Max Fontana-Reval.

Max became chief executive of a £10m+ UK design and manufacturing business at twenty-seven, leading more than a hundred staff within a multinational group. Years of building physical products to deadline — through supply shocks, power prices and the occasional flood — left a durable conviction: anything you truly depend on, you should own, understand and be able to run yourself.

He has spent the years since in other people's boardrooms as a portfolio chair and professionally qualified non-executive director — currently Non-Executive Chair of MW Equipment, a machinery manufacturer, and Advisory Chair of Unsigned Research, a systematic digital-asset trading firm — alongside running MAXFR, his board and strategy consultancy.

The technical thread runs equally deep: co-founder and CEO of BlockSmith Capital, a blockchain research and analytics venture, a member of BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT, and a Philosophy & Economics graduate of the LSE — where he acquired the habit of asking what a claim would have to be true to mean. Cryptographic signatures, key custody and trust-minimised systems aren't a marketing aesthetic here; they're a background.

Founded in February 2023 within MAXFR, AIOD applies all of it to one thesis: intelligence is becoming infrastructure, and infrastructure you don't control is a liability. So we build the version you control — sealed, air-gapped, owned outright, and answering when nothing else does.