Kai Kloepfer was in high school in 2012 when 24-year-old James Holmes walked into an Aurora movie theater, a half-hour drive from where Kloepfer lived.
Holmes shot and killed 12 people and wounded 70 others. The incident made Kloepfer want to stop accidental shootings and suicides. Now 26, he’s about to ship the world’s first smart gun.
PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel’s scholarship program awarded Kloepfer $100,000 for dropping out of school to start his business.
To date, Biofire has raised $30 million and has approximately 40 employees.
Biofire’s smart gun comes with a docking station equipped with a touchscreen that associates your face and fingerprint with the gun. Kai Kloepfer (pictured), 26, dropped out of school to start the business
Here’s how it works
The smart gun’s barrel is twice the size of a regular handgun.
The $1,499 pistol is 9mm, firing from a firing pin and fed from 10 or 15 round magazines.
It contains infrared biometric sensors, laser sights and an electronic interface.
The goal, Kloepfer said, was to create a high-tech gun that still felt familiar to both experienced and novice shooters.
Biofire’s smart gun comes with a docking station equipped with a touchscreen that associates your face and fingerprint with the gun.
Once the system detects an approved user’s fingerprint or face (whichever comes first), it quickly unlocks and can be fired like a regular handgun.
Up to five people can be registered per firearm.
“If you are the owner or someone the owner has chosen to enroll in the firearm, then it unlocks and functions like any other weapon,” Kloepfer said.
“But at the same time, it locks in a fraction of a second as soon as it leaves your control.”
He said fingerprint and facial recognition technologies are well understood and have their own strengths and weaknesses.
The combination of the two results in a much more reliable system than a single method.
“It should be unlocked each time you pick it up, and it should always be locked when it leaves your control,” he said. “This piece of reliability…is the key to building a viable smart gun.”
But think about when your iPhone’s Face ID fails and you need to enter your PIN. Authentication technology is far from perfect.
Legally armed citizens protecting themselves and their families could be killed if their weapons fail to identify them and malfunction.
Proponents of smart guns believe that police should also carry these types of guns.
But imagine a policeman in a life or death situation, trying to get his gun started again.
And yes, semi-automatic pistols can get stuck. Trained gun owners, especially law enforcement officers, can clear a jam in two to three seconds.
Proponents of smart guns believe that police should also carry these types of guns. But imagine a policeman in a life or death situation, trying to restart his gun
A gun that needs to be loaded
A lithium-ion battery powers the smart gun for months on a single charge.
“We’ve done a lot of work to make sure it’s not going to be something you really have to think about,” Kloepfer said.
He said that if the battery is low, there are many warnings and indications to warn you to recharge it. It takes about 30 minutes to an hour on the included dock.
Here’s a problem: if the battery dies, the gun won’t work.
Notifying users of a low battery is insufficient. Many, perhaps most, gun owners who do not carry their guns with them keep their guns locked away. They don’t check the batteries regularly and probably won’t know until it’s too late.
Anyone forced to use a firearm, in their home, in obvious self-defense, could find themselves in extreme danger if they draw the weapon at an armed intruder, only to find that their batteries are exhausted.
What about security?
Hackers find ways to break into just about everything in a world where everything is connected. That’s why the smart gun doesn’t have wireless communication, Kloepfer said. There is no Wi-Fi, GPS or Bluetooth for security and privacy reasons.
Captured biometric data is stored only on the weapon and is hashed. The information side of the weapon is encrypted using credentials that Kloepfer said he doesn’t even have access to.
“It’s all in the owner’s hands, and only their biometrics can actually access that data or change the system. So it’s a very, very locked architecture,” he said.
The Smart Gun will arrive with a smart docking station, with which the new owner will have to enter their biometric data: fingerprints and facial recognition. The system allows them, on their own, to determine who can unlock the weapon
Without a doubt, proponents of smart gun technology are desperate to reduce gun accidents and violence. Regardless of your position on the Second Amendment, we agree on that. Smart guns are a great idea, in theory.
But there is still a lot of work to be done to satisfy most gun owners and law enforcement.
Biofire’s marketing claims estimate that its smart weapon could prevent about two-thirds of gun deaths attributed to suicide in the United States each year, an estimate that would have accounted for 22,000 lives saved in 2018.
But Biofire’s estimate has been accused of being inflated.
Analysis by Engineering and Technology (E&T)the internal publication of the non-profit Institution of Engineering and Technology in the UK, estimated that only about 6,109 annual firearm deaths would be likely to be prevented.
E&T based its conclusions on data from the US Center for Disease Control and other research reports.
In either case, of course, that’s only if the high-tech firearm hits the market, on time, as expected.
“Our goal is not just to start collecting orders, but to put them into full production and produce as many as people want to buy,” said 26-year-old Biofire founder and CEO Kai Kloepfer. years. told the Denver Business Journal“because it’s a great concept and one that I think will be a good thing for the world.”
“He has the ability to have a gradual and immediate impact that avoids much of the political deadlock,” Kloepfer believes.
As a high school student in 2012, Kloepfer lived about a half-hour drive from the Denver suburb of Aurora, where a gunman killed 12 people and injured many more during a midnight screening of sequel to Batman. The dark knight rises.
The Gen Z entrepreneur immediately started toying with the idea of a biometric locking system that could make firearms more secure against misuse, accidents and theft.
Soon, his fingerprint-reading handgun concept went from a science fair project to a spot on the Forbes 30 Under 30 list.
He then caught the eye of libertarian VC Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund, which helped him raise more than $30 million for the startup.
Biofire, alongside competitors in the “smart guns” space, such as LodeStar Works and SmartGunz, have been boasting for years that their products are almost ready to go to market with launch dates still glistening on the horizon.
Last year, the senior vice president of the firearms industry trade association, the National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF), Lawrence Keane, expressed his skepticism last year at the repeated promises of these businesses.
“If I had a dime every time in my career I heard someone say they were about to bring us a so-called smart gun on the market,” Keane said, “I’d be probably retired now.”
Still, US customers ready to pre-order can pay a $149 deposit, about one-tenth of the smart gun’s $1,499 price, to reserve their weapon. via the Biofire website.
