Originally published by ABC 7 Denver. 

BOULDER, Colo. – A 17-year-old innovator from Boulder took the top prize in the first-ever $1MM Smart Tech for Firearms Challenge.

“The Challenge aims to improve firearm safety by furthering innovation around personalization features in firearms, locking devices, and ammunition systems in order to reduce gun tragedies,” organizers said.

Kai Kloepfer was awarded a grant of $50,000 to develop a firearm with a sensor that would require an authorized user’s fingerprint in order to fire the gun.

The sensor boasts a 99.99 percent success rate – even with partial prints, organizers said.

“I’ve been interested in technology for as long as I can remember.  After the mass shooting at the Aurora movie theater in 2012, I started thinking about the role technology could play in preventing accidents and death related to firearms,” said Kloepfer. “The idea actually came to me in a dream and I have been working since then to make it a reality.”

An earlier version of Kloepfer’s technology was the top engineering project by an American student at the 2013 Intel International Science and Engineering Fair.Kloepfer’s biometric technology placed him in a group of the top 34 out of 7 million high school students around the globe. It was built on a budget of less than $3,000.

“The Smart Tech Challenges Foundation hopes to spur advancement of the technology by awarding 15 innovators grants to research, build and test prototypes that can eventually scale to market,” stated the organization.

To date, the Smart Tech Challenges Foundation has disbursed $800,000 of the $1 million in grant money, with the remaining $200,000 going to the teams that exhibit the most progress throughout the course of the Challenge until December 2015.

Kai will be speaking this weekend at the TEDx Mile High event in Denver discuss his grant and the development of his technology.