When I spoke with Blake Resnick, he was touring his drone startup’s newest office space in Seattle. The cavernous 50,000-square-foot facility won’t be fully installed until later this year, possibly in November, Resnick estimates. Still, the large (and for now mostly empty) building offers the promise of a fast-growing company looking to conquer a specific industry.
The industry in question is public safety, and the startup is Brinc, which sells drones to police and public agencies across the United States. The company wants to be, as Resnick puts it, “the DJI of the West.” It’s a nod to the Chinese drone manufacturer and a sign that Resnick wants Brinc to become equally synonymous with the technology it sells.
Resnick, a former Thiel Fellow (a prestigious program that provides funding for young entrepreneurs to skip or postpone college), founded Brinc in 2017 and soon garnered the attention of then-OpenAI founder Sam Altman. Sam Altman was ultimately one of Brinc’s first seed investors. Since then, Brinc has enjoyed numerous funding rounds, with its last current valuation reaching nearly $500 million, Resnick said.
Brinc launched its latest product on Tuesday, a new public safety drone called the Guardian. “It’s the closest thing the drone industry has produced to a police helicopter replacement,” Resnick says. Brinc claims this drone is the “most capable 9-11 response drone” in the world to date.
The Guardian certainly comes with powerful specs and features. The drone can fly at speeds of up to 60 miles per hour and can endure a flight time of 62 minutes, its creators say. It is also equipped with a thermal imaging camera and two additional 4K cameras, all with zoom capability. “Even at fairly high altitudes, police departments were able to read license plate details,” Resnick said. It also has loud speakers with a volume louder than spotlights and police sirens.
The drone landing station, which Brinc calls a “charging nest,” offers fully automated battery replacement and can stock critical safety supplies such as defibrillators, flotation devices and Narcan, all without human intervention.
The Guardian has a Starlink panel built directly into its body, making it the first public safety drone with this capability, according to Brinc. Starlink, SpaceX’s satellite internet service, provides drone connectivity anywhere in the world. “Starlink has never been built into a commercially produced quadcopter before, giving this airframe unlimited range anywhere in the world,” Resnick said.
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Resnick clearly sees public safety as a big opportunity. “There are approximately 20,000 police departments, 30,000 fire departments, and 80,000 police and fire departments in the United States, and we think in the future the top half of this market will have 911 response drones in their rooftop charging nests,” he said. Assessing markets in the U.S. and other countries, he said, “I think we’re definitely looking at a $6 billion to $8 billion market opportunity.”
On this front, Brinc recently partnered with the National League of Cities on a program to expand “Drones as First Responders” programs in communities across the country. This will definitely help foster relationships between the startup and the local community that could ultimately become its customers.
Resnick also believes recent geopolitical developments have worked in the company’s favor. Until recently, DJI enjoyed an unofficial monopoly on the global drone market, including in the United States, where safety agencies have long relied on products from the Chinese company. However, the Trump administration recently banned the importation of foreign drone models into the country, opening up a huge potential market.
“There’s a huge need for DJI in the West or the leading drone manufacturer in the free world, and ultimately that’s what we want,” Resnick says.
