- Blake Resnick, the founder and CEO of Brinc Drones, is now worth $100 million, per Bloomberg.
- Resnick founded drone-maker Brinc Drones in 2019 and grew it to a $300 million operation.
There's a newly minted centimillionaire — and he's just 23.
Blake Resnick, the founder and CEO of drone manufacturer Brinc Drones, hit the milestone after the startup he founded in 2019 grew to a valuation of $300 million as of April 10, according to Bloomberg.
Resnick owns about half of the privately-held startup — one of the largest drone makers in the US employing about 100 people — putting net worth at $100 million now, per Bloomberg.
Brinc's backers include OpenAI founder Sam Altman, former acting defense secretary Patrick Shanahan, and disgraced former FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried.
Resnick appears to have an early start to his career. At the age of 14, he started college at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, before transferring to Northwestern two years later, according to his LinkedIn profile. However, he dropped out of Northwestern to start Brinc.
In 2020, Resnick won the Thiel Fellowship — backed by Paypal cofounder Peter Thiel — which grants $100,000 to young people to "build new things instead of sitting in a classroom."
Described on its website as a startup "working to build technology in the service of public safety," Brinc focuses on tech devices that enhance public safety.
"We want to make the police helicopter obsolete and respond to all serious emergencies in seconds," Resnick told Insider's Aaron Holmes in 2021.
Resnick was inspired to found the drone company in 2017 after the deadliest mass shooting at a country music festival in his hometown of Las Vegas killed 58 people. After the shooting, he cold-called the lieutenant in charge of the Las Vegas SWAT team to ask about technology that could've helped the police identify and stop an active shooter.
He wound up with a contract — Brinc's first — to custom-make a drone for crisis situations. The business has since expanded to supply police and fire departments worldwide.
Today, Brinc's website features a drone, the Lemur 2, and the BrincBall, a communication device for crisis situations.
The Lemur drone was being used in search-and-rescue operations in Ukraine, The Seattle Times reported in June 2022. In 2021, Resnick delivered a drone to help to inspect the partial collapse of an apartment building in Surfside, Florida.
Resnick was featured on Forbes 30 under 30 and interned at high-profile companies.
Born in Las Vegas to a doctor and a special education teacher, Resnick's adventures with science began early on in his childhood. At 14, he built a nuclear fusion reaction in his parent's garage in Las Vegas, according to a bio on his website.
By the time Resnick dropped out of college, he had already interned — as a teenager — at some of the most high-profile companies in the world: including British supercar maker McLaren, Tesla, and Chinese drone giant DJI, according to his LinkedIn profile.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Resnick features among the Forbes 30 under 30 list of achievers in the age group in 2021 and 2022. But, there's a tiny hiccup.
"I don't think my mom has forgiven me for dropping out of school. She hated that," Resnick jokingly told The Seattle Times. "At any opportunity she gets, she tells people about my sister going to Stanford before she'll even give a second thought to mentioning Brinc."
Resnick did not immediately respond to Insider's request for further comment, which was sent outside regular business hours.