Shrirang Patki

Background

Who he is

• Mechanical engineer, roughly six-plus years of experience building robotics hardware. His most recent role was at BRINC Drones in Seattle — a maker of drones for police and fire departments — which he left in January 2026. (LinkedIn)
• Co-invented, with BRINC’s founder and CEO, a rugged “throwable communication device” — a ball you can throw into a dangerous scene (a hostage standoff, for example) that survives the impact and keeps a two-way voice line open. (US12477054B2)
• Carnegie Mellon (2019–2020, 4.0 grade average) and a member of the student team that built a small lunar rover. Undergraduate degree 2014–2018 (school not public; native Marathi and Hindi speaker, likely educated in India). (LinkedIn)
• Earlier hardware work includes re-engineering a cheap off-the-shelf motor to work underwater, cutting that project’s build cost roughly in half. Much of his work focuses on making rugged parts simple and cheap enough to build at scale. (LinkedIn projects)

What BRINC does

BRINC puts drones in docking-and-charging boxes on police and fire rooftops so a drone can fly to a 911 call, often before officers arrive, and is rolling that out across the country at large scale. As a hardware engineer there, Shrirang worked on how these unmanned systems are powered, charged, connected, and maintained in the field, and on what happens when a new site is stood up. Three days ago (July 14, 2026) BRINC raised $125M led by Motorola Solutions. (PRNewswire)

Conversation — discovery agenda

1 · Open and get context

• What did he own at BRINC? Which customers, what kind of missions, and why did he leave?
• How he thinks about distributed infrastructure and the deploy-and-maintain side of drones — and about networks that tie together power, computing, and communications (ground stations, gateways, drop-in kits).

2 · Power, computing, and communications tradeoffs

• Where did power, computing, or communications actually limit the mission — and which one most often?
• When he was short on one, how did the team trade? (For example: weak signal, so do more of the computing onboard the drone itself; low power, so dial back the sensors or computing.)
• How much engineering effort went into juggling those tradeoffs versus building the actual mission capability?
• Did he ever wish he could hand off the heavy computing, or tap outside power or communications, while out in the field — and what stopped him?

3 · Ground and forward infrastructure

• Walk through standing up and maintaining a site end to end. What ground infrastructure did they build or deploy — docks, charging, communications relays, on-site computing? How did they keep the drones charged?
• Was that infrastructure theirs, a partner’s, or the customer’s?
• What worked, what didn’t, and what got killed? Where did the time and money actually go?
• Could they stand up a new site easily, or was each one custom-built? What broke when they deployed somewhere new, remote, or with nothing already there?
• What did it cost to build, deploy, and maintain? Was keeping it running in the field a bigger problem than people expect?

4 · Customer friction

• Did infrastructure ever become a customer pain point — who had to provide the power, the connectivity, the site prep, and did that cause friction?
• Did infrastructure needs ever slow a deal, shrink it, or lose it? Did being locked into one vendor’s stack ever come up?
• Where could customers actually operate versus where they wanted to — and was infrastructure the gap?

5 · Build vs. buy, and the shared-layer idea

• Did they plan to keep building this infrastructure themselves, partner for it, or decide it wasn’t worth solving — and how was that call made?
• If a shared, drop-in layer had existed — one kit that provides power, computing, and a communications link that any operator could use — would they have used it? What would have had to be true for them to trust it in the field?
• If he could deploy anywhere with zero infrastructure limits, what would he have done differently? What missions or markets does that open up?

6 · Close

• Who else should Jackson be talking to?
• Anything else he thinks Jackson should be considering?

Sources