Juul is waging a comeback with high-tech safeguards meant to keep vapes away from teens

After being heavily implicated in the teen vaping crisis — including years of legal battles and agreeing to pay out $1.7 billion over claims of misleading advertising — many assumed Juul Labs was a relic of the past.Now, the company is trying to rise from the ashes of controversy and get back to its original mission —creating smoking cessation devices for adults trying to quit cigarettes — while keeping its product out of the hands of teenagers.“Everybody kind of thought Juul was dead and evil,” James Sagan, CEO of Architect Capital and an investor in Juul since 2023, told NYNext.“But the early investors and founders have poured a bunch of capital back into the company to save it.”Juul founders James Monsees and Adam Bowen met as Stanford graduate students in 2005.

They were both studying design and initially aimed to make a compact vaping device that would help smokers transition away from traditional tobacco consumption.But, ultimately, instead of offering an alternative to Big Tobacco, the technology was co-opted by it.

Central to Juul’s comeback plan is a new vape device, Juul2, which comes equipped with biometric safeguards intended to limit access to adult smokers only. Users will have to verify their age and identity through a companion smartphone app — using their iPhone’s Face ID or other phone-based biometric logins — in order to unlock Juul’s flavored pods.All Juul2 pods will contain a hardware chip that connects to the app via bluetooth and will only unlock for a verified, authorized user who has linked their e-cigarette to their identity.“The new product is basically trying to solve [two problems simultaneously],” Sagan said.“How do you keep vapes out of the hands of people who shouldn’t be using them — kids — and how do you make it appealing to smokers?”The Juul2 also includes a larger battery, an LED display showing puff count and battery life and firmware capabilities that allow for remote updates and usage...