- BRINC has raised $125 million in a round led by Motorola Solutions, with participation from Index Ventures and Figma CEO Dylan Field, bringing its total funding to more than $280 million.
- The Seattle startup wants to deploy 911 response drones across all 80,000 police and fire stations in the United States.
- Revenue more than tripled in 2025, production capacity increased fivefold, and the company has already signed nearly four times as many public safety contracts this year.
Seattle-based BRINC has raised $125 million in a funding round led by Motorola Solutions, with participation from Index Ventures and Figma founder Dylan Field, taking its total funding past $280 million. The company said the round values it at nearly double last year’s $480 million mark
The round’s other backers include OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman, Scale AI founder Alexandr Wang, Palantir’s chief technology officer Shyam Sankar, former LinkedIn chief executive Jeff Weiner, former acting US defense secretary Patrick Shanahan, and former FCC chairman Julius Genachowski.
The capital backs one of public safety tech’s boldest bets: putting a 911 response drone on the roof of every one of the roughly 80,000 police and fire stations across the United States.
“Every second matters in an emergency. Our 911 response drones put eyes on scene before first responders arrive, giving everyone the situational awareness they need to act decisively and keep people safe,” says Blake Resnick, BRINC’s founder and chief executive.
Washington opens a door for US-made drones
The timing is not incidental. In December 2025, the FCC blocked foreign-made drones from receiving US equipment authorisation, a move that effectively barred new models from Chinese giant DJI from the American market.
DJI is challenging the ruling in court, and some non-Chinese models have won exemptions, but the shift has already pushed public safety agencies to look harder at domestically built alternatives — a category where BRINC, which builds all its hardware in the US, is positioned to win.
As a former DJI intern, Resnick has said he wants BRINC to become the “DJI of the West.”
Motorola Solutions is backing that positioning too. It first invested in BRINC in April 2025 through a $75 million round that formed a strategic alliance between the two companies, and its dispatch and radio systems already let officers launch a BRINC drone with the push of a button or trigger one automatically when a 911 call comes in. This round deepens that bet, and BRINC’s exclusive integration with Motorola’s ecosystem remains one of its clearest competitive edges.
From a Las Vegas shooting to 900 agencies
Resnick founded BRINC in 2017 after the Mandalay Bay mass shooting in his hometown of Las Vegas, where it took more than an hour for a SWAT unit to breach the shooter’s door. That realisation led to the company’s first product, the Lemur, an indoor tactical drone built to give first responders eyes inside a building before they enter it themselves.
BRINC’s current portfolio spans the Lemur 2 for indoor tactical operations, Responder for rapid incident response, and Guardian, a Starlink-connected, long-range aircraft the company says is built to replace police helicopters.
More than 900 public safety agencies, including over 20% of US SWAT teams, now use its products, a base BRINC says has grown alongside a tripling of revenue in 2025 and a fivefold increase in monthly production capacity.
The company has signed nearly four times as many 911 drone contracts this year as over the same period in 2025, including new deployments with the Los Angeles Fire Department and the St. Louis Police Department. These figures come from the company and have not been independently verified.
BRINC will use the new capital to expand its domestic manufacturing footprint, bring new products to market, and grow its workforce, which has grown to 187 employees from 108 a year earlier, with 41 more roles open and headcount expected to top 250 once the new factory is running.
Later this year, it plans to move into that factory, three times the size of its current
A crowded, and increasingly valuable, drone market
BRINC is competing in a market growing fast enough to support several outsized deals at once. Skydio, now valued at $4.4 billion after a $110 million raise in April 2026, has built one of the largest US autonomous drone businesses spanning enterprise, defence and public safety. Shield AI, whose valuation more than doubled to $12.7 billion in a $2 billion round in March 2026, is focused on autonomous military aircraft. Anduril Industries, valued at $61 billion after a $5 billion round in May 2026, continues to expand across autonomous drones and surveillance systems.
Unlike most of that field, BRINC has built its strategy specifically around integrating into 911 dispatch, rather than treating defence or industrial inspection as its core market, a similar wedge to the one European players like Auterion and Firestorm Labs have used to carve out defence niches of their own, and one echoed in Europe’s own counter-drone push, where startups like D-Fend Solutions are chasing a similarly fast-growing public-safety opportunity.
According to Grand View Research, the global drone services market is projected to grow from roughly $18.6 billion in 2025 to more than $57 billion by 2030.
Whether BRINC can actually reach 80,000 stations is a manufacturing and sales-execution question as much as a technology one. But with Motorola’s dispatch network as a distribution rail and a regulatory tailwind pushing agencies toward US-built hardware, BRINC has stacked more of the pieces in its favour than most rivals chasing the same emergency-response opportunity.
