A 25-year-old police drone founder just raised $75M led by Index

If you ever call 911 from an area that’s hard to get to, you might hear the buzz of a drone well before a police cruiser pulls up. And there’s a good chance that it will be one made by Brinc Drones, a Seattle-based startup founded by 25-year-old Blake Resnick, who dropped out of college to run the company.

Brinc, which was founded in 2017 and counts OpenAI CEO Sam Altman as a seed-stage investor, just announced today that it has raised $75 million in new funding led by Index Ventures.

This brings the startup’s total funding to $157.2 million. While Brinc isn’t disclosing its exact valuation, Resnick told TechCrunch it’s an “up-round” compared to its most recent round, a $55 million Series B in 2022. Brinc was last valued at $300 million in 2023, Bloomberg reported.

Brinc sells a variety of drone systems to police and public safety agencies. It’s part of a broader trend of U.S. drone startups manufacturing domestically due to increasing restrictions against Chinese companies that dominate the commercial drone industry. (Resnick briefly interned at DJI, by far the biggest Chinese player, a few years before founding Brinc.)

With this funding, Brinc is launching a “strategic alliance” with Motorola Solutions, which also invested in the round. Motorola Solutions is a giant in the U.S. security industry whose software powers many 911 call centers. The partnership will integrate Brinc drones directly into those centers, allowing operators to dispatch drones for certain emergency calls if they’re cleared by an existing Motorola AI system.

Brinc is, however, in an increasingly competitive field with other U.S. startups like Flock Safety and Skydio. Each also offers drones for police, and have multibillion-dollar valuations. Flock stood at $7.5 billion in its latest round last month while Skydio was valued at $2.2 billion in 2023.

When it comes to the competition, Resnick tells TechCrunch that there’s plenty of room for growth in a market that is otherwise dominated by Chinese players. Beyond the Motorola partnership, he says Brinc offers its share of unique features, like the ability to break windows or deliver emergency medical devices.