BRINC Drones raises $125M, led by Motorola Solutions, to put 911 response drones on police and fire station rooftops

BRINC Drones has raised $125 million, led by Motorola Solutions, to scale deployment of 911-response drones across police and fire stations in the United States.

Motorola Solutions is not a passive financial backer. The overwhelming majority of its business is selling body-worn radios and public-safety software to police and fire departments, making it the largest company in the public-safety tech industry by Resnick's account, ahead of Axon at number two and Flock at number three. That existing footprint gives BRINC a shortcut into every prospective customer. When BRINC's sales team approaches a new police or fire department, Motorola can provide the introduction and, in many cases, fold a BRINC sale into a preexisting Motorola contract. The integration goes deeper than distribution — if an officer pushes the emergency button on a Motorola radio, that event can automatically trigger a BRINC drone to launch and fly to their location. Motorola's computer-aided dispatch software, which most large U.S. police departments run, feeds GPS coordinates of 911 calls directly into BRINC's dispatch system.

The market gap

There are roughly 20,000 police departments, 30,000 fire departments, and 80,000 police and fire stations in the United States. Resnick estimates only around 400 to 500 of those buildings currently have a 911-response drone on the roof — across all manufacturers, including BRINC, Skydio, and DJI. That's approximately 1% penetration. The $125M is directed at closing that gap.

“Brink just raised a new $125,000,000 of capital, and that is all being directed towards putting these, the heavy police and fire station roof in America... Right now, we are on top of our factory and headquarters... about 20% of the SWAT teams in the country are actively utilizing this aircraft to reduce the probability of officer involved shootings.”

Product portfolio

BRINC's current lineup spans three aircraft:

• LEMR 2 — a small drone built to get eyes and ears into dangerous situations. About 20% of U.S. SWAT teams actively use it.
• Responder — the drone Resnick describes as the world's first purpose-built 911-response drone. Already deployed at hundreds of police and fire departments. Launches autonomously from a rooftop pod, follows a preprogrammed flight path to the 911 call coordinates, and can be switched to manual control on arrival. Onboard red and blue lights, sirens, and support for medical payload delivery.
• Guardian — designed to replace police helicopters. Flies for over an hour at more than 60 mph, carries integrated Starlink for unlimited global range, dual HD thermal imagers at 640-line resolution (Resnick says the best currently on the market in production are 640 resolution), dual 4K cameras with 640x total optical zoom, and a 130-decibel speaker louder than a police car siren. The recharging pod uses a robotic system that physically swaps batteries in roughly 90 seconds, giving Guardian more than 97% daily availability — over 23.5 flight hours per day. The same robotic arm swaps mission payloads, so a single drone can deliver a defibrillator on one call and a flotation device on the next.

Autonomy

The dispatch loop is largely automated. BRINC's software pulls GPS coordinates from 911 call-taking systems, selects the nearest drone with sufficient charge, plots a route accounting for manned air traffic and no-fly zones, and opens the pod. The drone launches, flies the preprogrammed path, and engages preset arrival behaviors — orbiting a structure fire, holding a fixed GPS point, or initiating automated object tracking. Human operators can take manual control at any point. NIST has developed standardized drone evaluation frameworks similar to what Resnick describes, and BRINC has competed in direct bakeoffs against Skydio; it won a competitive evaluation run by Charlotte Mecklenburg.

Go-to-market

BRINC's direct sales motion targets police chiefs, fire chiefs, mayors, and city council members. The U.S. is divided into dozens of sales territories, each with a quota-carrying account executive supported by dedicated demo teams and sales engineers. Motorola's distribution relationships reduce the cold-start problem significantly.

Supply chain gaps

Resnick flags American-made gimballed camera payloads with high-resolution thermal imaging, optical zoom, and three-axis stabilization at reasonable per-unit cost as the most immediate gap. High-energy-density batteries, brushless outrunner motors, and mesh-networking radio PCBs round out the list. He notes that even Anduril sources externally for camera payloads in this category rather than building its own.

At 1% market penetration and a strategic investor with relationships across every potential customer in the country, the commercial thesis is straightforward. The harder question is execution speed — going from 400-500 buildings to tens of thousands is a sales and logistics problem as much as a technology one.