Blake Resnick

Business InsiderBusiness InsiderBusiness Insider is a digital business-news organization.Open the full entry writes that he was born in Las Vegas, NevadaNevadaNevada is a state in the western United States bordered by Oregon, Idaho, Utah, Arizona, and California; its capital is Carson City. It was admitted to the Union on October 31, 1864, as the 36th state, and its population in the 2020 census (April 1, 2020) was 3,104,614.Open the full entry, to a doctor and a special education teacher; BRINC’s founder biography calls him a Las Vegas native.⁠[1][2]

GeekWire writes that he was diagnosed with dyslexia in first grade, went through intensive reading classes and skipped classes to talk about books with his school’s principal. ForbesForbesForbes is an American business media brand that began with Forbes magazine, founded by B.C. Forbes in 1917. It is known for rankings such as the Forbes 400, the World’s Billionaires list and 30 Under 30, and operates Forbes.com, ForbesLive events and licensed editions in 81 countries. Since 2014 a majority stake has been held by the Hong Kong investment group Integrated Whale Media; a 2021 plan to list on the New York Stock Exchange through a special purpose acquisition company was terminated in 2022. It is headquartered in Jersey City, New Jersey.Open the full entry writes that as a boy he took apart toys, then hair dryers, then microwaves; that an early diagnosis of dyslexia worked in his favor when he was enrolled in extra classes; and that he skipped sixth grade and spent a year and a half in high school. His personal website states that he has loved science and technology since childhood and often took household appliances apart and put them back together.⁠[3][4][5]

Forbes writes that he had been building drones since the age of 10.⁠[4]

BRINC’s founder biography states that he started college at 14. Business Insider, drawing on his LinkedInLinkedInLinkedIn is a social networking platform for professionals. It was founded in 2002 by Reid Hoffman and others, launched in 2003, and listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 2011; after Microsoft acquired it for approximately $26.2 billion in 2016, it became a wholly owned Microsoft subsidiary. Its revenue comes from membership subscriptions, advertising, and recruitment solutions.Open the full entry profile, writes that he started college at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and transferred to Northwestern UniversityNorthwestern UniversityNorthwestern University is a private research university founded in 1851, with campuses in Evanston and Chicago, Illinois, United States, and in Doha, Qatar.Open the full entry two years later; Forbes writes that he headed to the “University of Las Vegas” at 14, that internships at McLaren and Tesla followed, and that he then transferred to Northwestern University, where he studied mechanical engineering.⁠[2][1][4]

GeekWire and his personal website state that at 14 he built an inertial electrostatic confinement nuclear fusion reactor in his garage; The Seattle Times writes that he built a nuclear fusion reactor in his parents’ Las Vegas garage.⁠[6][5][7]

As a teenager he interned at McLaren, Tesla and DJI. In The Seattle Times he said that he was about 15 when he started at McLaren; GeekWire writes that he was McLaren’s youngest intern and that he briefly met Elon MuskElon MuskElon Musk is an entrepreneur who founded SpaceX and has long served as chief executive of Tesla; he also took part in creating PayPal, OpenAI, Neuralink, The Boring Company, and xAI. He acquired Twitter in 2022, and his businesses span spaceflight, electric vehicles, energy, artificial intelligence, and social media.Open the full entry while interning at TeslaTeslaTesla is an American electric vehicle and energy company whose businesses span automobiles, solar energy, and battery energy storage. Founded in 2003 and headquartered in Austin, Texas, its shares are listed on Nasdaq under the ticker TSLA.Open the full entry. BRINC’s founder biography states that at McLaren he developed a cheaper, more effective brake cooling system, at Tesla he built a data-driven predictive model estimating CAN bus latency from network utilization, and at DJI he designed an active Kevlar drone tether system to prevent flyaways and experimentally characterized the performance of an advanced lidar unit. His personal website adds that the McLaren work concerned brake cooling in super sports cars and that during that internship he assisted the design director and presented his work to the CEO, and that at Tesla he packaged the algorithms in a MATLAB script and identified the point at which high bus utilization causes network failures in real cars. Forbes writes that while at Northwestern University he took a few months off to intern at DJI in Palo Alto, CaliforniaCaliforniaCalifornia is a U.S. state on the Pacific coast; its capital is Sacramento and its largest city is Los Angeles. California was admitted to the Union on September 9, 1850, as the 31st state. Its population at the 2020 Census (April 1, 2020) was 39,538,223, the largest of any state.Open the full entry, where he saw firsthand how the global leader built flying machines; TechCrunchTechCrunchTechCrunch is an American technology news outlet founded in 2005 by Michael Arrington and Keith Teare and headquartered in San Francisco; it mainly covers technology companies, startups, and venture capital, and hosts events such as TechCrunch Disrupt. Its ownership passed successively through AOL, Verizon, and Yahoo, and in 2025 Regent announced its acquisition.Open the full entry writes that he briefly interned at DJI a few years before founding BRINC.⁠[7][6][2][5][4][8]

He did not complete a degree: The Seattle Times writes that he attended the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and then Northwestern University without finishing a degree. Sources differ on when and why he left: Forbes writes that he dropped out in early 2017 to try making drones himself, with a photo caption noting that telling his parents was not easy; BRINC’s founder biography states that he dropped out at 17 to start a company; GeekWire writes that he left Northwestern University’s mechanical engineering program in 2017 to start BRINC in response to the October 1, 2017 Las Vegas shooting; The Seattle Times writes that he dropped out when Peter ThielPeter ThielPeter Thiel is an American entrepreneur and investor, a co-founder of PayPal and Palantir Technologies, and the first outside investor in Facebook. He is a partner at the venture capital firm Founders Fund and founded the Thiel Fellowship, which funds young people to leave college and build new things; his public skepticism of higher education, his support for Trump in 2016, and his funding of litigation against Gawker Media have drawn controversy.Open the full entry offered him a Thiel FellowshipThiel FellowshipThe Thiel Fellowship is a two-year grant program started by investor Peter Thiel and run by the Thiel Foundation that funds young people who skip or stop out of college to build new things instead. The program has been criticized by figures in education for encouraging young people to leave college.Open the full entry.⁠[4][4][2][9][7]

In The Seattle Times he said: “I don’t think my mom has forgiven me for dropping out of school.” A Forbes photo caption notes that seven years and 700 customers later he quips: “I think my mom has finally forgiven me.”⁠[7][1][4]

On October 1, 2017, a gunman fired from a 32nd-floor room of the Mandalay Bay hotel on the Las Vegas Strip into the crowd at the Route 91 Harvest festival. Forbes puts the toll at 58 killed and more than 400 wounded, The Seattle Times writes that 60 people were killed, and his personal website states that more than 58 people died and that about one hour and five minutes passed before a SWAT unit breached the door. He was 17 and at his childhood home in Las Vegas, about 20 minutes away; GeekWire writes that he knew several of the victims.⁠[4][7][5][6][9]

Forbes writes that he wondered why the police did not use a drone in such a situation; GeekWire writes that he wondered how technology could have helped. His personal website states that he believed the right technology could have cut that time to minutes, which led to the LEMUR drone. BRINC’s founder biography states that he concluded new technology could help save lives in public-safety situations and set out in 2017 to build technology for first responders.⁠[4][6][5][2]

He cold-called the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department and met its SWAT commander; BRINC’s founder biography states that he did so to understand first responders’ needs and worked with the SWAT team on the first BRINC drone design. Forbes writes that the two met over coffee at a local Einstein Bros. Bagels, and that SWAT lieutenant Will Huddler listened skeptically to the gangly 6-foot-3 teenager but gave him 90 days to build a prototype; he assembled it at his parents’ dining table from mostly Chinese-made parts, and on day 86 his demonstration to 40 SWAT officers failed when an officer slapped the drone out of the air with a towel.⁠[3][2][4]

Forbes writes that three months later he returned with a drone that could right itself, that Will Huddler then invited him on SWAT ride-alongs, and that he and the Las Vegas SWAT team together developed the Lemur, which became his flagship drone. BloombergBloomberg L.P.Bloomberg L.P. is a global financial technology, data and media company founded by Michael Bloomberg in 1981. It began by providing terminal services that deliver data, analytics and news to financial professionals, and launched Bloomberg News in 1990. Michael Bloomberg has pledged the vast majority of the company’s profits to his philanthropic organization, Bloomberg Philanthropies.Open the full entry writes that at 18 he began going on calls with the Las Vegas SWAT team, driving out late at night with law enforcement, deploying drones to see what worked and what did not, then returning to his mother’s kitchen to re-engineer them for the next mission, and that the SWAT team never gave him the vest he had been promised. GeekWire writes that it took three years of trial and error before BRINC took off.⁠[4][10][11]

The InterceptThe InterceptThe Intercept is a New York-based nonprofit investigative news outlet founded on February 10, 2014 by Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras and Jeremy Scahill under Pierre Omidyar’s First Look Media, initially to report on the NSA documents leaked by Edward Snowden; it became an independent nonprofit separate from First Look in 2023.Open the full entry writes that in a 2018 promotional video he presented a concept for a “Wall of Drones” on the U.S.–Mexico border: a row of towers each harboring a small quadcopter with high-definition and thermal sensors and a stun gun, through which a Border Patrol agent could remotely “interrogate” the person stopped; the video shows a drone firing a Taser into the back of an actor portraying a migrant; he was about 18 when it was made. A patent in his name, “Drone Implemented Border Patrol,” was filed provisionally in 2017, formally filed in June 2018 and granted in 2020; it describes an onboard facial recognition algorithm comparing captured facial features with the U.S. Department of State’s facial recognition database, and names the onboard stun gun as a Taser X26.⁠[12]

Sources give different founding dates: Forbes writes that Brinc (short for Blake Resnick Inc.) was officially incorporated in 2018 with the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department as its first customer; BRINC’s founder biography, GeekWire and Business Insider give 2019 as the year he founded the company; TechCrunch states that it was founded in 2017; the BRINC page of his personal website states that the company launched in early 2021.⁠[4][2][13][1][8][14]

Forbes writes that for two years the company was a one-man operation and that its revenue reached $100,000 a year. A 2022 BRINC press release states that the company’s first product, the LEMUR S, was born from advanced Department of Homeland Security research and developed in close partnership with the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department’s SWAT team.⁠[4][15]

Forbes writes that in 2020 he joined a call with a friend of a friend who offered introductions, including to a former romantic partner of Sam Altman; Sam Altman then emailed him about revenue, customers, growth and fundraising plans, he answered quickly, and some 36 hours later Sam Altman replied that he would invest, writing a $2 million check. GeekWire writes that their call ended early because Elon Musk was calling, that Sam Altman then sent three or four questions and said he would take the whole round. GeekWire also writes that Sam Altman was the company’s first external investor, through OpenAIOpenAIOpenAI is an artificial intelligence research and product organization founded in 2015 that develops the GPT model series, ChatGPT, Codex and a developer API, and conducts research on image, speech, video and intelligent agents. After its 2025 restructuring, the nonprofit OpenAI Foundation continues to control the for-profit OpenAI Group PBC. Its growth has involved large-scale fundraising and compute partnerships, and has also been accompanied by controversies over governance, copyright, privacy and AI safety.Open the full entry’s startup investment program.⁠[4][3][6]

Forbes writes that Scale AI founder Alexandr WangAlexandr WangAlexandr Wang is an artificial intelligence entrepreneur, a co-founder and former chief executive officer of Scale AI. He joined Meta in June 2025 as the company’s first chief AI officer and leads Meta Superintelligence Labs. His work spans AI training data, model evaluation, government applications, and personal agents.Open the full entry then invested another $150,000; he says: “It really changed my life.”⁠[4]

On December 30, 2020, the Thiel Foundation announced the 24 members of the 2020 class of Thiel Fellows; he is item 4, with Las Vegas, Nevada, as his hometown. The announcement states that his Brinc Drones designs and manufactures advanced aerial robots that help tactical teams respond to barricade, hostage and active-shooter situations. It also states that the program, launched in 2011, encourages talented young people to pursue big ideas and start companies instead of attending college, and that fellows receive $100,000 over the two-year program.⁠[16]

Business Insider writes that he won the fellowship in 2020; Forbes writes that he received $100,000 from the Thiel Fellowship; The Seattle Times writes that the Thiel Fellowship offered him $100,000 to leave college and build something. BRINC’s founder biography and The Intercept also state that he is a Thiel Fellow, and his personal website states that he was named to the 2020 class of Thiel Fellows.⁠[1][4][7][2][12][5]

Forbes writes that Alexandr Wang introduced BRINC to Index Ventures, which led a $25 million Series A in 2021. The Seattle Times writes that Index Ventures provided the next $25 million after Sam Altman’s first check and that the investors include Pat Shanahan, a former BoeingBoeingBoeing is an American company that provides commercial airplanes, defense and space systems, and aviation services, and is listed on the New York Stock Exchange.Open the full entry executive who was deputy defense secretary under President Donald TrumpDonald TrumpDonald Trump (born 1946) is an American politician and businessman, a Republican who ran the real estate company the Trump Organization and starred in the television series The Apprentice. He served as the 45th president of the United States from 2017 to 2021 and has been the 47th president since 2025.Open the full entry; The Intercept writes that BRINC raised $25 million from investors including Sam Altman, former LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner’s Next Play Ventures and Patrick Shanahan, a former acting Secretary of Defense.⁠[4][7][12]

Business Insider quotes him in 2021: “We want to make the police helicopter obsolete and respond to all serious emergencies in seconds.”⁠[1]

BRINC moved its headquarters from Las Vegas to Seattle, Washington; he said he chose Seattle for its engineering talent. Sources date the move differently: GeekWire’s 2026 report and Forbes give 2021 (Forbes writes that the company moved into a 22,000-square-foot Seattle facility in 2021), while GeekWire’s 2023 report gives 2022. GeekWire places the headquarters in Seattle’s Fremont neighborhood.⁠[6][7][13][4][11]

The Seattle Times wrote in 2022 that BRINC had grown from a one-person company to about 100 employees between a Las Vegas manufacturing site and its new Seattle headquarters; KVVU wrote in August 2022 that he said the company had been just him 18 months earlier, and that half of its roughly 100 employees worked in the Seattle office. GeekWire wrote in 2022 that the company planned to grow from about 80 to about 150 employees within a year. The BRINC page of his personal website states that the company has a team of more than 100 engineers, builders, technologists and public-safety specialists with its office in Seattle, Washington, and lists its commitments, including never building technology designed to hurt or kill, building technology designed to save lives, being open and honest, and listening to customers and communities.⁠[7][17][6][14]

GeekWire wrote in 2022 that BRINC’s drones can flip around after a crash, see in the dark, communicate through a microphone and even break a window, and use lidar to operate underground or inside structures without a GPS signal; that its customers are mainly first responders, including the Seattle Police Department, which used its drones to mediate a hostage negotiation; and that its competitors include Viper Drones and Skyfire. The Seattle Times writes that Seattle police bought the Brinc Ball, a two-way communication device that can be rolled or dropped into a scene, that fire departments use Lemurs to inspect burning buildings before sending in firefighters, and that he personally designed the gimbal, a stabilizing device for smooth camera footage, on BRINC’s next new product.⁠[6][7]

After the partial collapse of a condominium building in Surfside, FloridaFloridaFlorida is a U.S. state occupying mainly the Florida peninsula, with its capital at Tallahassee; its most populous city is Jacksonville. It entered the Union on March 3, 1845, as the 27th state, and had a population of 21,538,187 in the 2020 census (April 1, 2020).Open the full entry, in 2021, he brought a drone to help inspect the damage; KVVU writes that he was called on to help with the recovery efforts after the tower collapse; The Seattle Times writes that his Lemur drone snaked through the wreckage in the building’s underground parking garage.⁠[1][17][7]

He was named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 Social Impact list. His personal website states that on December 3, 2021, Forbes announced him as the youngest honoree on its 2022 Social Impact list; a January 2022 BRINC press release states that, at 21, he was the youngest honoree on the list and its most-funded honoree, having raised more than $27 million from investors; BRINC’s founder biography identifies it as Forbes’ 2022 list. Business Insider writes that he was named to Forbes 30 Under 30 in both 2021 and 2022.⁠[18][15][2][1]

On December 13, 2021, The Intercept published a report by Sam Biddle disclosing the 2018 video and patent. He replied by email that the video was “immature, deeply regrettable and not at all representative of the direction I have taken the company in since”; that the “Wall of Drones” was a prototype never fully developed, sold or used operationally and was discontinued in 2018; that the video was faked, the company never having built a drone with a functional Taser, and the dart in the video having been fired with compressed gas; and that the company had talked with a very limited number of parties, that nothing had progressed, and that it was committed to not selling weaponized drones. He also said that the company was founded in large part in response to the 2017 Las Vegas shooting.⁠[12]

In the report an anonymous source with direct knowledge of BRINC said that “the original idea was 100 percent to use drones to tase migrants” and that the company came up with the emphasis on nonviolence only when it raised funds from investors such as Sam Altman. Mitra Ebadolahi, a senior staff attorney at the American Civil Liberties UnionAmerican Civil Liberties UnionThe American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) is a nonprofit, nonpartisan civil liberties organization headquartered in New York City, founded in 1920 by Roger Nash Baldwin and others.Open the full entry of San Diego and Imperial Counties, said that doing so “promotes profits over people and does nothing to further human safety or security”; Jacinta Gonzalez of the advocacy group Mijente called the video “absolutely horrifying” and a “racist fantasy.” The report notes that BRINC’s Values & Ethics page pledged to “never build technologies designed to hurt or kill,” and that the company had recently hired a “federal capture and strategy director.”⁠[12]

GeekWire wrote in 2022 that he called the video “immature, offensive and regrettable,” said it was staged and that the tasing technology was never created, and said that he had changed the company’s direction since 2018 and that values including never building technology designed to hurt or kill were motivated by the backlash; GeekWire wrote in 2023 that he had condemned his actions as “immature” in a blog post.⁠[6][11]

TechCrunch writes that BRINC raised a $55 million Series B in 2022; in The Seattle Times in 2022 he said that a substantial but as yet undisclosed second round had been secured. Forbes writes that Peter Thiel made a small investment in BRINC in 2022.⁠[8][7][4]

After Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, BRINC donated 10 Lemurs to Ukrainian emergency services, and in March he traveled to Poland with his team to give Ukrainians a two-day training. The Seattle Times writes that NATONATONATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, is an alliance founded on the North Atlantic Treaty signed in 1949, with collective defence as its core principle. Its political and administrative centre is in Brussels, Belgium.Open the full entry governments ordered 50 Lemurs at about $10,000 each and donated them to Ukraine, that the Dutch Ministry of Defense bought 30, and that about 10 for Ukraine’s Ministry of Defense were in the pipeline; GeekWire writes that the 10 donated drones were worth $150,000; Forbes writes that BRINC sent 60 Lemurs to Kyiv to assist in search-and-rescue missions.⁠[7][6][4]

The Seattle Times writes that the Ukrainian military has also used Lemurs for surveillance and artillery targeting, a gray area with respect to BRINC’s pledge not to build technology that harms people; he said: “if we can also alert Ukrainians about the locations of Russian forces, I think that’s something we’re OK with.” Forbes writes that the work in Ukraine helped BRINC understand how to make devices that work when radio frequencies and GPS are constantly jammed.⁠[7][4]

KVVU wrote in August 2022 that he had announced that month the BRINC Global Rescue Network, a neutral, nonpartisan philanthropic effort under which BRINC donates equipment, staff and expertise to first responders during emergencies when they request help; the United StatesUnited StatesThe United States is a federal country in North America made up of 50 states, the District of Columbia as the seat of government, and territories such as Puerto Rico and Guam; its capital is Washington, D.C. The Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776. The 2020 census (April 1, 2020) counted a resident population of 331,449,281, and the 435 seats of the House of Representatives are apportioned among the states on the basis of the census.Open the full entry is divided into ten regions, each staffed by a full-time Lemur pilot with two drones, 20 drones in all. He said: “if something happens, it’s a car ride away”; he also said that BRINC could have gone a little faster on Ukraine if all these pieces had been in place, and that after the Ukraine trip the company realized it should have people and equipment prepared to deploy immediately during emergencies. The report adds that BRINC drones had been deployed to and operated in more than 55 countries and that the team had logged more than 10,000 unmanned-systems flight hours.⁠[17]

In March 2023 BRINC unveiled the Lemur 2 for police and public-safety agencies at a media event at its Seattle headquarters, adding an onboard sensor for producing 3D maps and an obstacle-avoidance system that works without GPS or light. GeekWire writes that the company had then raised $80 million in total and that about 15 former AmazonAmazonAmazon is a publicly traded U.S. technology and retail company founded by Jeff Bezos in 1994, with its principal corporate offices in Seattle. Its businesses span e-commerce, logistics and fulfillment, digital advertising, membership and entertainment services, consumer electronics, and Amazon Web Services cloud computing.Open the full entry Prime Air employees had joined since the move to Seattle; he said that U.S. moves to blacklist DJI had been a tailwind for BRINC and that meeting NDAA requirements was hard because the entire global drone supply chain is based in Shenzhen, and that BRINC now makes its products in-house and sources most components in the United States.⁠[11][9]

He named Belgium-based Sky-Hero as BRINC’s closest competitor and said that Skydio serves a broader range of sectors while BRINC focuses only on public safety. GeekWire writes that BRINC drones were deployed in Hatay, Turkey, after an earthquake, that its customers include the Seattle Police Department, which used its drones in a hostage negotiation, and about 400 other U.S. agencies, and that the company planned to let its drones deliver Narcan or EpiPens and to add chemical sensors for hazardous-material emergencies.⁠[11]

In GeekWire’s 2023 podcast report he was 23 and led a team of nearly 100 people, and the company had more than 400 customers and more than $80 million raised from investors including Sam Altman, Index Ventures, Tusk Venture Partners and Jeff Weiner’s Next Play Ventures; the report adds that he had recently visited the White House and that the production version of the Lemur 2 made its first flight while he was in a board meeting: “It happened while we were in the board meeting.”⁠[9]

GeekWire’s 2023 “Uncommon Thinkers” profile writes that the first production Lemur 2 units began shipping to U.S. police and emergency responders at the beginning of that November, with the New York Police Department among its early customers, and that Erin Price-Wright of Index Ventures sat with him on BRINC’s two-person board.⁠[3]

On April 10, 2023, Bloomberg published a report whose headline put the 23-year-old founder’s net worth from SWAT drones above $100 million. Business Insider, drawing on Bloomberg, writes that he owned about half of the privately held company, which as of April 10, 2023 was valued at $300 million and had about 100 employees; its investors included Sam Altman, former acting defense secretary Patrick Shanahan and Sam Bankman-FriedSam Bankman-FriedSam Bankman-Fried (SBF) is an American entrepreneur and the co-founder of the cryptocurrency exchange FTX and the crypto hedge fund Alameda Research. After FTX collapsed in November 2022, he was charged in the United States with misappropriating customer funds; in November 2023 a jury found him guilty on seven counts of fraud and conspiracy, in March 2024 he was sentenced to 25 years in prison and ordered to forfeit about $11 billion, and in 2026 the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit rejected his appeal.Open the full entry.⁠[10][1]

Forbes writes that BRINC launched the Responder in 2024: it can reach an emergency within a two-mile radius in 70 seconds or less, flies up to 42 minutes on a full battery, needs 35 minutes to recharge and starts at $20,000. The police department of Queen Creek, ArizonaArizonaArizona is a state in the southwestern United States; its capital and largest city is Phoenix. Arizona was admitted to the Union on February 14, 1912, as the 48th state. Its population at the 2020 Census (April 1, 2020) was 7,151,502.Open the full entry, a town of fewer than 90,000 people, became one of America’s first police departments to try the drone in June 2025 and has since flown its one Responder on more than 450 missions, arriving first 131 times and handling 35 calls without an officer present; Chief Randy Brice plans to buy an entire fleet, and the department’s older drones, primarily made by DJI, are starting to collect dust.⁠[4]

On December 5, 2024, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the People’s Republic of China, giving as the reason that the United States had announced another arms sale to China’s Taiwan region and acting under Articles 3, 4, 5, 6, 9 and 15 of the Law on Countering Foreign Sanctions, issued Decree No. 14 taking countermeasures, effective that day, against 13 U.S. military companies and six senior executives; BRINC Drones, Inc. is No. 2 on the list of companies and he is No. 6 on the list of executives, as founder and CEO of BRINC Drones, Inc. The movable and immovable property and other assets in China of those listed are frozen, organizations and individuals in China are barred from transactions and cooperation with them, and the executives are denied visas and entry into China, including Hong Kong and Macao.⁠[19]

On April 8, 2025, BRINC announced $75 million in new funding led by Index Ventures, which had taken part in its two prior rounds, with Motorola Solutions investing and forming a strategic alliance with BRINC, and with Mike Volpi and Dylan FieldDylan FieldDylan Field is the co-founder and CEO of Figma and an angel investor. He studied computer science and mathematics at Brown University, explored browser-based design tools with Evan Wallace, and founded Figma in 2012 with support from the Thiel Fellowship. His personal history also includes collecting digital art and investing in companies such as Mercury and Socket.Open the full entry also investing. The alliance integrates BRINC drones with Motorola Solutions’ APX radios, VESTA 911 call-management software, computer-aided dispatch, CommandCentral Aware real-time crime center software and automatic license plate recognition, so that drones can be launched at the press of a button on a radio and feed aerial intelligence into these systems.⁠[20]

In the release he said: “We couldn’t be more excited for the future.” TechCrunch writes that BRINC had raised $157.2 million in total and was last valued at $300 million in 2023 (Bloomberg’s figure), and that under the alliance 911 call-center operators can dispatch BRINC drones to certain emergency calls cleared by a Motorola AI system. He called the round an “up-round” relative to the 2022 Series B, said that BRINC’s distinctive features include breaking windows and delivering emergency medical devices, and said that there was plenty of room to grow in a market otherwise dominated by Chinese players.⁠[20][8]

Forbes writes that BRINC was valued at $480 million after raising $157 million from Motorola Solutions, Index Ventures and billionaires including Sam Altman, Peter Thiel and Dylan Field, and estimates that his roughly 40% stake was worth about $192 million. Forbes estimates BRINC’s sales at just about $5 million in 2024, with about $15 million projected for 2025, and describes the company as deeply unprofitable.⁠[4]

Forbes writes that BRINC had more than 700 customers, mostly police departments, about 100 of which had bought a Responder, ranging from the Pueblo, ColoradoColoradoColorado is a U.S. state classified as one of the Mountain states, with Denver as its capital. It was admitted to the Union on August 1, 1876, as the 38th state, and its population in the 2020 census (April 1, 2020) was 5,773,714.Open the full entry, police department to the New York Police Department, with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) also a user; he estimates that about 15% of U.S. SWAT teams currently use the Lemur. Forbes writes that more than 80% of public-safety organizations with a drone fleet use DJI devices, compared with about 7% for BRINC.⁠[4]

Forbes also reports criticism: Kyle Nordfors of Utah’s Mountain Rescue Association says BRINC devices are not reliable, nimble or quick enough to reach people in time, and New JerseyNew JerseyNew Jersey is a state in the eastern United States on the Atlantic Ocean, bordered by New York State, Delaware, and Pennsylvania, with the Hudson River forming its northeastern boundary and the Delaware River its western boundary; its capital is Trenton and its largest city is Newark. One of the original 13 colonies, it became the third state to ratify the U.S. Constitution on December 18, 1787, and its population in the 2020 census (April 1, 2020) was 9,288,994.Open the full entry drone pilot Luis Figueiredo says range is definitely an issue and that the Lemur’s glass-breaking tool “doesn’t always work as intended.” Forbes writes that Skydio has raised more than $730 million from venture capitalists including Andreessen HorowitzAndreessen HorowitzAndreessen Horowitz (a16z) is a venture capital firm founded in 2009 by Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz. It invests from the seed stage through the growth stage and provides operational support to its portfolio companies.Open the full entry and has more than 1,000 public-safety customers, that ICE has spent $1.4 million on Skydio drones since 2021 against $80,000 on BRINC, and that the NYPD has 41 Skydio, 40 DJI and six BRINC drones.⁠[4]

Forbes writes that he travels three days a week pitching police chiefs and mayors on the Responder, and that Will Huddler, the former SWAT lieutenant, has retired from the Las Vegas police and become BRINC’s vice president of customer success, training other officers to use its drones. Forbes also writes that, apart from some exploratory meetings with U.S. Department of DefenseU.S. Department of DefenseThe U.S. Department of Defense is an executive department of the United States federal government, formed in 1949 from the National Military Establishment created in 1947 and headquartered at the Pentagon. The department’s website describes it as America’s oldest and largest government agency.Open the full entry officials, he has not pursued any Pentagon contracts.⁠[4]

GeekWire writes that in March 2026 BRINC unveiled the Guardian, a larger, StarlinkStarlinkStarlink is a satellite broadband service supporting video calls, streaming and communications in remote locations.Open the full entry-connected drone that the company says is built to replace police helicopters; BRINC’s July 2026 press release calls the Guardian the 911 response drone built to replace helicopters.⁠[13][21]

On July 14, 2026, BRINC announced $125 million in funding led by Motorola Solutions, with Index Ventures and Dylan Field participating; the company said it had raised more than a quarter of a billion dollars in total, that its revenue had more than tripled in 2025 and its monthly production capacity had increased fivefold, that it had signed nearly four times as many 911 response drone contracts so far that year as in the same period of 2025, and that more than 900 public-safety agencies used its products, including more than 20% of U.S. SWAT teams as well as the Los Angeles Fire Department and the St. Louis Police Department. Other backers it named include Sam Altman, Elad GilElad GilElad Gil is an entrepreneur, investor and author of High Growth Handbook. He co-founded Mixer Labs and Color, worked at Google and Twitter, runs the multistage investment firm Gil & Co, and co-hosts the No Priors podcast with Sarah Guo.Open the full entry, Patrick Shanahan, Julius Genachowski, Shyam SankarShyam SankarShyam Sankar is a technology executive and author, and chief technology officer and executive vice president of Palantir Technologies. He joined Palantir in 2006, helped establish its Forward Deployed Engineer model, and formerly chaired Ginkgo Bioworks. He launched First Breakfast, advocated defense industrial reform, cofounded Founders Films, and joined U.S. Army Reserve Detachment 201 in 2025.Open the full entry, Alexandr Wang, Bradley Tusk and Jeff Weiner.⁠[21]

In the release he set the goal to “put a drone on the roof of every police and fire station in America,” some 80,000 police and fire stations. GeekWire writes that the company did not disclose its valuation but said it had nearly doubled from $480 million a year earlier; that it had raised more than $280 million in total; that it had 187 employees, up from 108 a year earlier, and expected more than 250 by the opening of its new factory; that the new headquarters and factory are in a former fish cannery on the Lake Washington Ship Canal in Seattle’s Queen Anne neighborhood, with three times the production space; and that all its drones are built in the United States.⁠[21][13]

GeekWire writes that in December 2025 the Federal Communications Commission blocked foreign-made drones from receiving U.S. equipment authorization, effectively barring new models, most notably from DJI, from the U.S. market, that some exemptions have been granted for certain non-Chinese drones, and that DJI is challenging the ruling in court.⁠[13]

As of November 2026, BRINC’s website lists him as the company’s founder and CEO.⁠[2]

GeekWire writes that his father, Michael Resnick, is an obstetrician-gynecologist who trained at Cornell UniversityCornell UniversityCornell University is a private research university in Ithaca, New York, and a member of the Ivy League. It is New York State's federal land-grant university, a distinction unique within the Ivy League. Ezra Cornell and Andrew Dickson White founded the university in 1865, and it opened in 1868. In addition to its Ithaca campus, Cornell operates Weill Cornell Medicine and Cornell Tech in New York City and a medical college in Qatar. It enrolled 26,793 students in fall 2024. Its president is Michael I. Kotlikoff.Open the full entry, worked at New York Hospital, Sloan-Kettering and the Mayo Clinic, and spent many years as a medical reporter for ABCABCABC (American Broadcasting Company) is an American commercial broadcast television network. It grew out of NBC’s Blue radio network, took its name after becoming independent in 1943, developed into a national television network after merging with United Paramount Theatres in 1953, was acquired by Capital Cities in 1985, and has been owned by The Walt Disney Company since 1996. With CBS and NBC it is one of the three traditional U.S. broadcast networks, and it is one of the five networks that rotate in the White House television pool.Open the full entry; his mother, Angela Caruso, is a special education teacher; and he has a younger sister. In The Seattle Times he joked that his mother tells people about his sister going to Stanford UniversityStanford UniversityStanford University is a research university in California founded by Leland and Jane Stanford in 1885 and opened in 1891.Open the full entry.⁠[3][7]

His father described him to GeekWire: “He can present like a president, but talk to anybody on the street.” He wears his hair long and messy, which he says is low-maintenance and makes him more recognizable. He has said: “I want to help leave the world in a better place than where I found it.”⁠[3]

He has said that “The free world needs a drone maker” and that he wants BRINC to be that company; Forbes writes that he describes the end goal as “we’re the DJI of the West,” while conceding that “DJI makes incredible products at very low prices.”⁠[11][4]

Forbes writes that over the previous three years he spent $660,000 on lobbying, including for controls over the use of Chinese-made drones in the U.S., and that he had a hand in the impending DJI ban: as of December 23, 2025, unless the NSA or another security agency vouched for DJI, its drones would be banned from future sale in the U.S.; DJI has long called the security concerns unfounded hearsay. Forbes writes that BRINC’s time in warfare may come; he says “I care about democracy existing,” and Forbes writes that if the U.S. went to war with China he would not be able to sit out the mission.⁠[4]

Personal website: https://blakeresnick.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[2][5]

X: Public account: https://x.com/Blake_Resnick_ (opens in a new window).⁠[5]

BRINC: Official website: https://brincdrones.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[2]

Thiel Fellowship: Official website: https://thielfellowship.org/ (opens in a new window).⁠[22]