Sunny Ray sits down with Michael Leon, a Silicon Valley hardware entrepreneur and co-founder of Gun Sense, a five and a half year old startup building an autonomous AI vision system to combat gun violence and mass shootings. Michael traces his path from a childhood spent taking apart appliances in the UK, through decades in electronics distribution, contract manufacturing, and multiple hardware startups, to co-founding Gun Sense alongside CEO Peter Redford and a retired SWAT hostage negotiator. He explains how Gun Sense detects weapons on the edge in under a second with 99.2 percent accuracy, transmitting only metadata rather than video to protect privacy while alerting first responders through FirstNet in seconds. The conversation covers why speed matters more than cloud based competitors, the companys focus on schools, houses of worship and transportation, its CES 2025 debut, and Michaels vision of gun and threat detectors becoming as ubiquitous as smoke detectors within five years.
A Silicon Valley hardware veteran explains how his edge AI system detects guns in under a second to save lives.
Can you explain at a high level what Gun Sense does?
Gun Sense is a five and a half year old Silicon Valley startup solving the global pandemic of gun violence and mass shootings with an autonomous AI vision system. It does not violate privacy and lives fully on the edge, detecting weapons in less than a second and alerting first responders and the public through a cloud based app with live situational awareness of where the threat is in real time.
Is this device mounted on the gun or in the building?
It is a physical piece of hardware that looks like a smoke detector and mounts anywhere indoors or outdoors. We are fundamentally a SaaS and software company, but paired with a small piece of hardware that houses the AI vision system on the edge.
Take us back, what did young Michael want to be growing up?
I grew up in the UK and was a hardware geek from toddler age, always wanting to take things apart and understand how they worked. I took apart my mothers Hoover vacuum at four years old, and by the time she called a repair person I had already reassembled it and it worked for another forty years. I always wanted to be an inventor and change the world.
What is the origin story behind Gun Sense being founded?
My friend Peter Redford is CEO and a serial entrepreneur, and we have a friend Greg who is a thirty two year veteran of San Jose Police, a federal hostage negotiator and SWAT member. Greg got frustrated seeing kids shot in schools and asked Peter how to solve it with AI without violating privacy. Two weeks later Peter came back with a sketch, and Gun Sense was born. Peter then asked me to join over sushi.
Your motto is time equals life. When did that click for you?
At least three years ago. Existing technology sends video up to the cloud for AI inferencing, which eats time, and time is life. The average 911 response is eighteen minutes while the average mass shooting lasts ninety seconds. We buy back those seconds and minutes by processing everything on the edge instead of waiting on the cloud.
Why was a privacy first approach non negotiable for you?
People inherently want to be secure but they do not want their privacy violated. We are not interested in identifying people by race, color, creed, or gender, only in detecting whether there is a weapon present. Staying privacy first was important to us as a standard we had to live up to.
What makes Gun Sense different from competitors like Zero Eyes and Evolv?
It comes back to time is life. Zero Eyes runs in the cloud, requiring servers and NPUs whose memory costs have jumped roughly tenfold recently, so it does not scale economically for something like a thousand camera campus. Evolv requires people to walk through a narrow choke point. Gun Sense is fully autonomous at the edge, sending only metadata like coordinates, timestamp, and threat type.
Five years from now, what does success look like for Gun Sense?
We want to be like a smoke detector, anywhere and everywhere indoors and outdoors, a household name known for saving lives. We are really a threat detection company, not just guns, and will add knives and machetes to the AI soon. Likely a large Fortune 100 company acquires us within five years to accelerate the roadmap faster than we can alone.
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