BRINC has raised $125 million in a funding round led by Motorola Solutions, with Index Ventures and Figma founder Dylan Field participating, the Seattle company announced on July 14, 2026. The raise pushes BRINC’s total funding past a quarter billion dollars and bankrolls the boldest goal in the public safety drone business: a 911 response drone on the roof of every one of the roughly 80,000 police and fire stations in the United States.
The money buys expanded domestic manufacturing and a larger sales operation, with new products on the roadmap. Before the year ends, BRINC moves into a new Seattle facility with three times the production space of its current factory.
I have tracked BRINC’s funding since the days when the entire company fit in Blake Resnick’s parents’ dining room, and this round reads differently from the earlier ones. Motorola is buying deeper position in a drone maker already wired into its dispatch software, and that changes what the dollar figure means.
Motorola Solutions Deepens Its Grip On Automated Dispatch
Motorola Solutions led this round fifteen months after first investing in BRINC, extending a partnership that already lets an officer launch a BRINC drone with the push of a button on a Motorola radio or have one dispatched automatically the moment a 911 call comes in.
The relationship dates to April 2025, when Motorola joined BRINC’s $75 million round and formed a strategic alliance that tied BRINC hardware into APX radios, VESTA 911 call management, and computer-aided dispatch. BRINC says those integrations remain exclusive, which matters because Motorola software runs inside most American dispatch centers. Now the communications giant has gone from strategic partner to lead investor.
BRINC attached no valuation to the announcement, but told GeekWire the figure nearly doubled from the $480 million mark of a year ago, which leaves the company just short of unicorn status. Headcount tells the same growth story: 187 employees today, up from 108 a year ago, with plans to pass 250 by the time the new factory opens.
Revenue Tripled And Contract Signings Nearly Quadrupled
BRINC more than tripled revenue in 2025 and has signed nearly four times as many 911 response drone contracts so far this year as it did over the same period last year, with the Los Angeles Fire Department and the St. Louis Police Department among the newest customers.
The deal flow this year backs up the demand claim. St. Louis approved six BRINC drones for its Drone as First Responder program in May. Victorville put an $832,000 BRINC DFR contract into the field in the first quarter. The company now counts over 900 public safety agencies as customers, including more than 20 percent of SWAT teams in the country.
The product line covers the full mission set. Lemur 2 handles indoor tactical work. Responder is the DFR workhorse that reaches scenes in about 70 seconds. Guardian, launched on March 24, 2026 with Starlink connectivity and almost 13 kilometers (8 miles) of range, is the aircraft BRINC pitches as a helicopter replacement.
A Former Fish Cannery Anchors The 80,000-Rooftop Plan
By the end of 2026, BRINC relocates into a converted fish cannery on the Lake Washington Ship Canal in Seattle’s Queen Anne neighborhood, a building with three times the production space of the current factory and the physical foundation of the plan to manufacture drone stations at national scale.
“Every second matters in an emergency,” said founder and CEO Blake Resnick in the company’s announcement, adding that the investment funds more products and the manufacturing capacity to put a drone on the roof of every police and fire station in America.
The timing is no accident. The round lands seven months after the FCC added all foreign-made drones to its Covered List, a decision that blocked new DJI models from the US market and handed American manufacturers the largest procurement opening they have ever had.
DroneXL’s Take
BRINC is executing. When I caught up with Blake Resnick at IACP Boston in October 2024, Guardian was a carefully guarded teaser. Eighteen months later it is shipping, revenue has tripled, and departments from Victorville to St. Louis are signing contracts. That is real product velocity, and BRINC earned it.
This capital is also chasing a market the federal government cleared. The FCC’s December 2025 Covered List action did nothing to make BRINC’s drones better. It made much of the competition illegal. A quarter billion dollars flows a lot easier when your largest rival cannot ship new hardware into your home market, and every investor on this cap table knows it.
The Motorola lead is the detail worth watching, more than the dollar figure. Motorola’s software sits inside the majority of American dispatch centers, and BRINC is the only drone maker with exclusive integrations into that stack. That is a distribution advantage no spec sheet can match, and it nudges American policing toward a single default DFR vendor. We spent years criticizing the DJI monoculture in public safety fleets. Swapping it for a BRINC and Motorola monoculture, built on procurement politics as much as merit, is not obviously healthier for the agencies writing the checks or the taxpayers behind them.
Treat the 80,000-rooftop line as a mission statement rather than a forecast. The real gating factors are whether the new factory hits volume and whether the FAA’s still-unpublished Part 108 BVLOS rule arrives in a form that lets automated station-based response scale beyond waiver-by-waiver approvals. Watch those two, and watch whether Skydio and Flock Safety answer this round with capital of their own. If they don’t, the DFR market consolidates around one vendor faster than anyone in Washington intended.
DroneXL uses automated tools to support research and source retrieval. All reporting and editorial perspectives are by Haye Kesteloo.
