The week before the annual SXSW conference in Austin, Texas, a mass shooter killed three people outside a college bar in the city’s bustling downtown district. And at SXSW on Monday, a company called Angel Protection demonstrated technology that uses AI to identify potential shooters before they cause a mass casualty event.
Angel Protection was founded in the aftermath of another Texas mass shooting, the 2022 Uvalde tragedy that took the lives of 19 children and 2 teachers. Founder and CEO Lewis Matthews had two young children at the time of the shooting, and as a data scientist, he believed AI and visual intelligence could be used to mitigate future mass shootings and save lives.
Angel Protection’s technology integrates with existing surveillance cameras and scans them simultaneously to identify firearms. If it detects a civilian brandishing a firearm, it alerts a human reviewer in the company’s Midland monitoring center. Angel Protection says it can identify a shooter and alert law enforcement in 10 seconds or less.
Angel Protection founder Lewis Matthew demonstrates the company’s technology at SXSW.
Credit: Timothy Werth / Mashable
“As you can see, I’m an outsider, and I can see that it’s real, material stuff that’s broken in these systems,” Matthews told Mashable. “Stuff is broken at the local level all the way up through the federal government…So, we started studying it. We spent two years just really looking at the problem.”
Matthews said that, as a data scientist, he knew that if you want to change a broken system, you need to have some type of measurement to know if your efforts are working.
“The measurement we look at in this case is time. What’s the time problem that we’re solving here? We started with all the mass shootings from 1999 to 2025. Average time from first shots fired to 911 being initiated is 90 seconds. So if I put my gun out there and start shooting, it’s 90 seconds before someone picks up the phone and calls 911, because people go into denial. They think it’s fireworks, kids playing around, doors slamming, anything other than [what it is].”
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Even when people call 911, they often provide contradictory information.
“Then what happens…is they get inundated with a bunch of calls that describe everyone as being the shooter. Everyone is fleeing the scene. The shooter is black, the shooter is white, the shooter is bald. Shooters got long hair, tall, fat, shorts, jeans, whatever it is, they get every single description before the cops show up. All they know is they’re looking for someone.”
Not only can Angel Protection Systems quickly identify potential mass shooters, but they can send a photograph and precise location directly to first responders.
“We use AI to detect those guns and humans to verify that [and] cut that 90 seconds down to sub 10 seconds, and we do that with extreme, extreme accountability,” Matthews said.
Privacy experts are increasingly worried about AI’s potential to be used for mass surveillance. However, Angel Protection’s chief technology officer told me all the information processing occurs on-site to protect privacy, and Angel Protection is only alerted when a threat is identified.
The company’s human reviewers also help cut down on false positives, Matthews says, though it still happens, especially in an open-carry state like Texas. (Angel Protection’s visual intelligence doesn’t alert to holstered weapons for this reason.) Apparently, ROTC students who carry rifles without wearing the proper uniform have been one early problem.
The ultimate goal, Matthews said, is to identify mass shooters in entryways or parking lots, as these shooters often arrive on scene brandishing a rifle. Mass shootings often progress at lightning speed, and he believes that quickly getting accurate information to first responders will save lives.
Angel Protection is still in its infancy, and a company spokesperson told me the company is currently monitoring about 2,500 cameras in Texas, checking for potential shooters twice a second. So far, the company is working with schools, hospitals, and government sites.
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