When I speak with Blake Resnick, he’s walking around the Seattle drone startup’s newest office — a cavernous 50,000-square-foot facility that Resnick estimates won’t be fully built until the end of the year — potentially November. Still, the large (and for now, mostly empty) building promises a fast-growing company intent on conquering its industry.
The industry in question is public safety, and the startup is Brinc, which sells drones to police and government agencies in the US. The company wants to be the “DJI of the West,” as Resnick calls it — a nod to the Chinese drone maker, and Resnick wants Brinc to be as synonymous with the technology it sells.
Past Thiel Fellow — a prestigious program that funds young entrepreneurs to drop out or postpone college — Resnick founded Brinc in 2017 and was soon courted by then-OpenAI founder Sam Altman. early seed investors. Since then, Brinc has enjoyed a series of funding rounds and was most recently valued at nearly half a billion dollars, Resnick tells me.
Rice presented its newest product On Tuesday, a new public safety drone called the Guardian, which Resnick said is “the closest thing the drone industry has ever produced to a police helicopter replacement.” Brinc claims it is the world’s “most capable 9-11 response drone” to date.
Guardian certainly comes with some formidable features and capabilities. The drone can fly at speeds of up to 60 miles per hour and has a flight time of 62 minutes, its creator says. It’s also equipped with thermal imaging cameras, as well as two additional 4K cameras – all with zoom capabilities. “Even at a significant height, the police department can read the license plate details,” Resnick tells me. In addition, there is a traffic light and a loud speaker with more volume than a police siren.
The drone’s landing station (Brinc calls it a “charging dock”) is fully automated battery replacementand can be equipped with critical safety supplies such as defibrillators, flotation devices and Narcan without human intervention.
The Guardian also comes with a Starlink panel mounted directly on its body, making it the first public safety drone with such a capability, according to Brinc. Starlink, SpaceX’s satellite Internet service, connects drones anywhere in the world. “Starlink has never been built into a commercially manufactured quadcopter before, so (it) gives this airframe unlimited range anywhere in the world,” Resnick told me.
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Resnick clearly sees public safety as a huge opportunity. “America has about 20,000 police departments, 30,000 fire departments, 80,000 police and fire stations — and we think in the future the upper half of that market will have a 911 response drone in a charging bay on the roof,” he said. “We can say for sure that we are looking at a market opportunity of 6-8 billion dollars,” he said, evaluating the markets in both the United States and other countries.
On this front, Brinc recently became a partner A program with the National League of Cities to expand “drone as first responder” programs in communities across the country—which will certainly help foster connections between startups and communities that may eventually become customers.
In addition, Resnick feels that recent geopolitical events are working in his company’s favor. Until recently, DJI was enjoying itself informal monopoly in the global drone market, including in the United States, where security agencies are located they have trusted for a long time About the products of the Chinese company. However, the Trump administration recently banned the entry of drone models manufactured abroad into the country, thereby creating conditions for opening a large potential market.
“There’s a great need for a DJI of the West, or a leading drone manufacturer for the free world, and ultimately that’s what we want to be,” Resnick said.
