A coffee with… Max Cotton, founder and CEO of Another Round & VOR

Following a three-year stint as a professional MMA fighter, and a brief career in corporate sales, Max Cotton set up a remote personal training business in 2018.

Now called Another Round, the business exploded during the Covid-19 pandemic, when lockdowns triggered a huge demand for online personal training. This sudden surge in interest inspired Cotton to explore ways of scaling the business and improve and personalise the fitness services they already delivered.

The answer, he discovered, lay in developing the firm’s own AI-powered fitness training solution capable of crafting what Cotton claims are fully personalised workouts for healthcare and fitness professionals to deliver in person or online.

Backed by the former CEO of health and fitness chain PureGym, Peter Roberts, VOR has raised over £1 million in funding and claims to offer personalised workout plans in under half a second to improve efficiency, client engagement, and business growth.

While no customers have been announced yet, Cotton reveals they have three confirmed, with most interest coming from mainland Europe, the US and Asia.

How did you get into cage fighting?

I was a mixed martial arts (MMA) fan from the age of 16, and I chose to go to university in Nottingham because it was the best scene for fighting at the time. I didn’t take it as seriously while I was in college, but I learned a few bits and gave it a proper go when I was in my early 20s.

Later I set up my own fitness company after moving to London, using the strength and fitness elements of MMA and applying these to people who wanted to get fitter. That gave me a good first taster of start ups and forecasting.

What have you learned from MMA that you bring to your current role?

Fighting teaches you quite a lot of resilience, you literally get knocked down and you must pick yourself back up again. It’s also a mental game and it taught me the pain of failure and of regret. If you give up on something, you will think about it every day for the next ten years.

I remember losing my second amateur fight when I hadn’t been training properly and I got obliterated by this guy who had trained and so that was a turning point for me. I went on to win my next three fights and turned pro. There’s no quit in me anymore!

Tell us more about VOR – Another Round’s first foray into the B2B fitness market…

We started out wanting to remove that huge administrative burden personal trainers (PTs) face by creating a programme for the trainers which they would then check over and send to the client.

Rather than trying to replace anyone – which a lot of the AI tools do – we wanted to incorporate it into the important work that gyms and personal trainers already do, so that they can focus on engagement and the human elements such as motivation.

At the end of the day, a personal trainer ensures you exercise effectively and safely, an algorithm doesn’t. We see VOR as a tool to unlock human potential, to not only make trainers’ lives easier but to accelerate and enhance what every trainer is capable of.

What kind of AI are you using and how are you applying it?

We’ve built the code from scratch – this is not an LLM plug-in or a gen AI product that has scraped a broad range of workouts off the internet. To the untrained eye, a workout from ChatGPT might look like it’s safe and effective but, as trainers, we look at these quite often and know that they’re wrong. We are putting decades’ worth of experience into ensuring the right programmes are chosen for the right person.

With the programme we’ve developed we start going through it in the same way a personal trainer would when they take on a new client and ask a list of questions. We’ve designed a hierarchy of priorities based on the amount of time a person is committed to training, access to facilities; any injuries and personal goals etc and we start to build out those processes – ironing out contradictory goals, making this more personalised and more sophisticated.

Who is the tech lead on this project?

I met our CTO Jesse Shanahan, three years ago when she was building AI for start ups. She’s an astrophysicist and AI developer capable of simplifying absurdly complex concepts.

The platform uses theoretical physics to create an algorithm that helps marry up different inputs that are stacking up versus what that means in terms of the length of a workout, and it creates a programme for the user from scratch – without having to use existing templates.

What are the advantages of this level of personalisation?

The beauty of the tool is that it removes some of the limiting negative biases that exist around diet and exercise, for instance, the assumption that men do weights, women do cardio.

The platform agnostically looks at a person and designs a programme that gives them what they are asking for and helps them hit those goals. If a trainer tries to tweak that programme too much, the platform will red flag it first to ensure that those negative biases aren’t reinforced, which is an issue with AI.

How will the tech integrate into a gym’s existing offerings?

The platform is an API integration, so we work with gyms that have the technology or if they don’t, we work with them as a third partner. Gyms don’t need to advertise the fact that they have VOR – they could just market it as a new AI product for trainers… we’re in it for the impact, not the glory.

We will integrate the engine into an existing technology’s automation capabilities – and allow customers to choose what questions they ask. The engine also knows the layout of the gym, where the kit is situated and where the machines and dumbbells are.

Our first projects are in some of the bigger gym chains but we’re also working on offerings for the smaller players – independent gyms and freelance trainers. They may not have an API to integrate with, so the idea is to form partnerships and integrate into existing coaching tools.

What do you do to switch off from work?

I don’t know if I really do switch off. I train, I read business books and then trashy stuff on my kindle like Jack Reacher just to get to sleep. Any sort of fiction and some old classics.

How do you take your coffee? 

I love a good black filter or a cappuccino.