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Forbes cover star Blake Resnick just landed another $125 million for Brinc Drones, the startup on a mission to replace Chinese-made drones with American-built aircraft for first responders.

When we sat down with Resnick last winter, Brinc had raised $157 million from investors including Motorola, London-based Index Ventures and billionaires Sam Altman, Peter Thiel and Figma cofounder Dylan Field. At the time, Resnick’s estimated 40% stake was worth roughly $192 million. The latest raise, backed by returning investors Motorola, Index and Field, brings Brinc’s total funding to $282 million.

What’s more: The Federal Communications Commission has banned DJI, the largest manufacturer of Chinese drones, from sales of any new drone models in the U.S., made after December 2025. That gives Brinc an opportunity to acquire a whole set of new customers—eventually. The startup told Forbes it’s now working with 900 public safety customers (up from 700 in December) across the nation.

Still, it’s a tough task. Per our estimates, more than 80% of public safety organizations were already using DJI drones, while 7% were Brinc customers.

Brinc is betting on drones built specifically for first responders. Its flagship Responder drone, already used by police and fire departments including Newport Beach, California, and Queen Creek, Arizona, can reach incidents within a two-mile radius in under 70 seconds, stream a live video feed, enable two-way radio communication and deliver timely emergency supplies like Narcan. It has been deployed to incidents ranging from burglaries and shootings to suicides and sexual assaults.

Now Brinc is one-upping itself with a new product, the Guardian. Where the Responder can fly for 42 minutes on a full battery, it then needs to sit and recharge for 35 minutes. The larger Guardian drone employs robotics to automatically swap out drained batteries for fresh ones, allowing for around-the-clock operations—a feature several customers told Forbes they were particularly interested in.

It’s a long way to come for Resnick, 26, who first launched Brinc in 2018 as a one-man operation. He was an ambitious kid who’d been building drones since he was 10 years old, and when a mass shooting took place in Las Vegas just miles away from his home, he wondered why cops weren’t making better use of them.

Several cold calls and an unlikely meeting with a lieutenant at an Einstein Bros. Bagels led him to where he is today. Read Resnick’s full profile here. (Spoiler: It involves adventures with the Las Vegas SWAT team and an incredibly lucky chain of events that landed Sam Altman as an investor.)

More next week,

Zoya & Alex

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See people on TikTok injecting themselves with peptides for things like weight loss and tanning? Wonder how they’re getting their hands on them? Well, soon, some of them might be legal anyway. And regardless of the potential health consequences, many see a business opportunity.

Lister Lowdown

-Under 30 Europe lister Max Buchan’s Valarian closed a $50 million Series A this month led by NEA, bringing their total funding to $70 million. The company builds software for governments and enterprises to deploy underneath their AI systems “to ensure it controls how that intelligence operates, what data can be accessed, and who can shut it off.” In other words, they’re focused on sovereignty in the age of AI.

-Telli Technologies closed a $15 million seed round this week led by redalpine, with participation from Wayra/Telefónica, Cherry Ventures and Y Combinator. Telli is building AI agents for customer-facing operations at B2C companies, and now counts $18.5 million in total funding. It was founded by Under 30 Europe alums Philipp Baumanns, Seb Hapte-Selassie and Finn zur Mühlen.

-SignUp Media, founded by Under 30 lister Mariella Satow, announced this week a new partnership with Netflix to bring American Sign Language interpretations to 73 Netflix Kids and other titles on the streamer. Using SignUp Media’s web extension, ASL performances will appear at the bottom of the screen, overlaid directly onto the Netflix content, letting viewers view the interpretation alongside the film or tv show. Titles include Cocomelon, Pokémon, The Magic School Bus Rides Again, and more.

On Our Radar

-Beehiiv, the newsletter platform founded by Under 30 alumni Tyler Denk, Benjamin Hargett and Jake Hurd, launched its programmatic ad offerings this month—where the buying and selling of ad space is determined by an algorithm, rather than a salesperson. It’s part of their larger expansion plan that also includes subscriber-to-subscriber messaging and an AI copilot to advise publishers on audience growth and monetization. They’re on a mission to make it easier for beehiiv authors to earn money, and readers to find their community on the platform. (AdExchanger)

-More on the newsletter platform front, Substack wants you to know exactly where AI is used in its newsletters (and the comment section). Launched this week, a partnership with AI detection tool Pangram will now allow Substackers to scan a body of text to determine how much was likely written by a bot. “The core problem is not people using AI, or the quality of its output... The problem is when there is a mismatch between a reader’s expectation and reality” Chris Best, Substack’s cofounder and CEO wrote in his own newsletter announcing the new tool. (The Substack Post; The Verge)

-Creators far and wide tout “community building” as a core tenet to their social media philosophies. But what happens when a massive chunk of influencers happen to be a part of one religious community? For the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, that’s what’s happening. It’s not a coincidence that more and more Mormon creators are popping up: the church’s for-profit subsidiary, Deseret Management Corp., owns several advertising companies with influencer-marketing arms. They’re pairing hundreds of vetted (“to validate their membership with an ecclesiastical leader and to make sure they’d be an appropriate spokesperson”) influencers with brands looking to pay for social media ads. (Bloomberg)