The Carbon Fiber Armor Built For Elite Special Forces

That's wild, it is wild. And with a real bullet, well we have shot it with with a 22 and with a shotgun, a point blank range with no back face defamation. So your head and cervical spine are extremely well protected against hyper flexion, hyper extension and hyper rotation and concussive forces. So that allows you to take something like a baseball bat or the butt of a rifle at full force to the head and not have any interest.

So being struck with swords with real levels of speed and force. So proper swords. He was training with proper swords. He was training with steel weapons to a pre-preg carbon fiber.

And it's the same carbon fiber that they use in Formula One crash cages. So the other parts of the Formula One cars that you see, they fly off everywhere. They fly off everywhere but they crash cage that always stays intact. That's true.

All right. That's what we make the suit out. So it's incredibly tough, takes very dream to mind our crashes in trouble. And can take repeated very very high impacts.

David, welcome. Great to see you. Thanks, David. Very excited as always to have anyone sitting in that chair that has a physical product.

We have so many founders that have software and there's nothing wrong with software. It does amazing things but I love physical things and your products about as physical as it gets. It is about as physical as it gets. It's just I mean it's and we're obviously we're going to do some looking at it later and all that kind of stuff but it's it's not just physical.

It's epic. It's cool. It's it's a it's a it's a it's a big boys toy. It is a big boys toy and it's a good description call.

We designed it to be cool. We also wanted it to look quite menacing and we think it achieves that. That's a good word. I don't think well the audience don't even know what we're talking about yet.

So now let's talk about Kyron Tell. Let's tell our audience what is it that you do and you started what seven years ago? Something like that. Yeah we actually the business started in 2017.

Yep. And we spent about five years in research and development and a long time. Years of feedback and testing with sort of expert end users from defense, so military and law enforcement. Yep.

To come up with our flagship product which is called the Kyron X1 Elite combative training suit. It's an all carbon fiber combative training suit. That's such a cool name. You must have had so much fun going out with that name.

Well Kyron was a hilly's teacher, so Kyron is actually the name of the company, Kyron Global Tech. Yep. And the Kyron X1 is our first flagship product. But yeah there's a link back to that mythology throughout all of our sort of product branding.

That's cool. So you have built this product primarily for maybe you're telling me so law enforcement, military and correctional services is that right? So it's a protective product essentially rather than a more, it's designed to protect someone that is a weapon. Does that make sense?

Yes. Yeah. So we designed this to solve a problem with current protective equipment which the people train with at the moment, it's it's our data equipment and people regularly get injured in it. You can't move well in it.

It restricts movement. And so we came up with this design because our co-founder Justin Forsill was training with the tight special forces in Bangkok. And his instructor was lamenting the fact that he couldn't train sort of with realistic levels of speed and force using the weapons that they were using which were Krabi Krabong swords. So real weapons.

And Justin saw that there was a gap in the market and he identified that there was an opportunity for an innovative suit where you could move very freely but provide very high levels of protection against real weapon strikes. So being struck with swords with real levels of speed and force. So proper swords. He was training with proper weapons.

He was training with steel weapons. That's wild. Obviously that's extremely dangerous and training with any sort of lethal weapons is extremely dangerous. So typically what they'll do with the training is that they'll dump it down.

They'll slow it down. So you'll train with 20 or 30 percent speed or force and you won't necessarily train what are called the vital targets. So the head and the throat which are the lethal targets. So you'll train off target.

And what that does is create the wrong muscle memory. Of course. So we came up with this suit to solve that problem and it allows you to train full force with real weapons to vital targets including the head and the throat. So you can strike someone in the head and the throat with this and they will survive.

They won't survive. They'll hardly feel it. So you get the kinetic energy transfer and you like you hear the impact but you're incredibly insulated in the suit. So you're very well protected.

And what we've done is we've patented the head and neck protection. So we have a pattern around the way that the helmet and the neck piece engage and distribute forces into the rest of the armor. So your head and cervical spine are extremely well protected against hyper flexion, hyper extension and hyper rotation and concussive forces. So that allows you to take something like a baseball bat or the butt of a rifle at full force to the head and not have any injury.

Like how much I know I'm going to try it on later. But how much does it feel like if you get hit in the head with a rifle butt? Yeah. How much would you feel it?

Obviously you'd hear it. I mean, you feel there's a kinetic transfer. But if you're wearing the suit correctly and you've engaged the helmet and the gorge yet, all of the force that's being directed at the head gets distributed through the neck piece and then down into the chest plate and the backplate and onto the kidney belt. So the forces are distributed away from the head and your head and cervical spine are very well protected.

And we've patented that. So we have patents granted in all our key markets. And we're the only ones in the world that have come up with this hard armor solution. So we've seen things like this in movies, right?

Where you get hit and they actually powers up the suit, so to speak. I'm sure you're not quite at that level yet. But I mean, it's a similar sort of concept, right? But it's real.

It's interesting that you mentioned that because our head of design and engineering actually, as well as coming from a defense background and working with sort of ballistics and composites in the UK, had a background in armor design for movie sets. So when you see the cool design of the armor, a lot of that has been influenced by his experience designing armor. So sort of stunt armor and movie armor. And it looks cool, but it's also incredibly functional.

One of the key challenges in in solving for a hard armor design is you can be 100% protected, but you're in a steel box and you can't move. Or you can have 100% freedom of movement, but you've got no protection. And what we've done over many years is optimize the plate design and the way they interact so that we have a very high degree level of movement and a very high degree level of protection. I remember when we first met you were talking to me about like arm movement effort that that was one of the biggest problems.

It was always restricted. It's been like, I mean, analogy would be a tank and a jeep, right? A jeep is very agile, but blows up. A tank's not agile, but it's protected.

It's the same sort of thing. Yeah. So when we first spoke, we were talking about one of the changes that we'd made to the chest plate design originally. It was a wider chest plate.

That's right. And then what we found was that the end users that we were working with wanted to be able to do two-handed techniques where they were drawing a pistol or cuffing someone. Yeah. And they needed a better range of motion.

And so we came up with a solution where we cut away a section at the top of the chest plate and added a hard armor plate underneath it that attaches to the layers here. So it is an undergarment that goes under the armor that moves underneath the chest plate. So you've got this surface area of hard armor that moves in and out. So you've got freedom of movement, but you've got hard armor protection for strikes and for non-lethal training munitions that you might get shot with during training.

And what's the, it's the say, titanium, so it'll do it. No, it's carbon fiber. Carbon fiber. And so underneath that, what's the material underneath?

So there's a, the last year I was a two-part garment and it's a combination of materials that we've come up with. So it includes Kevlar for impact protection. There's a Alastomeric foam that provides shock absorbing properties. And there's a Alastomeric layer underneath it and a lycra layer which provides cooling.

So in spite of the suit being like a full body armor suit and it's black and carbon fiber, you would think it would be really hot. Actually, it's incredibly cool. And it's because of this sweat-wicking layer that's built into the underlayer. The other function of that is it acts as a hygiene layer.

So you can actually just chuck it in the wash over night, put it on a dry cycle and it's ready the next day. Cool. So you can, you can tumble dry it. Yeah, on a cool cycle, you can tumble dry it.

So let's talk about those, those different products because I'm interested about this, right? So we're talking carbon fiber. Now I want to start there because my experience of carbon fiber is I have seen it in cars. I've seen it on Formula One cars.

It seems to break apart pretty easily on Formula One cars. It's obviously a very hard, is it one of the hardest, tell me about it because I want to understand. I want to understand the difference between that and Kevlar. Okay.

So carbon fiber, strength for weight ratio, it's the best material in the world. That's why we started and we built the first suit out of all carbon fiber. So we use a particular type of carbon fiber. It's a pre-preg carbon fiber.

And it's the same carbon fiber that they use in Formula One crash cages. So the other parts of the Formula One cars that you see, not people everywhere, but that crash cage that always stays intact. That's true. All right.

That's what we make the suit out. Right. So it's incredibly tough, takes very big impacts and can take repeated very, very high impacts. Kevlar is actually a material that's used as a ballistic material.

So you can interlayer that and come up with a ballistic version of the suit. The version of the suit that we have available now is a training version. It's not a ballistic version. So it's not designed for operations and to be shot out with live ammunition.

But it is designed for use with what's called non-lethal training munitions. So these are high velocity rounds that are frangible. It's just like a paint round. It'll break apart on impact.

But they're very high velocity rounds and there's typically a standoff distance, a safety distance of between one and five meters, depending on the size and velocity of the round, that you're not allowed to fire inside of if you're training with these. So you can shoot at these suits. With our suit, you can shoot at point blank range using any training munition. That's why.

It is and with a real bullet. Well, we have shot it with a 22 and with a shotgun, a point blank range with no back face deformation. But as I said, it's not designed as a ballistic suit right now. No.

There is part of the roadmap downstream is actually to do a ballistic version just about every operator, anyone who comes from defense who sees the suit says this is better than our operational kit. Can we have this in a ballistic suit? Because they have Kevlar. That's what their body armor is right now, right?

That's designed to deflect bullets as opposed to stop them. Is that right? Well, it does both. And it depends on the armor.

There's different types of body armor that's around and it depends on sort of what part that it hits. One of the common problems with modern body armor, ballistic body armor is you're working in played areas around the size you chest. Yep. All right.

And they're typically put inside of a plate carrier. You have different levels of protection and the higher the level of protection, the heavier it is and the thicker it is. So there's a weight penalty involved with that. But one of the other issues is the level of coverage that you have.

So with our suit, you've got almost complete body coverage. There are gaps obviously for movement, which we've had to put in there so that you have complete, pretty much complete freedom of movement. We designed it so you could do any martial arts move while wearing a car wheel. Yeah, exactly.

The suit itself, the whole suit weighs about 14 and a half kilos, which is around the weight of what they wear as body armor normally, but we've got full body protection. So that's so that's your because I have been training with a weight vest recently. It's not talked about why, but I've had 15 kilos in that and that's obviously just on my weight. You're saying that's across the whole suit.

Yes. And because it's evenly distributed across the body and because of the weight that we've done on the harnessing solution, it doesn't feel like you're wearing 14 kilos. Actually, you can move really freely in it. You don't feel like you're wearing a suit.

So when you, we'll write some footage later and we'll actually film a guy so that you can see how quickly they can get up and move around. You can literally do some assaults jump across walls. Can you jump out of a plane with a parachute? Yeah.

In fact, it was funny. We were with the US Army Rangers in America and Carolina. And that was one of the questions I asked us and we said, we haven't tried that yet, but we have a special forces operator, his next paratrooper in Australia, who wants to be the first to do that. I know a parachute instructor from the special forces too.

Yeah. So we do want it. We do want to jump out of a plane. We should film that.

Just for fun. I want to film that. Wow. I want to one back a tiny bit.

How did you get into this? Obviously, we spoke about your co-founders and their backgrounds. How do you fit into this? So my co-founder, Justin, who I mentioned, who is training with the Thai special forces, he has a 30 year background in combative training.

Yep. He was at the time working for Vodafone and my wife was working for Vodafone. So I met them at a lunch. I met Justin at a lunch and got to talk in.

And one of the things I asked him was, you know, do you have a beehag, a big hairy audacious goal? And he said, if you mean a crazy idea that I've never done anything with as a matter of fact, I do. And he told me about this idea that he'd had when he was training with the Thai special forces. And I went, man, I think you might have something there.

And so we did some work together, did some research, found that there was a massive gap in the market. And so formed a business and decided to go and make the car in X1. You know what, there's such a sponsorship opportunity for Vodafone and connecting people there. Seriously, we need to call them.

You can get some dollars out. Okay, cool. So, and right now, so you've been going, like I said, seven years, you've been selling this food so far to special forces, but it's obviously expensive, right? Because it's carbon fiber.

Carbon fiber is expensive. Yep. So just in terms of the customers that we're dealing with now, we're selling into tier one special forces units and militaries in NATO, in Southeast Asia, and in Australasia. Have you seen action?

Well, it's being used by tier one special forces units as part of their training. So, yes, but it's not designed as an operational piece of kit. So it's designed to help them prepare for operations. Okay.

Yep. And then the capital raise that we're doing now is to bring out two low-cost versions of the suit. So carbon fiber is an amazing material, but it's really expensive and time-consuming to make, and not everyone can afford it. So what we're doing is producing two injection-molded versions of the suit, a low-cost training version and a right version.

So the training version is largely for law enforcement and certain military budgets, and the right version is for right corrections and public order personnel. And it provides massively higher levels of protection than any of the current personal protective equipment that's available, and leverages our same patented design. So the flagship product that we built, we want to roll out three new products using the same design. Okay.

So let's talk about that. So training version makes sense. So that's designed for them to train. They wouldn't wear it out on the street.

They're doing it just to combat and not get hurt basically. The right version is designed for operational. Yeah, I'm assuming. So if you think about any right you see, we've got the big screens, would it remove the need for that?

Is that the idea? So they're free. They're ready to go. They're not standing with stricter lines.

You're basically wearing the shield. Yeah, see that because they're so restricted by it and that what they're pushing is that would enable them to be far more. So look, they may still use those as a defensive tactic or technique, but the reality is you are so much better protected wearing this suit than any current PPE. You don't need the shield.

You're wearing the shield. Yeah. What that also means is that from a training point of view, you can escalate the level of threat that people are exposed to before they get into a real right situation and condition them to that. So once they know, I'm fully protected by this equipment that I'm wearing, they do risks the level of escalation that can happen in a right situation.

Because often what will happen is the blood goes, someone feels under threat and they respond with a higher level of because they're panicked kind of almost exactly. And that can lead to lawsuits, right, particularly in the United States. Which is mad, right? So there's two benefits for the sit one, we reduce the risk of injury to personnel.

Two, we reduce the litigation risk involved in personnel responding with undue force in certain situations and get hit and know they're fine. That's right. Because they've trained in the product. They know the product provides that level of protection and then they're worried in an operational scenario that they know that they're protected.

They don't have to respond with the same level of force. So I've got images of the robot cop movie where people are shooting and it's just walking along calm. It's essentially. Yeah, but similar sort of thing.

And yeah, you can throw bricks, bottles, like you can get hit with a baseball bat. I mean, you can just keep going forward. So let's talk about this injection mode. So obviously it's cheaper.

Is the protection level less? No. So we've come up with, why would you continue doing the carbon fiber one? So because the elite level, it will be, there's still be a market for the elite carbon fiber version for certain special forces units that just want the best material available.

But there's a lot of cost version which opens up these additional vertical markets of sort of law enforcement, certain military budgets and corrections, which is huge market. Yeah. So the tooling for that product is quite expensive, but the parts are much, much cheaper. And we have higher margins on those.

So when you say the tooling, you mean setting it up, setting it up there for the injection model process as opposed to the tooling that we have for the carbon fiber product. And how if you think about the special forces market compared to that other market, I would imagine this is, even though they've got bigger budgets, this would be a far bigger. Correct. Because there's much more of them.

That's global. And it's just as an example in America, there are 400,000 corrections officers just in America. How many police can you even imagine? I don't know the number of the top of my head.

I can't recall the number of police, but just corrections officers of 400,000 in NATO, in all of NATO, there's 300,000. So America is the most incarcerated nation on the planet. I know. Yeah.

But we've met with with with several corrections facilities in the United States and they all want this product. Of course. Yeah. We've done quite a bit of work with prison officers.

And it's an interesting space, right? They're they're usually quite gentle people, right? But obviously they're in an incredibly violent environment. That's right.

Well, we we demonstrated the product about a year ago to the UK's national tactical response group. So there are two of them in the UK, they respond to 800 prison rights a year. Oh my god. So the level of activity for that group is very high.

And we demonstrated at one of the facilities about a year and a half ago and put one of their operators with a female operator in the suit. And they were absolutely blown away with the level of protection. And they do training literally every day where someone is normally wearing a padded suit, getting the absolute help eaten out of them. And they always come out battered and bruised.

They often feel injured. They're not looking forward to the next day training. So these guys looked at this settlement. Oh my god.

Can we please have this like this is going to completely change the way we train. Then we took it outside and we shot it with a it's a training munition called pepper ball. And we let all of them have a go at shooting our poor German distributor who was wearing the suit. And he got absolutely peppered with pepper ball rounds.

Not a bruise on him pun intended. No, absolutely not done paintball and you look beaten up. There are bruises everywhere. That's right.

So our under the underlayer where there are gaps in the hard armor. You can be shot with any non-lethal training munition and you're not going to be injured. And if you weren't wearing that, it could cut your skin or worse. You definitely wind up with bruising.

I mean, even just for I'm thinking about the UK now you mentioned that I haven't lived there for a long time. But I remember going to soccer matches this year volume of police trying to hold the teams apart. They're very unprotected in those environments. Yeah.

I mean, the confidence that would give them to do their job. Yeah. Would be mind blown. Yep.

Okay. So you are looking to raise money to basically get the tooling to be able to mass produce this to sell. That's where you're at. So we've got a proven product.

Yeah. We've patented that we have customers like all around the world. We've got a global distribution network as well. Yeah.

And we've got strong demand for these lower cost products. I imagine. So how much are you raising? So we're raising 2.

5 million through a safe note. Yep. With a 20% discount on a series A in 12 to 18 months. Okay.

Cool. That seems that seems and that's that's what it's going to cost you to get the equipment to a half mill. That's not that much. I would have thought it was a bit more.

That'll allow us to bring both of those products to market. So the low cost training version and the right version. And how quickly is the main fight? What's the manufacturing process like?

So we can get the first product to market in six months. Yep. And the other product in about nine to 12 months. And then how much is it?

There's a bit of variability with the right version because we've got to get that product certified. The training version is self certified. Good to go. And so yeah, how many can you produce?

Like is it? Is it quick once it's up? We can produce them in the thousands once we've got it. So we get over a 30X increase in MN manufacturing capacity once we switch to injection molded.

How exciting. Yeah. And so in terms of your customer base, I imagine like you said, you've been out to integration services. This is a global product, right?

Yeah. Once you sell it to one person, you're done, right? Because the use case is there. It's already happening within the tier one unit.

So what happened? And we've had this experience several times now. The tier one units have had a train with other tier one units. Those tier one units then go, oh my god, where did you get this?

They then contact us. They wind up sort of leasing them or renting them and then they wind up procuring them. So the word of mouth is already there with the product. Well, it's a small community in that it's niche.

Have you thought about, and this is how many asking this because I saw a thing on TV today about ambulance. You know, you think about ambulance staff. There was this thing on TV. I literally, I'd really watched the news, but I was getting breakfast and it was on and they're getting it attacked regularly.

Is that another mark? I mean, there's plenty of other markets you could go. Obviously you've got to focus on this. Don't get me wrong.

But there's countless other markets that where I guess public servant kind of individuals are being attacked unnecessarily and wouldn't need protection. Yeah. So, so this suit itself is, it's pretty intimidating. Look at pacing.

Look at you. You need to make it a probably nice thing. For an ambulance officer, you wouldn't want the helmet on. No.

Right. But look, yes, there are other applications for it. And in fact, just recently, we've had a whole area of the US government open up for us that we weren't really targeting before. So it's not military, but there are federal agencies that do this type of training that require this capability private security companies.

So there's a very large addressable market for the product. Absolutely. Our initial customers are defense law enforcement security and corrections. You must be so excited.

This is amazing. Yeah, it's been, it's a long time coming. Any founders, Jenny, you know, it's a roller coaster. Lots of highs, lots of lows.

We're riding high at the moment. So it's been the result of a lot of sort of hard work and persistence, a lot of financial commitment from the founders. And we've had some backing from some seed investors. And now we're looking for some further investment to really take this thing and scale it.

What's been the hardest thing? And that's a big question every time. So raising capital, getting to the point where we've where we are now, that's been tough, right? Because you really want to focus on other areas, but this constant battle to raise capital.

So we're looking forward to just getting this tooling in place. And the revenue we can generate from that to awesome. That's amazing. And that's going to set us up for a series A.

Yeah. Which would be a big series A. But the hard work has just been the constant grind that the most rewarding stuff has been seeing the product iteration and getting the feedback from the customers. So we've gone through this product iterative development cycle where we've we've given prototype products to customers and got feedback from them.

So special forces got early versions of the suit. They used and they put them through a thousand use cases. They gave us feedback and said, we love all this. Can you fix this?

Can you tweak this? Then the next time they rented the suits, we'd made all those changes. They love the fact that we listened to talk on board their feedback and incorporate it in the suit. So we've done that multiple times who have four versions of the suit we developed before we we brought the product that we have in market now.

That's been really rewarding and working with the team and the customers on incorporating that feedback, building it into design, iterating it and then seeing that sort of come out into the world. It's been really difficult. I mean, from a customer feedback loop, of course they're going to tell you, I mean, it's protecting them. You're going to get the best feedback ever constantly from everywhere and the ideas will be, I mean, that's the power of crowds.

It doesn't matter how well you can think about something. You put 200 people in something or 5,000 people or 10,000 people the feedback's wild. Yeah. The other thing we've been able to do, which has been really interesting, is the access that we've had to these, these bases, like we're getting invited onto special forces bases that people don't even know about.

So we've been told by people within that community that we've probably been on to more sort of tier one sites than any other company. And what we've been able to do is observe the way they train and use the suits and we've incorporated that into a training program so that we've come up with this optimal way of using a suit based on sort of five years of working with these tier one units. And we can deliver that program of training with the suits to our customers. So we can really enhance the level of training they're able to do because we've had all of this amazing feedback from expert end users.

Super cool. Super cool. So I guess from your perspective, if people want to, if people are interested in learning more about this, people want to talk to you about the fundraising if they want to see the product, give me some ways people can learn more about it. Okay, so our website is caronglobaltech.

com, which is about exactly as on the shirt, C-H-I-R-O-N, global.tech. Yep. So they can go to the website.

There's an inquiries from there. They can reach out to us through that. Cool. There's also a video on the website where you can see the thing in action, but I'm sure we're going to film some stuff later.

We're going to film some more today, but I have seen this about that. It's the coolest product I have to say. I can't wait to try it on, but I'm so impressed with the tenacity to get here. It's a long time.

Five years of R&D is, I mean, any product that you're willing to do that for and then go to market and then obviously you are where you are now, you must feel fantastic about it. Yeah, well, we had COVID throw a bit of a curveball in the middle of it for I mean, it's for the whole world, but you know, we just started to get sort of traction with some of the early versions of the suit and then everything got shut down. No one was allowed to see anyone, so you don't really see it.

It was funny. We couldn't go five Ks from home here in Australia, but we were allowed to fly to America to the AUSA conference in Washington. Really? Yeah.

So we did. Absolutely. I did a roadshow all over the West Coast. Was there anyone else on the plane?

Yeah, not many. So we had five staff and five people in business. How funny. Well, look, congratulations.

I think what you've done is not just an amazing achievement. I think it's going to change law enforcement and correctly. It's the protection you're offering to people and the confidence in which they're going to be able to go into their jobs. Amazing.

Yeah. And there's really never been a better time to bring these products to market state like the state of the world. I was on the great state at the moment. The geopolitical tailwinds sort of driving the need for better protective equipment for people have probably never been stronger.

So it's a great time to be bringing this product to market. Particularly the right stuff. I mean, that just seems to be going well. Yes.

I mean, yeah, no timing, luck and timing, right? So it was part of everything. Yeah. Fantastic.

Well, let's go try it on.