At 25, Blake Resnick has built BRINC into a $480 million enterprise serving more than 600 public safety agencies nationwide—a trajectory that began with a SWAT operator literally slapping his prototype out of the sky.
A Garage Workshop Education
Resnick's path to emergency response technology started in unlikely territory. He built a deuterium fusion reactor in his garage as a teenager—"which freaked out my neighbors thoroughly," he recalls—learning high-vacuum systems, high-voltage electronics, and neutron detection along the way. He designed supersonic rockets, secured internships at McLaren, Tesla, and DJI, all before turning 18.
The technical confidence came hard-won. Dyslexic and struggling to read in elementary school, Resnick credits intensive after-school programs with helping him catch up and eventually excel. He skipped sixth grade, started college at 14, transferred to Northwestern, and dropped out six months later with a Thiel Fellowship.
When the October 1, 2017 shooting unfolded on the Las Vegas Strip—where Resnick grew up and knew people along the route—it shifted his focus entirely. "I'd never conceptualized building technology for first responders before that," he explains, "but that event definitely pushed me in that direction."
He reached out to Vegas Metro SWAT, and the commander agreed to meet. Their conversation broadened from that specific tragedy to the daily realities SWAT teams face: high-risk warrant searches, barricades, hostage rescue. What struck Resnick was a fundamental gap—teams needed eyes and ears in dangerous places before putting officers at risk.
The Towel Test
Resnick returned to his mother's house and engineered what would become the LEMUR drone. Proud of the design, he arranged a demonstration with the full Vegas Metro SWAT team. The demo did not go as planned.
Mid-flight, one operator walked up with a towel and swatted the drone to the ground. "He looked me dead in the eye and said, 'This is going to happen within the first 45 seconds of your first SWAT call-out,'" Resnick remembers. If the aircraft couldn't flip itself over and continue the mission, it would be "completely worthless."
A brutal 30-minute critique followed—everything wrong with the design, everything that had to change. Resnick went back, re-engineered the entire system, and returned for another demo. This time the team invited him to join actual callouts.
For six months, he went on call with Vegas Metro SWAT, receiving 3 a.m. notifications when situations escalated across the valley. He'd grab prototype drones, drive to the scene, watch operators use the aircraft in live tactical situations. The drones found suspects hiding in places SWAT didn't know to check. They established initial communications, dramatically reducing escalation risk. By the end of that period, Vegas Metro became BRINC's first customer.
The self-righting system that emerged is now standard—the drone drives two motors in reverse to generate flip thrust without adding mechanical arms or extra failure points. BRINC also added ballistic parachute canisters with pyrotechnic charges and independent computers that can autonomously deploy if anything goes wrong.
From TikTok Influencers to Sam Altman
Fundraising as an 18-year-old proved excruciating. After multiple rejections, a friend suggested an introduction to someone managing TikTok influencers who was dabbling in startup investing.
The pitch call was memorable for the wrong reasons—the investor joined late, shirtless, then stopped Resnick two minutes in to say he wasn't smart enough to evaluate the opportunity and invited two other people into the Zoom.
Hours later, one of those invitees called: he was Sam Altman's ex-boyfriend and wanted to introduce Resnick to the OpenAI CEO. The meeting with Altman lasted half the scheduled time before he had to leave for a call with Elon Musk. Four follow-up questions by email later, Altman committed $2 million.
"Sam Altman, to some extent, already had a vision for emergency response drones," Resnick reflects. The shared interests—McLaren, Tesla, DJI, fusion—helped, but Altman had already conceptualized much of what BRINC was building.
Alex Wang of Scale AI joined the seed round and connected Resnick to Index Ventures. Mike Volpi led a $25 million Series A in October 2021. This April, Index led a $75 million round with Motorola Solutions and others, bringing total funding to approximately $157 million and valuing the company at $480 million.
Building for SWAT and 911
BRINC now operates two distinct product lines. The LEMUR 2 serves tactical teams—more than 10% of US SWAT teams now deploy the platform. Features include glass breakers for forced entry, two-way audio for crisis negotiation, thermal imaging, and mesh networking that penetrates dense structures. LiDAR-based autonomy handles GPS-denied environments, and the aircraft can carry or drag objects up to one pound.
The Responder platform is what Resnick set out to build from the beginning—an end-to-end Drone as First Responder system. Charging stations sit on police and fire station rooftops, integrated directly with computer-aided dispatch. When someone dials 911, the system captures coordinates, selects the nearest drone, and launches autonomously with a target response time under 70 seconds.
Early deployments show the technology can clear approximately 25% of calls without dispatching officers, enabling human responders to reach priority calls 54% faster—critical when departments face staffing shortages. Drones deliver Narcan, defibrillators, EpiPens, and inflatable flotation devices. "Drownings are actually a serious problem," Resnick notes, "and it's difficult for first responders to get out into the ocean or into a pond within a couple of minutes." An inflatable device delivered in 60 seconds can save lives before human crews arrive.
Thermal imagers assess fire severity before firefighters enter, see through smoke, detect hotspots. For law enforcement, the drones provide situational awareness—whether a person is armed, how many individuals are present—before officers arrive.
Sophisticated path-planning algorithms deconflict with manned aircraft using ground-based radar and ADS-B data, route around cell towers, maintain altitude restrictions. Only when the drone arrives on scene does it hand control to a human operator.
AI That Won't Let Drones Take Off
Artificial intelligence runs so deep in BRINC's autonomy stack that aircraft won't launch without it, Resnick emphasizes. Machine learning processes visual inertial odometry, LiDAR mapping, and camera tracking to estimate position when GPS fails. The systems also handle electromagnetic interference—the Wi-Fi saturation inside buildings that can disrupt radio communications.
One feature under development is computer vision search. Operators will type queries like "white bag," "six foot tall male," or license plate numbers, and the system will alert them with bounding boxes when matches appear in video feeds. In search and rescue missions, querying for "six foot tall dude with a red jacket" could trigger alerts the moment that person comes into view.
BRINC has also built a public transparency portal that publishes every drone launch, emergency type, response time, and actual flight path. "If someone sees a drone flying over their house, they can look it up in our software, put in their location where they saw the drone, put in what time they saw the drone, and then they can see the purpose of that flight," Resnick explains. The system only deploys when someone calls 911—an opt-in model that addresses surveillance concerns.
Competing in a Geopolitical Market
China has sanctioned both Resnick personally and BRINC twice, citing alleged military collaboration with Taiwan—accusations Resnick denies. "I think the reality is they view drones as a very critical military technology, and they don't want the free world or the United States to have any capacity to build these systems," he says.
The sanctions carry limited operational impact because BRINC's products must meet NDAA compliance standards anyway—no Chinese processors, sensors, or radio systems. The company's supply chain sources from Japan, South Korea, the UK, and US manufacturers.
Recent tariffs raised BRINC's bill-of-materials costs but also made competitor DJI drones more expensive. "I actually think this is likely a small net positive for us," Resnick observes. The same dynamics benefit Skydio, the San Mateo company that's BRINC's primary domestic competitor with deployments in more than 1,000 public safety agencies including NYPD and SFPD.
BRINC differentiates through mission-specific design, particularly for interior tactical operations where glass breakers, mesh networking, and two-way audio address requirements general-purpose platforms don't meet. The company relocated to Seattle and scaled to approximately 150 employees, recruiting heavily from SpaceX, Starlink, Amazon Prime Air, and Project Kuiper.
Staying Focused on Public Safety
Resnick's focus remains exclusively on public safety customers, though he acknowledges geopolitics could force reconsideration. "I think if the US got into some major hot war with China, it would be difficult not to have conversations along those lines," he admits. "However, right now, we really do sell exclusively to public safety. It's a community I care a lot about. It's a mission that I passionately love."
He draws parallels to nuclear technology—civil applications that save lives coexist with military applications that carry existential risk. Drones follow similar trajectories. "There are ways that this technology can massively improve quality of life and save a lot of people's lives, and I think that's a beautiful, amazing future that we should make happen," he says. "But clearly, looking at what's going on in Ukraine and other places in the world, these are also powerful weapons of war."
Looking back at the years working from his mother's house, the failed fundraising attempts, the drone swatted down with a towel, Resnick reflects on what has changed. Vegas Metro SWAT didn't encourage him to give up during that first brutal demo—they made clear what had to improve for the technology to be viable. That honesty, delivered bluntly, became the foundation for everything BRINC has built since.
