Last week, MAGIC AI was awarded The King’s Award for Enterprise for Innovation, which is given to just 50 British businesses per year. Fewer than 8,000 businesses have ever held it.
We’re now allowed to carry the King’s Emblem on our packaging for half a decade. I can’t really put into words how proud I am of this company, the team and our product. It really is the stuff of dreams for me, and perhaps the highlight of my career so far.
When you’re almost five years into building a company and still trying to improve your product, you rarely get a moment to stop, take a few seconds and look back at what you’ve achieved. An award like this is one of the rare occasions where you feel like you can, and the first thing I did was cast my mind back to all the times it almost didn’t work.
When we started MAGIC AI in 2021, computer-vision fitness wasn’t a thing. There was no playbook for us to follow, no manufacturers with experience making the kind of hardware we wanted to create, or an ecosystem of competitors we could use to inspire us to push the limits of what we were trying to achieve.
This, combined with pitch rejections and a smattering of other classic startup struggles, meant it wasn’t always easy to see the light at the end of the tunnel. But crucially, at this early stage, we refused to cut corners.
We spent months troubleshooting technical problems and grinding through unglamorous work that would never come up in an investor pitch, and rebuilt the same systems three or four times because the first versions simply weren’t good enough. We didn’t let the fact that there wasn’t anything out there like our MAGIC AI Mirror get to our heads, because we believed so strongly in the vision.
I see this award as true recognition for those vital first few months and all the subsequent work that’s gone on behind the scenes from the team to make our product work, rather than the retail launches and revenue spikes that have come since. Without our proprietary computer-vision framework, we wouldn’t be recognised for an award like this. It makes all those long days, evenings (and occasionally, nights) all worth it.
It also proves what founders and businesses can achieve when they aspire to use intelligent technology not as a gimmick, but to help people genuinely know their own bodies and take control of their health. It shows the power of combining unconventional industries: in our case, hardware, AI and content.
My advice for younger founders is this: fill your business with people who care about the millimetres, and spend that little bit of extra time getting the core of what makes your product amazing completely right. Granted, it’s not flashy, and it’s not the kind of thing that’ll make for a good LinkedIn post. But really, it’s the only work that actually matters, and eventually, the only work that gets recognised at all.
Receiving the King’s Award for Enterprise from His Majesty The King is the proudest moment of our journey yet. And crucially, it’s a very powerful signal that British innovation is leading the way in making health accessible to everyone and doing the unexpected.
Varun Bhanot is Co-founder and CEO of MAGIC AI, the cutting-edge AI mirror that makes high-quality fitness coaching more accessible. Under his leadership, MAGIC AI has raised $5 million in venture funding and earned multiple industry accolades — including being named one of TIME’s Best Inventions of 2024. As a new father as well as founder, Varun shares candid insights on balancing parenting and entrepreneurship in his bi-monthly guest column, Startup Daddy.
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