Deft Dynamics' business is hard to pin down.
Their first products to market don't seem to have anything to do with one another: a lightweight AR-15 handguard, and an artificial intelligence device used in racecars.
The owners – Austin Gurley and Ross Wesson – have a long list of ideas they want to bring to market one day, again in totally different industries. One big patent-pending idea is for a cheaper, more efficient design for a way to harvest solar power.
But it goes with the owners' vision for the company, and for their lives: build a business by inventing things.
"All engineers want to make inventions and do this fun part, but no one knows how to sell anything," Gurley said. "That's why this is working so far, and why it's going to work out great. It's half people who are coming up with ideas and half who are selling them."
Gurley and Wesson grew up together until they left for college, Wesson to study finance at the University of Alabama, and Gurley to study engineering at Auburn University. After college, Gurley got his master's in mechanical engineering (he's now a Ph D. candidate at Auburn), and Wesson worked on Wall Street. In his Master's research, Gurley worked on carbon fiber open structures.
So Gurley made a prototype using that technology: a 15-inch structure that can't be crushed with 1,000 pounds, but it's the weight of a Coke can. The products are used for AR-15-style rifles; the open nature of it allows heat to leave the gun quickly. When he was designing the structure, he didn't have the gun applications in mind.
Gurley was in school. Wesson was working full-time in New York. But in January of 2016, the pair took their product to the SHOT Show, a gun industry trade show in Las Vegas, and that's when the business took off. It's sold locally in Hoover Tactical Firearms and Mark's Outdoors, but nationally it's been picked up by larger vendors including Brownell's, one of the country's largest online stores for gun accessories.
That invention – now marketed as Brigand Arms – allowed Gurley and Wesson, both 26, to really launch Deft Dynamics how they envisioned it. They put their own money into the first product, and its sales have allowed the company to launch its second product. Their company is entirely self-funded, and they recently opened their first office in Mountain Brook. Their production is still done in Auburn, where Gurley lives, but they hope to move it up to Birmingham soon. Wesson just moved back to Birmingham in the last few months.
"The momentum that we got from the Brigand Arms business gave me the confidence I needed to quit my job in New York and move back here and do something else," Wesson said. "Deft, the bigger picture, is a platform. We can take really good ideas, inventions and innovations, and not just leave them as good ideas but turn them into products or whole business or intellectual property. The more of these we do, we've fallen into a process. Austin's got a list a mile long of ideas, some that we'll tuck right into Brigand Arms, some into new industries. Apex was the next idea to start developing."
Apex Pro – a product Deft has just recently launched – is a tiny computer you place on a car's dashboard that performs real-time data analysis. Gurley started developing the technology for that while competing in Formula SAE, a design competition where students develop a small Formula-style race car. Professional racers, constantly trying to shave seconds off their race time, collect a huge amount of data while practicing. Most racing systems require an engineer to interpret this data and turn it into usable feedback. The Apex learns the track after a round or two and gives the driver feedback immediately: red bars turn green when the car is being used optimally.
"That's the main thing that drivers need, in most cases up to the top tier of racing, is to know if the car is being used up to its full potential," Gurley said. "The idea is to figure out what's the potential of the car and show you where you as a percentage of that."
Apex will fund Deft's next invention. Wesson views Deft as a sort of investment company, but at this point it's only investing in Gurley's ideas. Right now, the company has four employees. Eventually, the pair could see Deft developing specialized engineering technologies for other companies' or organizations' needs.
But whatever it's going to be, it's going to be in Birmingham.
"I love Birmingham. I'm going to be in Birmingham for the rest of my life, as far as I know. When I think about what Birmingham could be truly world-class in, what could our city be? What do its companies excel at? The list is short. It's never going to be Silicon Valley, that's where you go for a certain type of business," Wesson said. "When you think about what Birmingham has, it's the industrial infrastructure and the labor force ... it's really the one thing Birmingham could be truly world class in from an infrastructural advantage. That's really exciting for us, because we want to be the best in the world. It's not going to be creating the next Uber, but these things that require actually making things? There's no reason that shouldn't be us."