With this announcement comes news that BRINC has raised $75 million in a funding round led by Index Ventures, which took part in the previous two funding rounds for the 8-year-old Washington-based company. Motorola also has become a BRINC investor, according to a statement.
One of the main ideas driving this new partnership is integrating drone detection technologies into 911 command center operations. Motorola says that more than 60 percent of public safety answering points in North America use its 911 software.
According to a statement from Motorola, BRINC’s contribution to the effort is tech that allows emergency call handlers to “immediately dispatch drones in response to emergency calls or with the push of a button from a Motorola Solutions APX NEXT smart radio.”
SkySafe’s cloud-based platform, meanwhile, tracks and identifies drones, operators’ locations and real-time flight paths. That company’s tools offer users “a reliable airspace security solution that requires no hardware or infrastructure investment,” according to the Motorola statement.
"The new streams of drone intelligence enabled through these integrations can be streamed live into the command center and shared with officers in the field on in-vehicle computers or mobile devices. It can further be stored in agencies’ evidence management systems as part of Motorola Solutions’ ecosystem of safety and security technologies," Todd Piett, senior vice president of Command Center Solutions at Motorola Solutions Agencies, told Government Technology via email. "It can combine other incident data, such as 911 call records, officers’ radio dialogue, officers’ location information and more, for comprehensive analysis and evidence, including AI-based redaction to protect privacy."
The deal follows other recent moves to use drones more often to scout emergency scenes before police and medical personnel have a chance to arrive, potentially providing critical information to those first responders.
Earlier this month, for instance, public safety technology vendor Flock Safety, known for its license plate recognition capabilities, said it had combined its 911 calling tools with its drone-as-first-responder program.
Backers of such programs, including Motorola, say that drones can clear some emergency calls without the need for those first responders to show up. Such a capability, those companies said, will increasingly depend on artificial intelligence.
"With over 240 million 911 calls made each year, a faster response time to the call can be the consequential difference in an emergency,” said Mahesh Saptharishi, executive vice president and chief technology officer for Motorola Solutions, in the company’s statement. “We’re integrating the powerful capabilities of drones into 911 software, enabling precious time saved to deliver that life-saving medicine or give officers eyes and ears on scene before they arrive.”
As for BRINC, the company said its new capital will go toward such tasks as scaling production as demand from public safety increases, paying for more research and development, and hiring.
