BRINC Drones raises $75M from Index Ventures and Motorola Solutions to scale 911 drone response networks

Summary

BRINC Drones founder Blake Resnick has closed a $75 million Series round led by Index Ventures, with significant participation from Motorola Solutions — a strategic investor that holds a near-monopoly in body radio across police and fire departments globally. The Motorola relationship is the sharpest element of the deal: BRINC will integrate its drones with Motorola's body radios so officers can call for drone backup directly from the field, and Motorola will actively distribute BRINC's products into its existing public safety customer base.

What BRINC builds

The core product is a network of drone recharging pods installed on police and fire station rooftops, integrated with computerized 911 dispatch. When a call comes in, the system automatically grabs the GPS coordinate and launches the nearest drone, which travels at 60 mph and can deliver Narcan, EpiPens, or flotation devices on arrival. Thermal imaging lets the drone map hotspots in structure fires and relay that to firefighters before they enter; on law enforcement calls, it can identify whether a suspect is holding a weapon before officers arrive.

The 911 network launched roughly eight months ago. Before it, BRINC's flagship product was the Lemur 2 — a purpose-built indoor drone for SWAT teams, with a glass-breaking attachment, onboard lidar that maps floor plans in real time, thermal imaging, and a two-way audio system so crisis negotiators can use it as a flying phone. Over 600 SWAT teams are actively using it, representing roughly 10–15% of all SWAT teams in the United States.

Why the hardware is hard

Resnick spent six months riding along with Las Vegas Metro SWAT during early development, iterating on hardware after each live callout. The failure modes are mundane but lethal in consequence: overheating in Las Vegas summers, RF spectrum congestion in apartment complexes, public safety radios knocking out drone communications, and indoor localization systems that fail when dust or zero-light conditions degrade visual sensors. His solution is redundancy — layering lidar, IMU, barometric, and GPS data so the system degrades gracefully when individual sensors fail. A polished demo, he notes, is easy to build; something that consistently outperforms BRINC in the field is not.

Supply chain and the China gap

BRINC's drones are NDAA compliant, using no electronics from China — no processors, radios, or imaging sensors. That requirement was baked in from the start, driven by the need to sell to federal and public safety customers. Resnick has been personally sanctioned by China and BRINC has been sanctioned twice, barring it from purchasing Chinese components regardless.

DJI controls roughly 90% of the global drone market; Autel, also Chinese, holds about 5%. Around 10 U.S. states have already passed laws banning public safety agencies from using Chinese drones, and federal legislation that would extend that ban to all 50 states is possible. That creates an acute need for non-Chinese drone manufacturers, but Resnick argues domestic investment is off by a factor of 100. The largest known U.S. military small-drone purchase he's aware of runs to single-digit thousands of units — while DJI produces millions annually.

Defense ambitions, kept in check

Resnick is not chasing defense contracts, largely because the DoD isn't writing meaningful checks yet. His read is that the U.S. military is only beginning to understand small drones as weapons of war, prompted by Ukraine, but procurement hasn't followed. Current FPV drones require extreme piloting skill, are vulnerable to jamming, and will likely be superseded by automated, target-selecting systems within five years — which makes large-scale FPV training a questionable investment. His prescription is straightforward: the U.S. should buy drones at significant scale now, get them into the armed forces, and push manufacturers to build hardware that's genuinely fit for combat purpose.