A biometric smart gun with Kai Kloepfer of Biofire

Biofire founder and CEO Kai Kloepfer believes there’s at least one way to decrease gun deaths in America. Early next year, his company will begin shipping the world’s first handgun with an electronic firing system that unlocks instantaneously upon fingerprint or facial verification. This week on How I Built This Lab, how Kai spent the past decade designing a firearm intended to prevent unauthorized use, particularly by children and adolescents. Plus, why past efforts to bring a smart gun to market have failed and an assessment of the changing U. S. gun market. This episode was produced by Casey Herman and edited by John Isabella, with research by Alex Cheng. Our music was composed by Ramtin Arablouei. Our audio engineer was Neal Rauch. You can follow HIBT on Twitter https://twitter.com/HowIBuiltThis & Instagram https://www.instagram.com/howibuiltthis, and email us at [email protected] mailto:[email protected]. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Guy Raz?

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• 4:27Guy Raz?

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• 5:10Guy Raz?

  Hello and welcome to How I Built This Lab. I'm Guy Raz. So if you've listened to the lab edition of this podcast before, you've probably noticed that I often talk to founders who are working on bold and innovative solutions to big problems that we face as a society. These founders are trying to address issues like unequal access to health care, pollution, food safety, and of course, climate change. And again, on the show today, I'm talking to someone working on a big problem, but it's one that we haven't discussed before. In the United States in 2021, according to the CDC, almost 49,000 people died from gun-related injuries. And in 2020, guns surpassed car accidents as the leading cause of death among children and teens.

• 5:54Guy Raz?

  Now, no one thinks this epidemic of gun violence is a good thing, but meaningful ways to reduce gun violence have been really difficult to achieve. Gun policy is a third rail issue in American politics and society, and there are plenty of reasons, which we won't go into today, why many people feel like making progress in this area is almost impossible. But Kai Kloepfer doesn't think so. His startup BioFire is focused on developing a smart gun, a firearm, that's impossible to use if it's not unlocked by the owner's biometrics. And by the way, this idea isn't new. Companies have tried versions of it before and totally failed. And Kai thinks that's largely because the technology wasn't good enough or didn't exist. Now, Kai's goal for the BioFire smart gun isn't to

• 6:39Guy Raz?

  eliminate gun violence, but he does think that it might reduce accidental gun injuries and deaths, as well as gun suicides among adolescents. Kai grew up in Boulder, Colorado, and he loved tinkering, science, and engineering. And he started thinking a lot about guns when he was 15, after the mass shooting at a movie theater in the nearby town of Aurora. Before that, his exposure to firearms was pretty minimal.

• 7:03Speaker 01

  I had a bunch of family in Tennessee. I'd gotten the chance to go skeet shooting and stuff growing up and experience more of the fun side of firearms. But that was sort of my first encounter where I was 15 at the time, so old enough to actually start to think about, hey, like, there are some other impacts to kind of what firearm ownership looks like in society. And there are impacts that, you know, really nobody is looking for.

• 7:23Guy Raz?

  And you were basically a kid who, I mean, you were like winning science competitions and you were a tinkerer. And when that happened in Aurora, your thinking was, wow, is there something that can be done? To prevent this essentially. And what was your initial thought? Like, what were you thinking? Maybe we could do what?

• 7:42Speaker 01

  The first step, I think, of any process and project is to dig into, OK, what's the actual problem?

• 7:46Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 7:46Speaker 01

  I very quickly realized, you know, while mass shootings and other kind of violent crime like that, obviously something that we hear about a lot in the news, they actually make up a very small percentage of gun deaths. Where 2/3 of gun deaths in the United States are the result of suicides and accidents. And that seemed like, to me, an area that would better lend itself towards the kind of technical solution that I was interested in working on, because it's something where I might be able to work with gun owners, you know, to provide better products, better tools, as opposed to, you know, the more adversarial relationship of trying to prevent a criminal from committing a crime.

• 8:18Guy Raz?

  So essentially, you concluded quickly that preventing the Aurora shooting would, you know, was probably, as long as guns are legal, probably almost impossible, because I think that gun, that shooter acquired the guns legally. In many cases, you know, most cases they do. But having looked at the data, you saw that, you know, for example, last year, or most recent year, 2021, there are about 48,000 gun deaths in the US, and about close to 60% of those were suicides. You thought, well, maybe there's another way to have an impact. Maybe we can prevent things like suicide or accidental deaths from gunfire.

• 8:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. I started to think about, very much especially focused on children, teenagers. Those are situations where somebody, a kid or a teenager, is getting access to a firearm that the owner does not intend for them to have access to. It's unfortunately pretty clear cut with children, teenagers, where, you know, they're not legally allowed to own firearms. That's almost always a parent's firearm or a relative's firearm or something else. And so the obvious solution is, OK, well, how do we ensure that kids don't get access to firearms? And this is not a novel question, right? You know, US, all sorts of rules and regulations around gun safety and storage and security. Like, here in Colorado, you're required to secure your firearms, you know, from unauthorized access. That's true in many states as well. But those don't seem to be particularly effective, or at least not effective enough to really fully address the challenge. And I think the reason why that is,

• 9:43Speaker 01

  is it really just boils down to humans make mistakes. And so- That really lends itself towards, you know, well, how do you prevent mistakes? Okay, can we provide pieces of technology that start to remove some of the aspects of human error from at least portions of the equation of gun safety?

• 9:57Guy Raz?

  So you're essentially, the idea that you decided to tackle was can we build a gun that is only accessible, can only be used by a person it recognizes?

• 10:09Speaker 01

  Exactly. A firearm that's always locked by default, only ever unlocks when you pick it up and are holding on to it, and then instantly re-locks, most importantly, instantly re-locks as soon as it leaves your control. And it's really that last part, because that's what prevents your kid, your teenager, or anybody else from getting access to it, because it's always locked, no matter what you do, right? You don't, there's no manual action required to lock it.

• 10:30Guy Raz?

  So initially, I mean, this is, we're going back to 2012. What, how did you start to do that as a 15-year-old? What tools did you use to build a prototype?

• 10:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's, I would say, in a lot of ways, just like any other engineering problem, you know, you define your problem statement, define your hypothesis, then you start breaking it down into pieces. And so I ended up, actually, long story short, winning first place in engineering at the Intel International Science Fair that year, which is sort of the top of that kind of competition. But they have all sorts of, the Science Technology Society that puts on these competitions, that's all sorts of rules and regulations. And, you know, one of them, obviously, is, you know, you can't work on weapons. It also would have been illegal for me to have possession of a firearm at the time. And so what I did was, I actually went and bought a starter pistol, something that's not considered to be a firearm. I took it apart and started to look at it, like, how does it work internally? How does it work? And then basically designed my own version of this prototype that, lots of 3D-printed plastics and metal, lots of circuit boards, things like that, with this little actuator

• 11:23Speaker 01

  that basically locked and unlocked the system, based on the input of whether or not your fingerprint matched. Went through, you know, over the course of that project, a couple hundred different generations and iterations, again, lots of 3D printing, lots of iteration, to, you know, get to the point where, you know, it was good enough to win that final competition.

• 11:40Guy Raz?

  But this was not a gun that fired. You just demonstrated that a fingerprint could unlock it.

• 11:45Speaker 01

  Absolutely, yeah. In fact, it was designed to be deliberately not a gun and something that didn't look too much like a gun. It was like gun-esque, but they wouldn't let me bring something that even looked like a firearm into the science fair. And so, yeah, it was very much just designed to demonstrate how you would integrate with a firearm in concept. And I actually later ended up going on and applying that technology to an actual firearm as a prototype a year or two later.

• 12:07Guy Raz?

  You won a grant in 2014, a $50,000 grant. I mean, you were still in high school in Colorado and really started to pursue this. I mean, with $50,000, I guess you could, what, like buy a 3D printer, maybe? So what was your plan? Like, what did you do next?

• 12:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, basically, I ended up receiving that $50,000 grant from a group called the Smart Tech Challenges Foundation, where basically a group of folks in Silicon Valley came together to say, hey, we should be investing into innovation and technology. There's no real investable companies in this space. Let's try to basically kind of like kickstart some, right, to foster some innovation in this space. I had just turned 18 by this point as well, which was quite convenient, because I was able to ask my parents to buy a handgun for me and transfer it to me legally and use that as a platform. And so I basically ended up building kind of a Glock 22, which is a full-sized handgun-based kind of proof of concept prototype that had all this technology built into it. It was fingerprint only. It was a better version, a newer version of fingerprint, because by that point, there

• 13:05Speaker 01

  was starting to be more, a lot more commercial investment into fingerprint technology, lots of improvements across the board. But it was still based around kind of this fundamental concept of using an electromechanical actuator to inhibit the functionality of the gun, right? What I mean by that is you take a normal mechanical gun, and then you electromechanically prevent it from working in some way, right? You disconnect a piece of it, you put a linkage, a pin in some linkage, something like that. And that architecture is something that we later ended up moving away from, because it's not particularly reliable, but at the time was sort of the only viable approach.

• 13:34Guy Raz?

  You started at MIT as a student, but eventually you dropped out because this really became your focus of your, of trying to create a gun that was safer. Let's just sort of step back for a moment and talk about this category, right? Because

• 13:53Guy Raz?

  This version of sort of childproof guns, the technology to create something like that goes back to the 19th century, obviously not super sophisticated, but this was, you know, there were always ideas and designs on how to make guns safer, right?

• 14:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 14:09Guy Raz?

  And, you know, there have even been attempts to create and have some have been successful to create technology that prevents unauthorized users from using guns, but it really has never taken off. I mean, I remember back in the 90s in the Clinton administration, they were talking about, you know, smart locks for guns or sensors on triggers. And there was even a point, I think, where Smith & Wesson in the 90s was talking about maybe developing it, and it almost destroyed the company. I think the NRA was at the time was like, if you guys do this, we're going to tell all of our members not to buy Smith & Wesson. And I think it forced the CEO at the time to step down.

• 14:49Guy Raz?

  So are those and other reasons, I mean, what are the reasons why, in your view, smart guns have never taken off?

• 14:56Speaker 01

  It's a good question. There's a couple of different factors here. So as you point out, the concept of a smart gun is by no means a new one, right? James Bond has one, Judge Jed has one. It's been a popular science fiction topic for many years. It's something that there have been a previous attempts at building by both startups as well as incumbents like Smith & Wesson. Nobody prior to BioFire has ever sold a commercial smart gun. And what I mean by that, and this is true for every previous attempt at a smart gun, nobody has ever actually solved the fundamental technical challenges required to make something that anybody would want to buy. And that includes me. I'm a gun owner myself. I own a lot of firearms at this point. And, you know, I would certainly not purchase any of the previous smart gun attempts. And you'll hear this-

• 15:34Guy Raz?

  Because, because they weren't reliable?

• 15:36Speaker 01

  They weren't reliable. I couldn't trust them.

• 15:38Guy Raz?

  If you needed it at the time of, you know, a crisis, you couldn't trust it would work.

• 15:42Speaker 01

  Absolutely, right? And the product that we are building, it's not designed to be a toy, right? It's not designed to be a fun thing. You take the range and hopefully it works. Like, the reason why you'd buy a BioFire smart gun, or any smart gun, is because, you know, that's the firearm that you want to have quick access to for home defense. And you're going to, one, trust that the technology is truly going to prevent your kid from using it, if they should find it. And, two, you are going to trust that the firearm is actually going to be usable in the unlikely event that you need to actually use it in an emergency. And if either one of those things is not true, it's not a good product, and it's not one that you'd want to invest in. In fact, it's probably much worse than just buying a traditional firearm and putting it in a gun safe.

• 16:17Guy Raz?

  And so, so just, I mean, your sense is the reason why these haven't taken off- Is entirely because the technology wasn't good enough, not because it. I mean, there's obviously other reasons, which is very powerful. Gun lobbies and organizations oppose them, have been concerned that it's a slippery slope, that the minute somebody makes one, they fear that lawmakers will try and make every gun a smart gun.

• 16:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, two answers on that. One, the NRA as an example, does not oppose the development of smart guns, right? That's their public stance. You can go read on their website. And when they have pushed back on smart guns in the past, they were pushing back on situations where a basically non-functional firearm would have been mandated for an entire state. But biofires approach here is really important. We've had lots of conversations with regulators, both at state levels and federal levels, to make it very clear that this has to be a choice.

• 17:09Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 17:10Speaker 01

  We are building a product that we think is the best product you can buy for home defense, right? For a certain kind of home defense use case. But there's lots of situations where that firearm is not going to be the right choice.

• 17:20Guy Raz?

  I'm curious, what, I mean, probably many of those people are motivated to buy a handgun for self-protection.

• 17:27Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 17:27Guy Raz?

  But there's really conflicting data around this. I've spent time looking at it, and I'm sure you've seen the same data from the CDC and other places that show wild divergence in how often guns are used to prevent in self-defense situations, like anything from, you know, 15,000 times a year to 2 million times a year. The overwhelming evidence shows that most people who actually use a handgun in a self-defense situation, the benefits are outweighed by the risks. So what's your take on it? I mean, do you believe that there are significant examples every year in which people are using handguns to defend themselves, you know, and protect their lives? And had they not had them, they wouldn't be alive?

• 18:12Speaker 01

  My short answer is yes, I do think there are real environments on a regular basis where people are using firearms as either as a deterrent or as an actual way to prevent threats to their personal health, safety and their family's health and safety. Do I think that is anywhere near as common as most people think it is? Absolutely not. I think it's a very unlikely event. But at the same time, I think that even independent of that, people are going to continue to buy firearms for home defense. And that is something that is only increasing rapidly year over year. In fact, it is rapidly becoming the primary reason why people buy firearms. And sure, some of this is COVID and other major political and cultural things that have happened in the United States over the past couple of years.

• 18:53Speaker 01

  But also, there's just a lot of reasons why people see that as a potential way to protect themselves and their family.

• 19:00Guy Raz?

  We're going to take a quick break, but when we come back, more on the risks and opportunities of smart gun technology like bio fires. Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz and you're listening to How I Built This Lab. Hey, it's Guy Raz here. You're about to hear from Gogin Biani, entrepreneur and Mercury customer, to learn a little more about why Mercury is the best banking partner for your startup journey.

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• 23:29Guy Raz?

  In fact, more than 1.6% of global GDP flows through Stripe, with Stripe's users processing a combined $1.9 trillion last year. So if you're already thinking about what's next for your business, see what's possible at stripe.com. One more thing before we get back to the show. Please make sure to click the follow button on your podcast app so you never miss a new episode of the show, and it's totally free. Welcome back to How I Built This Lab. I'm Guy Raz, and I'm talking with the founder of BioFire, Kai Kloepfer.

• 24:09Guy Raz?

  He thinks that his company's smart gun technology will reduce gun-related accidents, and he's confident that there's a market for that. So guns, people will own them, and that's not going to change. What you're saying is, we want to offer something that is a little safer, and it's not going to be for everybody. It might not even be for the vast majority of gun owners, but there is going to be a sliver of people. In the US, who might be hesitating to buy a gun because they're worried about, you know, their kids getting a hold of it or something like that, but that might feel comfortable with this solution.

• 24:43Speaker 01

  Absolutely, and I would say I think that sliver is bigger than you think it is. And the reason for that is there's basically two kind of primary groups of people that buy firearms. There's what I would call gun enthusiasts, and this is what most people think of when they think of a gun owner. Like, I'm a gun enthusiast. I own multiple guns, I care about guns, I follow the latest developments, etc., not just because professionally, but like personally, I think it's interesting. That being said, over 50% of gun purchasers, not number of guns sold, but of gun purchasers, do not fit that category at all. It's not part of their community, or their hobby, or their sport, right? It's more in the category of going to Home Depot and buying a power drill. And this entry-level community, this group of folks that are thinking about buying a firearm for the first time, that community is, tend to be the folks that have the least experience with firearms.

• 25:27Speaker 01

  It tends to be the highest rate of accidents, the highest rate of mistakes, and they tend to be the most concerned about unauthorized access.

• 25:33Guy Raz?

  All right, let me talk, let's talk about the technology for a moment, because a, let's just say, a basic handgun, like a Glock, is a very elegant piece of technology. And I mean, I hesitate to use that because I know that, you know, some people listening really don't like to hear about guns, but just sort of looking at it, I mean, it's a very, very unbelievably simple, you know, series of pieces that come together to produce this very powerful and deadly weapon. What you guys have is, has tons of technology packed in. So for people who haven't seen the video of BioFire, explain how it works.

• 26:13Guy Raz?

  It's a 9mm gun, you know, your standard kind of handgun, and it uses any 9mm ammunition, right?

• 26:20Speaker 01

  So, basically, yeah. So the BioFire Smart Gun is a, is a fully custom, novel 9mm smart handgun, designed from the ground up for this home defense use case. The way that it works is it's always locked by default, right? So anytime that the owner, or some of the owners chosen, is not interacting with the firearm, it's locked and unusable, which means unable to be fired, right? If you were to pick it up, put it around the chamber, pull the trigger, the gun would not fire.

• 26:42Guy Raz?

  Okay.

• 26:43Speaker 01

  Again, we're very focused on, on home defense, right? So folks that might be buying a firearm to put in their nightstand drawer, to keep accessible in the home, something like that.

• 26:50Guy Raz?

  Right. So people who want it available, and in the event, in the unlikely event, that their home is broken into, they want to access it quickly, but if it was kept in a safe... You can't access it quickly. If it wasn't loaded, you can't access it quickly. But of course, that's the safest way to store it.

• 27:06Speaker 01

  Correct. And that's actually one of the main reasons why we're focused on home defense. Not only is it a good market and there's a lot of people that have some unmet need here that we can address, but there is this inherent tension between, in practice, again, if you're actually going to practically own a firearm for home defense, the situation where you're going to use it is going to be the middle of the night. You just woke up, you're groggy, you have no idea what's going on, and you have probably literally seconds to access the firearm at most. And what that means is you have to make a decision of, do you optimize for the once in a million event of somebody breaking in? Or do you optimize for the day-to-day event of your kid finding it? And you can't really solve for both, right? There's no technical solution that allows you to solve for both. BioFire's product does. Our system is just inherently secure.

• 27:47Speaker 01

  When the owner or some of the owners chosen picks the firearm up, it automatically wakes up and recognizes their biometrics. There's two ways that you can do that, and you'll need one of them to work, right? You don't need both, you just need one, which is either a fingerprint sensor that's built into the grip, kind of underneath your middle finger of your dominant hand, or a 3D facial recognition system that sits on the back, similar to like an Apple Face ID.

• 28:08Guy Raz?

  So there's a camera in the gun, actually.

• 28:10Speaker 01

  Yep, a camera and a full 3D infrared structured light solution as well. But once either one of those recognizes, again, the owner or somebody the owner has chosen to own the firearm, the gun unlocks. It then stays unlocked the entire time you're holding on to it. Anytime it's unlocked, it functions basically like a normal firearm. If it's around in the chamber and you pull the trigger, the gun fires. We can talk about this later. Under the hood, we've totally reinvented the entire operating concept of how the gun works. It's fire by wire. It's very, very novel, but none of that is visible to the customer. You just pick it up and you pull the trigger.

• 28:40Guy Raz?

  So unlike a standard handgun, there are electronics in it. It has a battery.

• 28:46Speaker 01

  Yep, it has a battery. It has a bunch of circuit boards, software processing, and that's how we run the biometrics. It's electronic fire control. There's lots of internal, basically, monitoring systems that help ensure reliability. All of those are basically designed to improve the reliability and user experience of the system.

• 29:01Guy Raz?

  I wonder, there are going to be people who are listening to this who are gun owners or gun enthusiasts. And of course, you know where their head is going to go to, which is, wait a minute. All of this data, this biometric data, you have this. You know my face, you know my thumbprints, which means you can control my weapon too. I believe that all of the biometric data is just kept locally on the gun. How do you guarantee or how do you assure people that it's not kept in a central database that BioFire controls?

• 29:37Speaker 01

  It's a great question, and yes, you're definitely correct. That's a key concern of our customers and one that I think is a reasonable concern. The short answer is we do not have any of that data. We have no ability to access it. We have never had any ability to access it. We do not process it. We do not handle it.

• 29:50Guy Raz?

  The gun has no Wi-Fi capability. It doesn't connect to the internet.

• 29:53Speaker 01

  So the way that we do that is the gun itself is totally air gapped. There's no Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, GPS, IoT, RF communications of any kind. And all of the biometric data, all the usage data, the maintenance information, every single piece of information that the firearm has to collect to be able to perform the function that we're advertising is stored encrypted locally within the firearm. And those encryption keys are generated by the device itself during manufacturing in a secure element. BioFire has never seen the keys. We never process them or handle them in any way. And basically, once the owner sets that firearm up, BioFire has no ability to factory reset it or assist the owner really in detail with what's going on in any way.

• 30:29Guy Raz?

  So if basically, if the gun owner, if it only recognizes the owner, because I think you can add people to it.

• 30:34Speaker 01

  You can, yes.

• 30:35Guy Raz?

  But if it just recognizes the owner and the owner just dies, that gun is obsolete.

• 30:39Speaker 01

  Correct. Yeah, and we're looking at ways that might, long-term, allow people to opt into like a kind of password recovery flow or something like that that still would not involve any servers but would generate like a backup code or something. But as of right now, the only method that we found that we're comfortable releasing is it is lock the owner's biometrics. And don't get me wrong, the owner has full control, right? So if they want to factory reset that and sell it to somebody else, they can do so. But if there was something unexpected that happened, yes, that firearm would be unusable.

• 31:06Guy Raz?

  How long do you think it'll take people to get comfortable with the idea that it's reliable? Like, my iPhone is pretty reliable, right? I mean, it recognizes my face and it's a... Yeah, I can't remember a time when it didn't. But guns, different, right? Especially if people are thinking about personal safety. I mean, how do you think you're going to be able to kind of get to a tipping point where skeptics who are going to be like, "There's no way I'm putting my life in the hands of a facial recognition system." How do you think you can kind of create a tipping point where they're going to be like, huh, okay, I trust this?

• 31:40Speaker 01

  First step is you have to make it reliable. And I know I've said that before, but like, I think it all really, I am an engineer and it does really come back to, this is not a space or an industry or a product where, you know, we could, we could go do some really amazing job on the marketing perspective and sell people kind of an okay product, right? You have to start off with a really great product and then you still have the challenge of, of how do you actually build that trust with your customers? It's really hands-on experiences, right? And what that means is we want to have as many smart guns, you know, available out to our customers. Our customers tend to show them to their friends and to other people. That also includes getting it in the hands of trusted experts and reviewers on YouTube and podcasts and things like that. And additionally, you know, I would say, we have a lot more orders than we can fulfill. You know, we have a ton of demand and our focus right now is fulfilling that demand.

• 32:23Speaker 01

  And I think as more and more of those get out in the wild, it'll also mean more and more opportunities for people to have hands-on experiences and to build that trust with our customers.

• 32:31Guy Raz?

  Do you think that down the road, you're gonna need the gun enthusiasts to buy your product also? I mean, I keep thinking of Rivian's and we had R.J. Skorringe on the show a couple of months ago and he's brilliant founder and he really, he understood that, you know, trucks are the number one, two, and three best-selling vehicles in the United States. And to really make a dent on trying to clean up the environment, you gotta, you gotta make electric trucks. But Rivian's are still purchased mainly by people on the coasts and people who are kind of snowboarders, skiers, you know, people in urban settings. It's still, it's iPhone users, right? Technology people. You know, and I would imagine, at least for now, your product is going to appeal to those people too.

• 33:12Guy Raz?

  But down the road, do you feel like you need the, you know, the hunters and people in rural areas? And do you need those customers too, to make this a successful product?

• 33:22Speaker 01

  I think yes. Not necessarily because of the, the number of people there, but because anybody who's thinking about buying a firearm, right? Whether they're super experienced or especially if they're not super experienced, is going to go ask, you know, people that they know about, you know, whether or not this is a good product, right? And this is a big part of how we think about this. I don't, again, I'm not expecting that every gun enthusiast or every person who owns a firearm in the United States is Going to buy a smart gun, right? Because a lot of them, you know, don't, don't see the use case. They don't see the value. It's not the right fit for them. It's too expensive. That's great. And like whatever their decision is, that's why that choice aspect really matters. What I do want, you know, every gun expert enthusiast to say is, yeah, like that's a high quality firearm, right? Like, you know, I, I would trust that, right? I don't think I personally need one, but I would trust that.

• 34:05Speaker 01

  And that's why, you know, we've invested just as much time, energy and capital into building a really good gun as we have into building a smart gun.

• 34:14Guy Raz?

  We're going to take a quick break, but when we come back, Kai's vision for the future of his company and maybe even the gun industry. Stay with us. I'm Kai Raz and you're listening to How I Built This Lab.

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• 36:06Guy Raz?

  Welcome back to How I Built This Lab. My guest today is the founder of BioFire. It's a company that makes fingerprint-enabled smart guns to try and curb firearm-related accidents and deaths. So Kai, you've been working on this technology really since you were a teenager. You formally launched your company back in 2016, even while you were a student, and then you ended up dropping out of college in 2018 to focus on this full-time. And with several years of building this full-time under your belt, I wonder, I'd be curious to sort of get your prediction on this, and this is pure speculation, but is there a world in which, let's say, five or 10 years from now, where the big gun manufacturers

• 36:48Guy Raz?

  see what you're doing and say, huh, there's an opportunity here, and then they start making smart guns?

• 36:53Speaker 01

  Absolutely. And I think in a lot of ways, BioFire's objective is we want everybody to make smart guns. I think BioFire is never going to be, not to be similar from a Tesla or Rivian, like we're never going to address the entire market, and we have no plans to. We want to find good niches and build good products and be the best in the industry on that, but there's always going to be the need for competition and for other brands in the space. And so I think hopefully, yes.

• 37:16Guy Raz?

  I think the starting price, the preorder price, is like $1,500 for the gun. It's like three times the price of just a Glock 19. Presumably, over time, the price will go down. There's a lot of technology in there, it's got to be expensive, but I mean, it's kind of tough to compete with. I mean, if you're looking to build a, to attract a significant number of customers down the road, I'm assuming you're going to have to bring that price down, make it maybe competitive with a non-smart gun.

• 37:46Speaker 01

  Yes, definitely. Our product is positioned at a premium price point. I will say, among folks that are in kind of our core customer demographics, the average basket price, when they go buy a firearm, the amount of money that they spend on average is closer to $1,200 to $1,300, because they'll buy a biometric gun safe for a couple hundred dollars, they'll buy some accessories, upgrades, things like that. Almost all those features are directly built into our product.

• 38:08Guy Raz?

  I see.

• 38:09Speaker 01

  And so my initial argument would be, it's more like we're competing with a 12 or $1,300. $1,500 price point, which again 1,500 is still a premium. For the product that we're building right now, yes, definitely our objective, you know, we're, we're a new company. We're scaling our manufacturing efforts. We definitely don't benefit from the economies of scale of, of the incumbents like Glock. And that's partially reflected in the pricing. And those will, you know, as we get more successful and ship more product like those, that pricing will come down and allow us to further reduce the cost. But those are, are little ways down the line.

• 38:36Guy Raz?

  I think you've raised about $30 million total. And you have some, some very well-known backers, Ron Conway and others. But I wonder if you had issues trying to raise money because, you know, there are so many, so, so there's so much pushback. There's been so much pushback from special interest groups and even gun owners and it's never worked. So I have to imagine you face some skepticism from investors who are like, I, you know, this is a niche market.

• 39:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, I would say the easy answer is fundraising is always hard, no matter what you're doing. That being said, yes, I think definitely, especially early on, fundraising for BioFire was probably more challenging than average. And I would actually mostly pin that on, on two main factors, neither of which is, you know, special interest groups or the NRA or anything like that. The two main factors is one, we're building hardware and two, we're building complicated deep tech hardware that is technically a weapon. When I was fundraising initially, let's say, you know, eight years ago or so, those two factors alone basically opted out the vast majority of traditional venture investors, right? Either they would not invest in hardware, right, which was pretty common. There's lots of venture funds that only do software deals.

• 39:42Guy Raz?

  Right.

• 39:43Speaker 01

  Or most venture funds would have is known as a LPA restriction. Basically, the agreement that they have with their investors would have a clause in it saying you're not allowed to invest in, in vice. So weapons, pornography, drugs, et cetera.

• 39:55Guy Raz?

  Right.

• 39:56Speaker 01

  And, you know, no matter why we're doing this, no matter that the whole point is to improve safety and, and save lives. You know, oftentimes we would trigger those sort of clauses.

• 40:04Guy Raz?

  I know the guns are starting to ship out in 2024.

• 40:08Speaker 01

  Early next year.

• 40:08Guy Raz?

  Yep. Right. To the first, you know, and how many, how many have been ordered so far? Is that public?

• 40:13Speaker 01

  I can't disclose the exact numbers, but thousands is all I can say.

• 40:16Guy Raz?

  Thousands, okay. Cause I know you had, you had two models, you had a launch edition and then the second edition. So those will start to be sent out and presumably, I mean, you're manufacturing them. So what you can use now, what you've played around with and shot, it is totally reliable. You, you pick it up and if it recognizes you, it's like, it's a millisecond, it's, it's a half a second, it's ready to go.

• 40:41Speaker 01

  Yes, basically, the goal is the system is unlocked faster than you can pick it up off a table, so in a fraction of a second, basically.

• 40:48Guy Raz?

  I get you.

• 40:48Speaker 01

  And so, part of the reason why there's this much complexity and technology built into it is, you know, we need to deliver very high quality biometrics faster than almost any other application that they're used in. And that's been, I can say, quite the engineering challenge for our software teams and electrical engineering teams to handle a lot of the complexity required with that. Additionally, I mentioned earlier in the show, you know, how with that Glock prototype that we were working on a long time ago, it used an inhibitor, right? It basically took a mechanical system and used that to prevent the gun mechanically from working. It turns out that doesn't really work, right? The kind of actuators that you could put in there would add another second or so to the process after you had already finished processing all the biometrics and software data. BioFire, we really went back to the drawing board and pioneered the world's first ever

• 41:33Speaker 01

  electronic fire control system in a handgun. The trigger mechanically is not connected to the firing pin in any way. There still is a mechanical firing pin, because we want to have it support traditional 9mm ammunition, which needs a traditional firing pin.

• 41:45Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 41:46Speaker 01

  But the connection between the trigger and the firing pin, where in a normal gun would just be a mechanical linkage, in our system is full electronic. The trigger is really just a fancy switch that is an input to that solid-state fire control system. One of the important parts about that, not only is it dramatically more reliable, because it's solid-state electronics that don't wear out, you know, within any, you know, lifetime of the customer and never need any maintenance, but it also can be armed and disarmed in about five microseconds, not milliseconds, microseconds. Which means, like, for all intents and purposes, effectively instantaneous.

• 42:15Guy Raz?

  I have to imagine it's gonna take a while for you guys to reach profitability. This is to be a cash-intensive production. I mean, you are manufacturing, you're in the manufacturing business, you're not making software.

• 42:27Speaker 01

  No.

• 42:28Guy Raz?

  And I have to imagine the first, you know, run of Firearms that you've sold, maybe the costs are higher to you than they are for the customer. At what point do you see sort of a path to profitability? I mean, because this is a multi-billion dollar industry. There's, I mean, for better or worse, and I know, again, you know, this is a controversial topic for some people, for many people, but the fact of the matter is guns, it's a big industry. It's a big market in the US.

• 42:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I would say, you asked previously, like, you know, why has nobody actually succeeded in building this technology prior to BioFire? And, you know, my answer was, you know, nobody actually ever built the technology, thus they couldn't build a product or company around it. I think one of the, not by any means the only reason, but one of the main reasons why nobody has succeeded prior to BioFire in building technology is nobody succeeded in having the kind of capital required to build the kind of engineering team required to do this. This is not something you can do with a cheap engineering team. Almost the entirety of that $30 million has been spent on R and D, right? On basically paying engineers to do engineering. At the same time, the reason why we've been able to get access to that kind of capital is because we have an actual viable business model. I'm actually not sure that's ever existed in this space before. You know, our Series A, which we announced last year, that was the first ever venture-led

• 43:39Speaker 01

  investment into a firearms company from Founders Fund. That was a big milestone. And part of that was, you know, we were able to share a strategy that allowed us to push towards profitability, you know, without insane amounts of additional capital. So I can't share exact timelines, et cetera, of course, because it's always subject to change, but a big part of this from the very beginning has been, you know, we're not just doing R and D on a fictional product that, you know, we need to build one of, but doing product development, really, on a product that is designed to be scaled into the hundreds of thousands or millions of units.

• 44:07Guy Raz?

  Kai, looking ahead, where do you want to be in five years? Or, let's say, 10 years from now? Do you want to be able to come back on the show and say, you know, we've saved X number of lives? I mean, obviously, it's inevitable that somebody is going to use this in a situation at some point that's going to cause bad press. It's just a fact of the matter. It's going to happen. Somebody's going to use it and someone's going to die. But there might be examples of people who, you know, where people could not commit suicide because they couldn't access this weapon. So. In a perfect world, you know, it's hard to make a gun a feel-good story. But let's say, imagine you'd rather that be the story than not. What do you want BioFire's story to be in five or 10 years?

• 44:52Speaker 01

  I think the biggest thing for me is I want to prove out the technology, the product, and have it be available as a real option to a wide spread of customers. And that includes, you know, being able to manufacture it at scale. That includes, you know, getting really good customer reviews. That includes serving other markets and use cases than just, you know, the initial consumer one that we're talking about here. And really having this be very obviously part of the conversation. And not to overuse the Tesla analogy, and I'm not claiming BioFire is Tesla or anything like that. But in a lot of ways, you know, prior to Tesla, electric vehicles were dead.

• 45:21Guy Raz?

  That's true.

• 45:22Speaker 01

  Right? And you could talk to any car manufacturer and they would tell you that electric vehicles were a dead end, not because they were probably impossible to build, you know, people built them, but because nobody wanted them.

• 45:30Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 45:31Speaker 01

  And so I think the big metric success for me is really being able to get this in the hand of as many customers that are interested in adopting technology as possible and have them have a really good experience, right? And have that be a product that they can trust, that they can rely on, and that they're excited to tell their friends about.

• 45:46Guy Raz?

  Kai Klufer, thank you so much.

• 45:48Speaker 01

  Thanks for having me, Kai.

• 45:49Guy Raz?

  That's Kai Klufer, founder and CEO of BioFire. Hey, thanks so much for listening to the show this week. Please make sure to click the follow button on your podcast app so you never miss an episode of the show, and it's totally free. This episode was produced by Casey Herman with editing by John Isabella and research by Alex Cheng. Our music was composed by Ramtin Arablouei. Our audio engineer was Neil Rousch. Our production team at How I Built This also includes J.C. Howard, Kerry Thompson, Elaine Coats, Carla Estevez, Chris Messini, Sam Paulson, and Ramel Wood. Neva Grant is our supervising editor. I'm Guy Raz, and you've been listening to How I Built This Lab.