BioFire CEO urges voluntary adoption of smart guns, warns against mandates

Kai Kloepfer, founder and chief executive of BioFire, told the Special Legislative Commission that his company has developed a 9-millimeter personalized firearm, the BioFire Smart Gun, and urged state policymakers to favor voluntary adoption and incentives rather than legal mandates.

“We oppose any law that would mandate, whether de jure or de facto, the use or sale of personalized firearm technology,” Kloepfer said. He described the product as engineered from the ground up for home defense and said its safety features are integrated into the firearm rather than appended as add-ons: “The BioFire Smart Gun is a 9 millimeter semiautomatic handgun designed primarily for home defense.”

Kloepfer told commissioners the firearm uses a redundant biometric authentication system he called the Guardian Biometric Engine, integrating fingerprint and facial-recognition sensors, and an electronic fire-control system that makes a “sub-millisecond decision about whether or not to fire based on if the user is authenticated.” He said biometric data are stored locally on the firearm in encrypted form, that the product has no wireless connectivity, and that BioFire follows a “zero‑knowledge” encryption approach: “All biometric data stored locally ... is stored locally on the firearm in encrypted form. This is 0 knowledge, which means that nobody, not even BioFire, has access to the encryption keys.”

Kloepfer said BioFire began taking public preorders after unveiling the product in April 2023, had “thousands of pre order deposits” and had shipped a limited number of units while building manufacturing capacity. He disclosed a retail price of about $1,500 and said the company’s current production is limited: “No company today, including BioFire, is prepared to supply an entire state's demand of handguns with a single product line.” He testified the product is currently offered only in a single 9mm model, supports up to five authorized users, and that a single charge of the battery lasts “at least a couple weeks and up to a month” depending on use. He described a dock supplied with each firearm that charges the device and serves as a configuration interface.

Kloepfer outlined several reasons BioFire opposes mandates: limited manufacturing capacity for a single early-stage vendor; the product’s current single-use-case design (home defense rather than concealed carry or long guns); higher retail cost relative to many traditional handguns; and precedent he said showed mandates can freeze innovation. He cited the earlier New Jersey mandate as an example, saying it “froze the personalized firearm space” and deterred investment and market adoption.

Commission members pressed Kloepfer on several technical and operational topics. On estate transfers and ownership change, Kloepfer initially said the company had designed devices so that BioFire could not access encryption keys and that there was “currently no way for a firearm whose owner is no longer able to access that firearm physically, to turn that back into a traditional firearm.” Later in discussion he explained that a formal ownership-transfer process includes a factory-reset step that rotates internal encryption keys and deletes prior keys so a future purchaser cannot access a previous owner’s data; he characterized transfer and reset procedures as part of the company’s ownership-transfer design and emphasized this is intended to prevent unauthorized access to enrolled biometric data.

Mikayla Dunn, chair of the Firearm Control Advisory Board at the Massachusetts Department of Criminal Justice Information Services, told the commission that BioFire submitted firearms to approved testing labs and that the product had been added to the state’s handgun roster: “Yes. It's published on the roster right now.” She described the roster process as requiring manufacturers to submit up to five handguns to an approved testing lab for firing, drop-safety and related tests.

Representative and senator questioners asked about patents, manufacturing location and commercial distribution. Kloepfer said BioFire holds a “robust patent portfolio,” manufactures at a facility in Broomfield, Colorado, and is currently selling primarily through the company website with transfers conducted via gun dealers to complete required background checks. He said the company had not placed product in dealer inventories and was working through a backlog of preorders.

Kloepfer repeated that BioFire supports incentive-based approaches such as tax credits or rebates and independent vetting by law enforcement and public-safety experts to build trust, while opposing any policy that would functionally narrow consumer choices or create single-product mandates.

No formal votes were taken on policy recommendations during the hearing.