Forward Deployed Engineer

BRINC brings wildfire and smoke tracking into drone operations. New LiveOps layers integrate NOAA fire and smoke data to give public safety agencies a more complete operational picture. BRINC has added wildfire and smoke tracking to its LiveOps platform, giving public safety agencies another source of information during active fire response. The company announced two new map layers on August 10. The features display active fire detections and current smoke conditions alongside drone operations, live video, and other incident information. BRINC made the new layers available to all customers on August 7 at no additional cost. Bringing fire data into drone operations. The new features use data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Agencies can turn the fire and smoke layers on or off independently. The goal is to give responders a more complete operational picture without requiring them to switch between separate systems. Fire departments and emergency managers can use the information while assessing and coordinating wildfire response. Law enforcement agencies can also view smoke conditions when reduced visibility affects operations in impacted communities. "When agencies are stretched thin responding to wildfires, the last thing they need is another screen to check," said Blake Resnick, BRINC Founder and CEO. "Our customers already run their drone operations in our software. Now fire activity and smoke conditions are right there on the same map. And like every BRINC integration, it's free." Expanding the LiveOps platform. The addition reflects BRINC's broader effort to bring multiple sources of public safety information into LiveOps. The platform combines drone video, dispatch information, third-party data, and other operational information in a single interface. BRINC said customer feedback has also driven other additions to the platform. After agencies requested live traffic information, the company integrated Google Maps traffic data. That capability can help teams assess road conditions and manage vehicle pursuits. BRINC says LiveOps upgrades, improvements, and core integrations are included for customers at no additional cost. The Seattle-based company develops drones and related technology for public safety agencies. According to BRINC, more than 1,000 public safety agencies and over 20% of U.S. SWAT teams use its products. Miriam McNabb is the Editor-in-Chief of DRONELIFE and CEO of JobForDrones, a professional drone services marketplace, and a fascinated observer of the emerging drone industry and the regulatory environment for drones. Miriam has penned over 3,000 articles focused on the commercial drone space and is an international speaker and recognized figure in the industry. Miriam has a degree from the University of Chicago and over 20 years of experience in high tech sales and marketing for new technologies. For drone industry consulting or writing, Email Miriam.

Motorola and Index Ventures back BRINC with $125M to put a 911 drone on every US police and fire station roof. July 16, 2026 * 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.

BRINC raises $125 million to expand 911 response drone manufacturing. BRINC announced this week that it has closed a $125 million financing round led by Motorola Solutions, with participation from Index Ventures and Figma CEO Dylan Field. The raise brings the public safety drone maker's total funding to "well over" a quarter billion dollars and is aimed at scaling deployment of its 911 response drones across the roughly 80,000 police and fire stations across the United States. The company said the new capital will go toward expanding domestic manufacturing, bringing new products to market and scaling go-to-market operations. BRINC plans to move into a new facility by the end of the year that is three times the size of its current factory, a step the company says is needed to keep up with demand from public safety agencies. "Every second matters in an emergency," said Blake Resnick, founder and CEO of BRINC, in a statement. "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." BRINC said the round follows a period of rapid commercial growth. The company more than tripled revenue in 2025 and increased monthly production capacity fivefold. So far this year, BRINC has signed nearly four times as many 911 response drone contracts as it did over the same period in 2025, with customers including the Los Angeles Fire Department and the St. Louis Police Department, among hundreds of other agencies. BRINC's product line spans indoor and outdoor missions. The company positions its Lemur 2 as "the most capable indoor drone," its Responder as the leader in time on scene, and its Guardian as a 911 response drone built to replace helicopter response. BRINC also has exclusive integrations with Motorola Solutions and says its products interoperate with other public safety technology platforms.