Roxy Jacenko’s husband has turned a small investment into a massive fortune after venturing into artificial intelligence.
Oliver Curtis’ personal investment of $250,000 into Singapore-based Firmus Technologies is likely to increase to $447million after another round of capital raising.
Mr Curtis helped launch the company out of Tasmania as chief operating officer in 2019 while under a court order barring him from serving as director until June 2022.
The five-year order restricted his business opportunities after he was released from prison one year after being sentenced for conspiring to commit insider trading.
Mr Curtis started the company alongside Tim Rosenfield and Jonathan Levee as an experiment to see if they could cool down computers mining Bitcoin.
The company took off after patenting a cooling liquid which ultimately led to the computers using less power as energy prices skyrocketed.
It continued to grow to meet the demand of data centres for AI after a massive wave of interest in the industry.
Now the co-chief executive, Mr Curtis has since relocated his family including daughter Pixie, 12, and son Hunter, nine, to Singapore to be closer to Firmus.
PR queen Roxy Jacenko’s husband, Oliver Curtis (both pictured), is set to make about $447million off his founding stake in the now Singapore-based Firmus Technologies
Firmus features billionaire investors, like Melbourne’s Pratt family and Alex Waislitz, and is seeking a new round of investment.
The company is looking to raise a further $597million in equity and another $819million in debt, according to the Australian Financial Review.
If reached, Firmus’ valuation would soar to about $1.8bn and Mr Curtis’ stake in the company would be worth about $447million.
It would also see the company fall under a new Singapore based holding company controlling both Firmus and sister business Sustainable Metal Cloud.
‘I don’t want to say (Mr Curtis) pulled a rabbit out of the hat because he’s worked very hard, but he’s now in possession of a very gold rabbit,’ a source close to the businessman who wished to remain anonymous said.
Firmus launched into Singapore thanks to a $150million deal struck with the Singapore government’s ST Telemedia Global Data Centres.
The deal saw the technology rolled out into 60 centres across the country and halved their energy consumption.
Tech giants Nvidia and Dell Technologies brought in the tech while Firmus launched Sustainable Metal Cloud to sell power and space in its own data centres.
The turnaround is a massive step for Mr Curtis after he spent one year of a two-year sentence in Cooma Correctional Centre before being released in June 2017.
He had been found guilty of conspiring to commit insider trading, netting him and then-friend John Hartman $1.43million.
Justice Lucy McCallum said Mr Curtis must have known what he was doing was ‘very wrong’ but believed he could ‘avoid getting caught’ while sentencing him in 2016.
Upon his release, he told Daily Mail Australia that he tried to make the best of a bad situation while he was in custody.
It’s a massive turnaround for the former investment banker who served one year in jail (pictured, Mr Curtis being released in 2017) for conspiracy to commit insider trading
The happy couple now live in Singapore with their two children (pictured) so Mr Curtis can be closer to Firmus as it seeks over $1.3billion in investment
‘You’ve got two ways to deal with it. You either shut down and be reclusive and stay within yourself – that’s not who I am,’ he said.
‘Or you have to deal with it, and fit in and adjust.’
Ms Jacencko had initially stayed back in Australia while Mr Curtis lived in Singapore for his job with Firmus, but moved the family to the island nation in September.
She told Daily Mail Australia that their relationship has improved with the family living under one roof and now they ‘don’t have any plans to come back’.
‘Ollie is working harder than he’s ever worked in his life. We hardly ever see him, but [moving to Singapore] has put us all together in one house,’ she told Daily Mail Australia in March.
‘In the morning Ollie’s amazing. He’ll get breakfast ready for the kids and get them out the door with me. We didn’t have that opportunity before.
‘Life’s very different now. We are active parents together, which we’ve never had the opportunity to be before.’
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Read more at DailyMail.co.uk