Eighty thousand police and fire stations across America. Fewer than 100 have drones on their roofs ready to respond to emergencies in under 70 seconds. Blake Resnick intends to change that.
The 25-year-old founder of BRINC announced in April 2025 that his Seattle-based drone company has secured $75 million in new funding and formed a strategic alliance with technology giant Motorola Solutions. It’s the kind of partnership that doesn’t just validate a young company, it has the potential to reshape how every emergency in America gets handled.
“I’ve been talking to Motorola for a couple of years about various ways we can work together,” Resnick said during the Motorola Summit 2025 in Grapevine, Texas. “Everything just fell into place within the last six months to a year.”
The implications are staggering. Motorola Solutions touches nearly every public safety agency in North America, more than 60% of emergency call centres run on their software, and virtually every police officer and firefighter in the country uses their equipment. Now, all of that infrastructure will integrate seamlessly with Resnick’s American-made emergency response drones.
When Seconds Determine Who Lives
The partnership solves a problem that has plagued emergency response since the invention of the telephone: the gap between when someone calls for help and when help actually arrives. For Blake Resnick, this isn’t an abstract concern. He founded BRINC in 2019 in the aftermath of the Las Vegas mass shooting, a tragedy in his hometown that killed 58 people and left him asking how technology could help first responders neutralise threats faster.
The BRINC-Motorola alliance creates something that hasn’t existed before: true automated emergency response. A 911 call comes in, and a drone launches automatically from a charging station on a nearby police or fire station roof. It arrives at the scene in under 70 seconds; long before any human responder could get there streaming live video, thermal imaging, and audio back to dispatchers and officers.
“When someone calls 911, we would grab the GPS coordinate of that call from CAD,” Resnick explained, referring to Motorola’s Computer-Aided Dispatch systems. “We’re integrating with both Premier One and Flex, which are their CAD offerings. And again, that could trigger a drone flight.”
But the integration goes further. An officer or firefighter in danger can push the panic button on their Motorola APX radio, and a drone will automatically launch to their exact location. Ground-based license plate readers can trigger drones to track suspect vehicles, eliminating dangerous high-speed chases. The system doesn’t just make emergency response faster; it fundamentally reimagines how it works.
The American-Made Advantage
The timing of the announcement proved remarkable. Just days before BRINC and Motorola revealed their partnership, President Trump announced new tariffs on China. For Resnick, whose company manufactures everything in the United States, the moment represented both validation and opportunity.
“DJI drones did certainly become much more expensive after the latest couple of rounds of tariffs,” Resnick noted. “I would say our products are much more price competitive, after that happened.”
Todd Piett, senior vice president of Command Centre Solutions at Motorola Solutions, emphasised that the American manufacturing wasn’t just about price. “The fact that BRINC is US-made is really compelling for us as well,” he said. Data security concerns have made agencies increasingly wary of foreign-made drones, especially those from China.
BRINC manufactures all its products in Seattle, maintains co-located R&D and production and operates as a vertically integrated company, controlling every link in its supply chain. It’s exactly the kind of domestic manufacturing capability that federal agencies are actively seeking.
Beyond the Funding: What the Alliance Unlocks
The $75 million raise led by Index Ventures with significant participation from Motorola Solutions, Mike Volpi and Figma CEO Dylan Fie matters less for the capital itself than for what it signals. Motorola doesn’t just write checks; it opens doors.
“They’ve sold to basically all of the potential customers that we will be able to sell to in the free world,” Resnick said. “So they have all of those relationships, and this is an amazing way for us to collaborate and show a huge number of agencies all over the world our technology.”
The integration between the two companies’ products creates capabilities that neither could offer alone. Jeremiah Nelson, Motorola’s CVP of Product & Technology, described BRINC’s approach as genuinely novel. “BRINC is bringing a purpose-built American-made, vertically integrated solution to market. It’s very different from how all the companies have been solving DFR to date,” he said, referring to Drone as First Responder programs.
“The payloads, the voice, the lights, and sirens. Nobody is solving for this market in that way,” Nelson continued. BRINC drones don’t just observe, they can deliver AEDs, Narcan, EpiPens, and flotation devices. They have red and blue LEDs to identify themselves as law enforcement. They can communicate through two-way audio with people on the ground.
Regulatory Winds Shifting
A crucial factor accelerating BRINC’s growth trajectory has nothing to do with technology and everything to do with bureaucracy or rather, the sudden lack of it. Beyond Visual Line of Sight (BVLOS) waivers from the Federal Aviation Administration, once notoriously slow to obtain, are now being approved in roughly two weeks.
“It’s far faster than it ever has been,” Resnick said. “It’s difficult to overstate how much that’s changed. Especially in the last six months.”
Nelson confirmed the transformation: “Before Beyond Visual Line of Sight, you had somebody looking at a drone. You were paying a pilot’s salary up on the roof. You were spending more on people and less on hardware. With BVLOS, the ratio of people to drones changes pretty dramatically.”
That shift in economics combined with BRINC’s purpose-built drones and Motorola’s distribution network has Nelson convinced that the market is reaching an inflection point. “With the change in the waivers, just in the last six months, it’s been dramatic. DFR is happening now.”
The Scale of the Opportunity
About 700 agencies worldwide currently use BRINC drones for emergency response. Over 700 public safety agencies and more than 15% of US SWAT teams rely on BRINC products. Those numbers sound impressive until Resnick puts them in context.
“There are roughly 20,000 police departments in America, roughly 30,000 fire departments, and about 80,000 police and fire stations,” he said. “But less than 100 have drone recharging stations on the roof to send drones to respond to 911 calls. I think in the future though, maybe 50% of those 80,000 buildings will have this capability.”
Forty thousand buildings. That’s the market Resnick is targeting. Getting there requires not just great technology but the distribution, integration, and credibility that a partner like Motorola provides.
“I couldn’t be more excited about the distribution element of it, we’re working together to meet with agencies,” Resnick said. “But also, technology integration by deeply connecting computer aided dispatch and Real Time Centre software with Command Central Aware.”
For agencies struggling with budget constraints and staffing shortages, the value proposition is becoming impossible to ignore: 60-second response times, the ability to clear low-priority calls without dispatching officers, live video feeds of every situation before officers arrive, and the capacity to deliver life-saving equipment faster than any ambulance could travel.
What Comes Next
Blake Resnick remains characteristically focused on execution. “We will continue building world-class emergency response drones and scale our team to meet the growing demand for our life-saving technologies,” he said. “We couldn’t be more excited for the future.”
The $75 million will fund scaled production, next-generation R&D, and workforce expansion. But the real story isn’t the capital, it’s the infrastructure that Motorola brings to bear. Every 911 centre running CommandCentral Aware. Every officer carrying an APX radio. Every patrol car equipped with license plate readers. All of it can now talk to BRINC drones.
Six years ago, Blake Resnick was a 19-year-old founder with a bold idea and a first contract from the Las Vegas Police Department. Today, he’s partnered with one of the world’s largest public safety technology companies to transform emergency response across the country.
The question is no longer whether drones will respond to 911 calls. The question is how quickly Resnick and Motorola can make it happen at scale and how many lives will be saved in the process.
