A retired Ladner cop continues to combine his passion for public safety with an entrepreneurial bent to create companies that offer products to assist law enforcement efforts.
Kal Malhi and his partners will see Patriot One Technologies go public on the Toronto Stock Exchange today. Patriot One is developing a covert concealed weapons detection system.
Malhi, a retired RCMP officer, has also been working on developing a roadside breathalyzer to detect marijuana use.
Last August, his company Cannabix Technologies signed an agreement with the Yost Research Group at the University of Florida. They are at an advanced stage with research and are preparing a device for testing.
"With my background I see technologies that are out there and I also have a keen interest in the financial market, so with the combination of my policing background and understanding what the markets are willing to fund, I am able to research and find technologies that fit those two areas," Malhi says of his ventures.
"With the Cannabix Marijuana Breathalyzer, that really fell into my background in the drug section and I was able to raise the money in the public market. It's very similar to this product with Patriot. We see shootings almost on a weekly basis in the U.S. and there are a lot of technologies that can address some of these things, but they just don't get the funding for the first one or two million dollars."
Patriot One is a partnership with the University of McMaster. The goal is to sell covert concealed weapons detection systems for use at entrances to nightclubs, stadiums, public transportation and public buildings such as courthouses, schools and theatres.
"We licensed the technology, we developed for about nine months and have now taken it to a public company. We have a really good team to take it forward as a product, so we are really excited by this," he said.
The product was launched Oct. 15 at the International Chiefs of Police Conference in San Diego and Malhi said the reception was amazing.
"The North American public is facing a lot of challenges with terrorism, but they are still not willing to undergo the inconvenience to their lives - the inconvenience that the airport scanners and metal detectors provide. This is a technology that is not an inconvenience," he said. "Someone simply walks through a doorway. It is a covert detection device. If it detects something, then there is an alert, but in most cases the public won't even know."
What makes Patriot One's technology unique is its "cognitive" ability to detect guns and knives as well as to assess threats. The system is trained prior to installation and continues to learn upon deployment, getting better and smarter at detecting hidden weapons with each screening instance.
"I would say the final step in the process is FCC approval and we have begun the investigation around that," added Patriot One president and chief technology officer Dinesh Kandanchatha. "The software is quite far along, but the hardware we still have work to be done. Our target is to announce the product in April with shipments starting hopefully in mid to late 2017."
Chief executive officer Martin Cronin said the idea behind the product is what their mission statement is all about - deter, detect and defend.
"As compared to other screening devices, it certainly is a much more intelligent capability, but our expectation is it will form a part of a larger security architecture," added Cronin. "Most likely when you look at an airport, for example, your typical screening devices would still be in use, but airports would use our technology to start screening people before they get to the metal detector because if you look at many of the recent airport attacks, people carrying weapons got them into the airport, so if you can use our technology to find out they have the weapons before they get into the airport, then the attack can be prevented. We really want to deter attacks."
