(Bloomberg) -- Blake Resnick was 18 when he started to go on calls with Las Vegas's SWAT team.
He would drive out late at night with law enforcement, deploy drones to watch what worked and what didn't, and return to his mother's kitchen to reengineer a new iteration for the next mission. The SWAT team never gave him the vest he was promised.
Now 23, Resnick leads Brinc Drones, one of the largest makers of the aircraft in the US. The company, which has about 100 employees, has raised more than $80 million from the likes of OpenAI founder Sam Altman, former acting Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan and even Sam Bankman-Fried.
With all that backing, his startup, founded in 2019, is now worth more than $300 million, making Resnick, who owns about half, a centimillionaire. He's a 2020 Thiel fellow — the program designed by PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel to undermine traditional education by encouraging young entrepreneurs to leave college and start companies with $100,000 grants.
His firm is carving out a niche in public safety, where the technology is relatively nascent after years of dominance by Chinese billionaire Frank Wang's DJI. Wang's company now faces regulatory challenges. In addition to US sanctions against DJI, at least nine states are considering a ban on Chinese-made drones for government agencies, following Florida's lead.
Read more: Chinese Drone Billionaire's Dominance Threatened by US Blacklists
To Resnick, that's created an opening for companies like Brinc, which is focused specifically on selling to some 7,000 SWAT teams across the country. Other US startups include Skydio, which has prominent backers such as Kevin Durant and In-Q-Tel, the venture arm of the Central Intelligence Agency.
“It's just reducing the risk of a gunfight, that's the point of all this technology,” said Resnick, who decided to focus the company on public safety after the 2017 mass shooting in Las Vegas, his hometown. “You're trying to create distance between someone who is armed and a SWAT team.”
Brinc's drones differ in a number of ways from DJI's, which are often bought off the shelf by agencies. They feature lidar — or light detection and ranging — which allows them to navigate indoor environments, as well as the ability to ram through glass windows and communicate through a two-way speaker. In one SWAT operation, a suspect asked the drone for a cigarette, which it dropped along with a lighter, defusing the standoff.
“The whole public safety industry has been massively underserved by technology for decades,” Resnick said.
Brinc has struck deals with hundreds of US public safety agencies, including the New York City Police Department. The firm offers the new model in a five-year subscription for about $90,000, which comes with upgrades to the next two models.
In an interview in New York, Resnick's curly mop blew in the wind as he held one of his company's Lemur 2 models. He was 14 when he began studying engineering at University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and later went on to Northwestern University. He interned at DJI and Tesla Inc. before starting his company in 2018.
He moved the headquarters to Seattle for its engineering talent pool and said he's since hired employees who formerly worked for Amazon Air, SpaceX and Blue Origin.
As for his $40 million backing from Bankman-Fried, Resnick said he doesn't see much risk of it being clawed back in the wake of FTX's collapse. Instead, he's focused on taking the advice of Thiel, who suggested dominating a corner of the drone market before expanding outward.
“It's so hard to build a drone that is useful for consumer, commercial, industrial, public safety, defense, everything,” he said. “Every drone company is trying to build a drone platform that does everything.”
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