Vara Safety: Solution for Gun Accidents and Suicides

SOLUTION: At Vara Safety, we discovered an opportunity to make an viable impact on unintentional shootings and gun-related suicides through the use of technology.

• In the beginning, our primary goal was to prevent to unintentional child deaths by firearm. From our research with over 1500 gun owners and the LAPD, we developed a biometric holstersafe (varasafety.com) to increase the adoption of gun storage in homes, where accidents are most likely to occur.
• We won a grant from the Veteran Affairs to address veteran suicide, and started to develop a IoT integrated application for suicide prevention. Features like a 2-factor authentication can help control access to a gun in times of suicidal urges or send notifications to friends and family.

PROBLEM: 

(1) "Firearm suicide is a significant public health crisis in the U.S. Nearly two-thirds of all gun deaths in the U.S. are suicides (average of 59 deaths a day)."

• 22,000 Americans die every year from gun suicides
• 950 are children and teens

https://everytownresearch.org/firearm-suicide/

(2) An overlooked yet equally devastating area of firearm safety (or lack thereof) is in unintentional shootings related to unsecured firearms. Over 43% of firearms are left loaded and unsecured, giving easy access to children as young as 2-3 years old who injure or kill themselves with a firearm.

THE CHALLENGE: We are addressing the challenge of "Healthy Cities". The health of a city is made of its residents and unfortunately, gun violence has a devastating effect in the health of our communities with permanent consequences. 

Families: Suicide has a devastating impact on families and unfortunately, the use of firearms in suicides play a critical role on the outcome of life or death. This was a point driven by the "Means Matter" campaign.  https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/magazine/magazine_article/guns-suicide/

Children: Firearms are the 2nd leading cause of death for American children and teens.

At-risk veterans: Veterans are a high-risk demographic when it comes to suicides. An average of 20-22 veterans a day take their own lives. The Veteran Affairs is focusing on this vital issue and we are taking a leading role with them in developing voluntary solutions that veterans are willing to implement into their life.

Law Enforcement: The application of our technology can greatly increase the safety and security of officers in the field. Authentication technology ensures that only police officers will be able to access their firearms and prevent criminals from using officers' weapons used against them.

Women: Statistics show that a high number of women become victims of gun violence (as an extension of domestic violence and other factors). Giving them control over their partners' ability to access a firearm during a moment of violence is paramount.

Our first solution started out as a mission to prevent gun-related deaths and injuries by unintentional shootings. After conducting extensive research with over 1500 gun owners, we developed a Reach, a biometric holstersafe that was specifically designed to increase adoption of safe storage. The product is a hybrid of a safe and a holster, providing immediate firearm access to authorized individuals. Using leading technology in biometric security, Reach provides a variety of advantages over traditional gun safes.

With our recent success in bringing Reach to market (1000 units are ready to be shipped out in August!), our next major technology goal is:

Addressing suicide through an IoT integrated application. We won a grant from the Veteran Affairs on addressing veteran suicide, starting our development into an IoT platform. The app works in conjunction with our Reach unit and performs key functions of:

• Communication- Notifying a close contact list when a gun is removed from Reach or if the gun is being tampered with.
• Access Approval* Requiring the approval of another user (friend/family/counselor) when the gun is attempted to be unlocked. 
• Data Capture- Capturing data on firearm usage statistics, which is an area of research that currently has no real data.

*This same technology can also be applied to a spousal setting, where women (who are statistically likely to be a victim of gun violence during a domestic abuse situation) can restrict access to the firearm during an violent event.

The Internet-of-Things or "smart" products have been changing entire industries with the advantages that software-enabled products can provide. However, the firearm industry and gun safety has been slow to innovation. Vara Safety is a tech company that will change the gun safety industry by leveraging smarter biometrics and tech platforms like IoT.

What makes Vara Safety innovative is how the company utilizes the same principles used by tech leaders like Nest, Apple, and Tesla to push the market into new areas. By focusing on a user-centered design, intuitive experience, and using engineering to create new ideas, Vara Safety was able to provide a solution that changes how firearm safety is used. Right now, there are few companies that take the initiative to lead the firearm safety market.

A core technology that we utilize is biometric technology via integrated fingerprint sensor ensures that only authorized users can remove the gun. Currently we are implementing a capacitance sensor that offers a higher standard of reliability and performance. As more developments occur in the biometric industry, we will also be continually upgrading.

The next core technology we will be expanding to is connected software. This technology will be a network-connected platform that can store information and communicate between devices such as a smartphone to the Reach unit (or any other licensed product that integrates our technology). Advisors in our network have experience in IoT and will be guiding us on creating a reliable, secure and ethical means of managing data.

Research and studies have proven that means of safe storage make a difference when it comes to gun accidents and suicides. 

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/13/upshot/gun-safety-children-storage.html

Our Theory of Change is: 

Activity: Vara Safety introduces a tech-enabled innovation in gun safety.

Output: A better solution for improving firearm safety in homes and preventing gun-related suicides now exists in the market.

• We make a short term impact directly on:
  Families and homes who purchase and use our device, which statistically improves their level of safety against child suicide, theft and unintentional shootings.
• Indirectly, we make an impact on:
  The gun safe industry, as they are pressured to "catch up" and innovate a similar product and technology that promotes safe storage.
  Gun safety organizations, who may see a viable opportunity for impact through a different strategy than legislation and policy.
• We make a long term impact on:
  Decreasing gun suicide and unintentional shootings, if widespread adoption of gun storage innovation occurs.

• Currently, we are serving 1000 users with our first production run of Reach units (shipping out on August 31st).
• Within the timeframe of a year, we are expecting to deploy Reach to over 10,000 users and start a trial program (100 users) with the IoT platform.
• In a scope of 5 years, our goal is to have revolutionized the gun safety industry* to address the 42 million households in the U.S. with firearms (and potentially more through international distribution)

*Realistically, it will take significant resources and execution to become a leading company in gun safety. However, with the relationships we have made with the legacy gun safe companies, we may be able to leverage their distribution to make a significant impact within 5 years.

Our goal for this year is growth. We have successfully launched our first gun safety product into the market. To continue to be successful and make an impact in this industry, we will need to grow our distribution and partnerships to reach as many people as possible. While this is ongoing, our engineering team will be working on developing the IoT platform for addressing gun suicides.

Within the next 5 years, our goal is to have made an impact in the gun industry and in the 42 million homes in the U.S. that have a gun. As a technology company, we want to introduce innovation that drives this space forward in creating new solutions for better gun safety. We believe this needs to be a collaborative effort in order to reach as many people as possible, so continuing to make key partnerships will be a necessary part of our goal.

Throughout it all, our mission is improving gun safety through technology. Because it has to potential to impact lives.

At the beginning of our project, we had imagined there to be a lot of political and cultural barriers that we would face as a firearm safety company. 

However, with our mission centralized around safety, we have been able to get support from both sides of the political spectrum and have not faced any policies that have greatly restricted our entry to market. And despite assuming a cultural barrier from an older generation being technology-adverse, that has not been proven to be the case after our experience with product demos at industry tradeshows.

Our current barriers are:

• growth and distribution (the firearms industry utilizes a tiered distribution model that makes it challenging for market penetration and growth)
• raising capital to build new technology 

To address the barrier of growth, we are in the process of finding a key Sales Director who is familiar with the industry and can successfully manage to build a large scale distribution and sales channel.

To address the barrier of financing, we recently started a new round of investment to secure resources needed for growth and new technology development.

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• 6 full-time
• 3 interns
• 1 part-time

The Vara team consists of passionate individuals who care deeply about firearm safety. The core competency of the team is in technology and engineering.

Executive Team:

• Timmy Oh (founder/CEO)- Timmy was 17 years old when he started his idea for gun safety. After winning the STCF prize in 2014, Timmy became a leading expert on gun safety technology while building his product and company. He has been featured on LA Times, FAST Company and presented on gun safety panels in Washington D.C.
• Christine Tate (COO) - Christine is an active angel investor in New York and the president of UNY50, a leadership network in Upstate NY. Prior to that, Christine was a global business executive at Cargill with experience in finance, operations, and management.
• Austin Rivera (CTO) - Austin leads the engineering team with an extensive knowledge and experience in manufacturing and product development. Interesting fact: Austin is also a pilot for the Air National Guard!

Vara Safety is partnered with:

• The Smart Tech Challenges Foundation on initiatives and policies to advance gun safety technology.
• Project Childsafe by the National Shooting Sports Foundation on advocating safe storage in the gun industry

Vara Safety's business model uses:

• Direct-to-consumer channel: 1st production of 1000 units were made available through preorders on the varasafety.com website
• Retailers & distributors: Vara Safety will also be selling Reach via retail and online distributors
• Technology licensing: Vara has an extensive intellectual property portfolio that can be licensed to key partners to expand the impact of our unique gun safety solution.

The economics of our Reach unit allows for financial sustainability with the conservative growth of sales within a year.

However, raising investment capital will be necessary for accelerated growth and expansion our technology line, so that we can move forward with more innovation in different aspects of gun safety.

During our startup process, we have discovered that trying to create a business around a social impact mission has its unique set of challenges.

We would really like to opportunity to find mentors in this space who we can learn about creating a viable company to make a widespread impact while support a core social mission (TOMS is a great example of a business leader we would love to learn from).

In addition, we discovered that there was a specific challenge for gun safety being provided by Everytown. We wanted the opportunity to connect and form relationships with key advocates from that organization as well.

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We are interested in partnering with any organizations that care about firearm safety, veteran suicide, and social mission.

Our key expertise is as a technology company and finding partners who can help us with effective deployment of our solutions will be critical in making the most impact in the shortest amount of time. This can be specific such as veteran outreach programs or more general such as healthcare providers who can help promote gun safety tech.

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The financial prize from Everytown will go into development of our gun safety technologies described in our proposal. More importantly, winning the prize will be a key validator that could open opportunities into networking in the gun safety space.

A key aspect of our development involves talking and receiving feedback from as many end users and communities our product may affect. Having Everytown be a part of that conversation as we advance our solutions would be amazing. So as we progress in development, a part of the Everytown funding will also be used for community research and focus groups.

The data application of our solution is gathering usage statistics on the performance of the product such as tamper detection, lock/unlock status, battery life, etc. We have mentors in our network who have built and managed IoT data/product companies, so we will be taking their advice on building a system that protects our user's data and ensure an ethical and responsible data infrastructure.

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