had raised $2.5 million (about £1.9 million), with funding from Fasanara Capital and participation from SFC Capital. Fasanara Capital chief executive Francesco Filia said MAGIC and its ReflectAI technology were at the forefront of the trend of AI transforming consumer health experiences. The company had earlier received early-stage backing from high-profile figures including Richard Branson.⁠[2][2][2][2]

In November 2024, MAGIC AI raised $5 million in a round led by IW Capital, with participation from Baleen Capital, SFC Capital, Ventures Together, and angel investors from SpotifySpotifySpotify is an audio streaming subscription service offering on-demand music, podcasts, and audiobooks through a free ad-supported service and a paid Premium subscription. Its parent company, Spotify Technology S.A., is incorporated in Luxembourg, has its principal operations in Stockholm, Sweden, and is listed on the New York Stock Exchange (ticker SPOT). It helped move the recorded-music business from buying and owning music to on-demand streaming and is one of the largest audio streaming subscription services by users.Open the full entry, TikTok, and Meta. Bhanot said that in the product’s first year the company had surpassed 5,000 customers in 38 countries and built a large computer-vision form-tracking dataset. The same year, the MAGIC AI Mirror was named one of TIMETIMETIME is an American newsmagazine and media brand founded by Henry Luce and Briton Hadden, which published its first issue on March 3, 1923; it is headquartered in New York and known for its Person of the Year selection and the TIME100 list. Since 2018 it has been personally owned by Marc and Lynne Benioff; its current Chief Executive Officer is Jessica Sibley, and its Editor-in-Chief is Sam Jacobs.Open the full entry’s Best Inventions of 2024, and the company was named one of Fast Company’s World’s Most Innovative Companies for 2024.⁠[6][6][6][3][4]

In January 2025, MAGIC AI was ranked ninth in the Startups 100, Startups.co.uk’s index of the most promising new UK businesses, up 20 places from 29th the previous year; by then its mirror was available in Decathlon.⁠[4][4][4][4][4]

On May 12, 2025, The Venture RoomThe Venture RoomThe Venture Room is a UK entrepreneurial media brand centered on the YouTube channel @theventureroom. Through long-form interviews with founders and street interviews such as “Asking Millionaires How They Got Rich?”, it presents entrepreneurs’ stories and advice to aspiring business owners, and runs an entrepreneur community and brand partnerships.Open the full entry published a street interview filmed in Knightsbridge, London, in which Bhanot appears at 02:43 in the video. He described MAGIC AI as building “the world’s first AI personal trainer”: a mirror you hang in your home that brings up a hologram, with a built-in camera that tracks your form, gives live feedback, counts reps, and corrects mistakes; he said the company expected to make 10 million in revenue that year. He also discussed starting out with paid advertising, finding business models in the gap between the US and UK markets, and using Crunchbase to track funding activity. The interview was later included in a compilation the channel published on July 13, 2025 (from 16:39 in that video).⁠[5][5][5][7]

On May 6, 2026, The London Gazette published the list of King’s Awards for Enterprise for 2026, in which Magic Tech Ltd (Greater London), the company behind MAGIC AI, received an award in the Innovation category for “the world’s first AI personal trainer”. A total of 186 companies received the King’s Award for Enterprise in 2026, the 60th anniversary of the awards. Bhanot said receiving the award from the King was the proudest moment of the company’s journey so far and a powerful signal that British innovation was leading the way in making health accessible to everyone.⁠[8][8][1][1][1]

Writing in his column, he said the award recognised the team’s early work on its computer-vision framework, and advised younger founders to fill their businesses with people who care about the millimetres and to spend a little extra time getting the core of their product completely right.⁠[3][3]

In September 2026, Bhanot was named Asian Entrepreneur of the Year at the first-ever Asian Founders Awards. The award came out of the Asian Founders Network, a programme that started at De Montfort University in Leicester.⁠[9][9][9]

On October 6, 2026, MAGIC AI announced that it had closed an $11 million Series B round to launch in the United States. The round was co-led by the transatlantic venture capital firm Beringea and existing backer IW Capital, with participation from PXN Group, Accelerate Ventures, Ventures Together, and Active Partners, the consumer investment firm behind Soho House. The company said it had secured more than $20 million in venture capital funding to date and had been ranked the fourth fastest-growing hardware company in the UK in The Sunday Times 100 Tech 2026, with 342% annual growth.⁠[10][10][10][10][10][10]

Bhanot said the round had two purposes: the United States would make up most of the business by the following year, and the company would go far deeper into the data layer behind ReflectAI so that the mirror would not just count what a user does but understand how they progress over time. As of the announcement, the product had logged more than 500,000 AI-coached workouts across 150,000 hours, covering more than 1,000 exercises.⁠[10][10][10][10]

“Look at which businesses are raising venture capital over in the US right now but don’t currently exist in the UK, and replicate that model here.” He noted that DeliverooDeliverooDeliveroo is a London-based delivery platform founded in 2013 by Will Shu and Greg Orlowski. It connects consumers, merchants and riders across restaurant, grocery and retail delivery. DoorDash acquired it in 2025; Miki Kuusi is its CEO in 2026.Open the full entry was modelled on Postmates and DoorDash, which already existed in the US, and said there is a huge arbitrage opportunity in businesses doing very well in the US that have not yet come to the UK (at 03:55 in the video; at 17:50 in the compilation).⁠[5][5][5]

“The best one has got to be Crunchbase.” He recommends subscribing to Crunchbase to see which businesses in every region are raising money and doing well, to track who is investing in whom, and to find models worth replicating from funding activity in other markets (at 04:25 in the video).⁠[5][5]

“Try and aim for a 2 to 3 return on ad spend.” He advises aiming to get two or three pounds back for every pound spent on Facebook and Google ads; doing that month after month gets a business to a 1 million revenue run rate (at 03:30 in the video).⁠[5][5][5]

MAGIC AI: Official website: https://magic.fit/ (opens in a new window).⁠[4][11]