After a pipe burst on Harrison Crowe-Maxwell’s street in 2019, he enlisted Long Tran and Shyeon Delnawaz to build and commercialise the ‘ferret’ – a 40cm autonomous bot that can crawl into underground pipes. With more than $2 million in capital, Puralink is at the forefront of a $5.26 billion opportunity.
This article featured in Forbes Australia’s 30 Under 30 Issue. The full list is out now.
In 2019, UTS engineering student Harrison Crowe-Maxwell was living in Frenchs Forest in Sydney’s north shore when a leaky pipe caused his street to flood. Sydney Water showed up and dug up the street to find the leak in what Crowe-Maxwell says was an “extremely disruptive – and very expensive” exercise.
“It really got me thinking about how robotics – which I love and pursued in high school – could make this issue more efficient,” he says. This investigation became the basis of his honours thesis at university – a project he worked on for three years.
Co-founder Shyeon Delnawaz, joined Crowe-Maxwell’s project after hearing about it over a game of table tennis at Amazon Web Services in 2022, where the pair were interning together.
“He’d said, ‘Just think about how many pipes are around us right now, under our feet.’ Just the sheer magnitude of the opportunity – I couldn’t stop thinking about it,” Delnawaz says
Thien Long Tran joined in the middle of 2024, first as the chief technology officer, before being offered the title of co-founder.
“We were paying him out of our pockets in the early days of business,” Delnawaz says, adding that the business was fully bootstrapped initially.
“We said, ‘Long, we need to raise some money or get some grant funding because we can’t sustain this. If you need to get another job, we understand. We’ll sort out the money and come back for you when we’ve got our capital right’.”
The next morning, the pair walked into the lab and found Tran still working away at his computer. “He just refused to leave – he never asked to be a co-founder, but when you see someone who’s committing on that level, they deserve to be in that position,” Crowe-Maxwell says.
And so, the trio joined forces to form Puralink and worked together to commercialise the technology that Crowe-Maxwell worked on during his capstone thesis: the result being the ‘ferret’: a 40-centimetre-long, 150-millimetre-wide autonomous robot that can crawl into underground pipes and use its camera and LIDAR technology to map out pipes and find leaks.
Despite existing robot crawlers in the market, Puralink says its ferret is at the forefront: “That segment of the market is still stuck in the early 2000s – they have a manual operator controlling the robot… and they can cost almost $200,000. They’re expensive, manual, and they can’t do the advanced geometries that you see inside a pipe, so when you get to corners or slopes, you need to remove the robot and find a new way into the pipe.”
For the first two years, Puralink was entirely bootstrapped by its founders, but early in 2025, the company raised $150,000 from two angel investors.
It also participated in Cicada’s Fast Start program and the 2025 Startmate Accelerator, which gave them another cash injection.
“We’d done internships, and Shyeon had worked in consulting for a few years, but we didn’t really know how to run a business,” Crowe-Maxwell, the company’s CEO, says. “Cicada’s accelerator gave us the foundations on how to build a business, how to start thinking about a product, marketing and pricing. And then the 12 weeks we were at Startmate just accelerated everything we were already doing.”
In September this year, the Puralink team closed an oversubscribed $2.3 million seed round led by Peak XV (Sequoia’s APAC seed fund), with further participation from Startmate, as well as Side Stage Ventures, NZ VC, and Robyn and Victoria Denholm’s Wollemi Capital Group.
“We call it assembling the Avengers,” the team say. “We have big dreams for Puralink; we want to scale this globally, so it’s about finding the people that align with that mindset and will dream big with us.”
Partner at Side Stage Ventures, Markus Kahlbetzer, said Puralink’s innovation was ‘world-class’: “Their robotics technology enables service providers to deliver superior outcomes across aging water networks that are difficult and costly to access. At Side Stage Ventures, we backed an exceptional team tackling a complex global challenge with a solution that promises significant long-term value to our aging infrastructure.”
The Puralink team say the global opportunity is large: about $5.26 billion, and that’s just with the ferret’s base inspection function. The team say with the added capital, they plan to expand their engineering team and iterate the ferret so that it doesn’t require a tether to pull the
data out. In other words, the ultimate goal is to add modularity and start deploying robots to actually ‘live’ in pipes.
How exactly would that work? Well, Crowe-Maxwell says Puralink’s robots will eventually be able to recharge off the resource flowing past them, whether it be the water in sewerage and wastewater pipes or oil and gas in those pipes.
The ferrets will be able to recharge off the resource flowing past them and autonomously make decisions, finding leaks before they become a problem.
“Globally, there are tens of thousands of service teams that each represent a buying opportunity for our robot,” says Crowe-Maxwell.
In terms of global scale, the team say they have a global-from-day-one approach, adding that “terrible pipe networks” are common in every city around the world, which means there’s a use-case for the ferret pretty much anywhere. Helpfully, each co-founder has dual citizenship somewhere (Crowe-Maxwell in France, Delnawaz in the United States and Tran in Vietnam), “So, we’ve got the coverage wherever we need to go,” Delnawaz says.
“There’s no shortage of pipes to fix and problems to solve.”
Look back on the week that was with hand-picked articles from Australia and around the world. Sign up to the Forbes Australia newsletter here or become a member here.
