Thiel’s former company recently unveiled a plane it says could replace police helicopters

When I talk to Blake Resnick, he’s walking around his drone startup’s new office space in Seattle—a cavernous, 50,000-square-foot facility that, Resnick estimates, won’t be fully set up until later in the year—likely November. Still, the large (and currently, empty) building offers the promise of a fast-growing company aiming to conquer its particular industry.

The industry in question is public safety and the startup is Brinc, which sells drones to police and public agencies across the US.

A former Thiel Fellow — a prestigious program that sponsors young entrepreneurs to skip or postpone college — Resnick founded Brinc in 2017 and soon received interest from then-OpenAI co-founder Sam Altman, who ended up serving as one of Brinc’s first seed investors. Since then, Brinc has enjoyed several rounds of funding and, most recently, was worth nearly half a billion dollars, Resnick tells me.

Brinc unveiled its new product on Tuesday, a new public safety drone called the Guardian that Resnick says is “the closest thing to a police helicopter replacement the drone industry has ever produced.” Brinc says it is “the world’s most powerful 9-11 response aircraft.

Guardian certainly comes with awesome specs and abilities. The drone can fly at speeds of up to 60 mph and can endure a flight time of 62 minutes, its creator said. It also comes equipped with thermal imaging cameras, as well as two additional 4K cameras—all with zoom capabilities. “Even if you’re at a high altitude, the police department can read, say, license plate information,” Resnick tells me. In addition, there is a light, and a large speaker with a volume greater than a police siren.

The drone’s landing station (Brinc calls it a “charging nest”) offers fully automatic battery switching, and can be equipped with critical safety equipment such as defibrillators, flotation devices, and Narcan, all without human intervention.

The Guardian also comes with a Starlink panel embedded directly into its body, making it—according to Brinc—the first public safety aircraft with such a capability. Starlink, SpaceX’s satellite internet service, offers drone connectivity to any location around the world. “Starlink has never been designed into a commercially produced quadcopter before, so [it] offers this type of airframe almost anywhere in the world,” Resnick tells me.

Resnick clearly sees public safety as a huge opportunity. “There are 20,000 police departments in America, 30,000 fire departments, 80,000 police and fire stations – and we think that a high part of that market in the future will have a 911 response drone in a nest on the roof,” he said. “It looks like we’re looking at a $6 billion to $8 billion market opportunity,” he said, surveying markets in the US and other countries.

To that end, Brinc recently partnered with the National League of Cities in a program to scale “flying first responder” programs in communities across the country—an initiative that will certainly help foster relationships between startups and communities that would eventually become customers.

Additionally, Resnick feels that recent geopolitical developments have worked for his company. Until recently, DJI enjoyed an unofficial monopoly on the global drone market—including in the US, where security agencies have long relied on the Chinese company’s products. However, the Trump administration recently banned foreign-made drone models from entering the country, thus opening up a huge potential market.

“There’s this huge demand for DJI in the West, or the leading drone manufacturer in the free world, and ultimately, that’s what we want to be,” Resnick said.