That Navy SEAL you see
before you is holding a gun made by Biofire.
Its very, very big claim is that it's the first company
to make a smart gun that actually works.
That's right.
James Bond-style fingerprint and facial recognition.
The gun only fires if the right person is holding it.
It knows somebody is holding onto it.
But no matter how much he pulls the trigger, nothing's going to happen.
The person who started Biofire is Kai Kloepfer.
He's all of 25 years old and has been working on making this gun
for ten years, a project he started shortly after the Aurora theater shooting.
At the time, it's like the worst mass shooting in history.
And it happened right just down the road here from where I grew up.
I was fortunate enough to not have to think about gun violence or gun deaths
and that was really my first sort of encounter
with the topic, right?
I was just starting to grow up, just starting to think
about these kind of topics as a 15 year old
and really start to think about:
how could we do something about this?
I started thinking about this concept of a smart gun.
By no means am I the first person to think about this, obviously,
and it's been science fiction forever, but
nobody had ever really built a working smart gun.
Okay, so you're 15. Yeah.
And instead of doing some policy that you're kind of you're inspired.
Yeah. I was never a policy person, right?
I've been forced to become a little bit more of one, you know, over the last
ten years. But no I was an engineer.
I was a socially awkward nerd.
A bona fide nerd who clinched his nerd bona fides by getting
an award at the very prestigious Intel International Science and Engineering Fair.
So, okay, so for people who don't know, I mean, this is like no joke.
It's like, yes, thousands of the world's smartest kids
Top. The year I went, it was the top 1500 out of over 8 million people.
8 million people. Right.
Yeah. Like this is the top of the top.
It’s as high as it gets I think for the science fair world.
At the time I was mostly an electrical engineer
and I could sort of fake my way through some mechanical engineering.
So built a pretty good electrical system and a really s***** mechanical system
Sort of slapped them together into this kind of gun-shaped object,
not an actual firearm in any way,
I wasn't allowed to bring a gun to the science fair, quite obviously.
I was very surprised by all this.
You know, I'd done a lot of science fair projects before.
Three quarters of the time people didn't believe that I'd actually built them.
They thought my parents had did them.
I mean this in the nicest way possible, Dad, I'm sorry, but
my dad needs help like turning his iPad on.
After ten years of toil, Kai is understandably proud
that his business finally has a product to sell.
After you. Today we've got one of our Mark
Mark II prototypes, production units of the smart gun.
So as soon as I start to interact with it, I'm going to see those white lights.
The white lights basically mean that it's active.
It sees that somebody has picked it up, but it hasn't recognized the user yet.
So it's still locked.
To set up the gun, you register your face and fingerprints on this device
in less than a minute where you can also add and delete other users.
If you're not registered, Nothing.
Fingerprints are very well optimized, very commercially mature.
You don't need a lot of processing power to run them appropriately.
Facial recognition is a cutting edge biometric,
which means it requires orders of magnitude more processing power.
So where previously we were able to just use like little microcontrollers
and things like that to do fingerprints, we've had to basically build
an entire computer hardened for the system that works inside of a gun
to be able to run facial recognition at the speeds that our customers demand.
I’ve shot
guns before, but am far from a gun enthusiast.
In many ways.
I'm Biofire’s target audience.
A dad who wants to keep his family safe,
but who also thinks having a gun at home probably ends up more dangerous than good.
Still, old gun or new, I needed a few pointers.
Yeah, I would try to lean forward like, just like me.
Like, lean into it a little bit.
There you go.
Okay.
And again, target's, like, less than ten feet away,
so you don't need to worry too much about aiming.
Let’s not point that out.
Sorry- the target is like 100 plus yards away.
Ashlee is about to do a marksman level sort of shot here.
Am I cool to try it?
There you go.
It still had more kick than I thought I was going to.
It’s all good.
It kicks, and from my experience, it works.
The question is, will it sell?
Several companies have tried and failed to make a smart gun
because it's really hard to do.
And not just because you're mixing
sensitive electronics with regular explosions.
Okay, so you've chosen to do a startup doing this incredibly hard technology
and then to wade into like a Second Amendment sort of issue.
Right. So this is like nightmare
keeps it interesting
that, as Kai has a talent for doing, is putting the controversy mildly.
Pro-gun folks hate these things because they fear that one day the government
will use the existence of a working smart gun to ban the dumb ones,
even flirting with smart guns leads to death threats and financial risks.
One of the reasons Biofire’s investors prefer to stay anonymous.
And plenty of anti-gun folks don't like them because, you know, they're guns.
For his part, Kai is not interested in mandating or even advertising his product.
Biofire, he says, is just here to provide
choices and maybe save lives.
The key thing that we are trying to solve, which I think we could completely solve,
is children and teenagers gaining access to firearms.
Firearms are now the leading cause of death for children.
and teenagers in America.
They surpassed motor vehicle accidents for the first time in 2020.
I've never talked to a gun owner who wanted their kid to find their gun.
And so we think that by building technology that, you know, basically
works with the gun owner to enforce what they're already looking to do
allows us to really actually address that portion of the
of the challenge of basically gun deaths in America.
The final version of Biofire’s gun
arrived in April with this funky sci-fi look.
It's definitely more Halo, than Red Dead Redemption.
But how well it will sell is anyone's guess.
We want it to look modern and futuristic and a little different
than everything else that's on the market, obviously.
When I saw that one, it does have a little sci-fi thing going on.
And again, we don't want to look too normal,
but we don't want it to look like only, you know, it's looking like a sci-fi nerd.
Like the Cyber Truck or something. Yeah exactly.
I was trying to not say that.