Rory San Miguel, cofounder and CEO of drone-based site survey company Propeller Aero, has won the 2025 NSW Pearcey Entrepreneur of the Year Award.
The Pearcey Foundation, a non-profit named in honour of Australian ICT industry pioneer Dr Trevor Pearcey, recognises leaders in information and communications technology.
The Pearcey NSW Entrepreneur Award is presented to an outstanding individual who has “taken a risk, made a difference and is an inspiration to others” in the NSW ICT industry.
Propeller transformed site surveying in construction and mining through drone-enabled analytics. The platform combines drone imagery with ground control technology and cloud-based analysis, to measure, model and manage worksite progress with unprecedented ease. Propeller now has more than 300 employees globally, with operations in Australia and the US, and has raised nearly $50 million from the likes of Blackbird, Costanoa Ventures, Aware Super, Canva co-founder Cliff Obrecht, and Aconex co-founder Leigh Jasper’s fund Saniel Ventures.
Rory San Miguel’s work brought enterprise-grade geospatial insights to industrial sites to make them safer and more efficient. He grew up “making go-karts and fixing engines, and mucking around with the computer”, beforea degree in mechatronics, robotics, and automation engineering at UNSW.
San Miguel started a maker society club called Create at UNSW, where they bought engineering parts in bulk from China and resold them to other students. The club made $50,000 in the first six months, had 1000 members and won UNSW’s Club of the Year.
Create held weekly courses to teach non-engineering students how to use robot parts to make things like clap-on light switches, with the university eventually paying the club to teach to high school students. A spin-off club called Create UAV taught students how to build and fly drones, which was Rory’s hobby project.
While study he also worked as an intern at a startup called Taggle when he encountered the drone delivery startup Flirtey. Asking if they needed a drone person, within 48 hours, he became one of the cofounders, along with fellow Propeller cofounder Francis Vierboom.
In 2014, the pair started their own company to leverage drones for other applications. They discovered how difficult it was for construction companies using drones to do photogrammetric surveying to make maps of worksites, and developed Propeller as a way to make better maps.
Right Click Capital partner Ben Chong, chair of the NSW Pearcey judging committee, said “At the Pearcey Foundation we love to see Australian entrepreneurs forging ahead in new and emerging technology fields and taking that success globally. Rory is the perfect example of this, applying drone technology with Propeller to solve intractable problems and create greater efficiencies across a range of industries in innovative and revolutionary ways.
Other state winners this years include Professor Lachlan Blackhall, Deputy Vice Chancellor (Research and Innovation) at ANU in the ACT; Chris Morrissey, founder and CEO of Ever Nimble in WA and in Victoria, Sam Kroonenberg, cofounder of A Cloud Guru and now, Cuttable. The Queensland winner is announced next week, followed by Tasmania and Queensland
The winners represent their state at the Pearcey National Awards in November.
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