Roxy Jacenko’s husband has turned a small investment into a huge fortune after venturing into artificial intelligence.
Oliver Curtis’ personal investment of $250,000 in Singapore-based Firmus Technologies is likely to rise to $447 million after another round of capital raising.
Mr Curtis helped launch the company from Tasmania as chief operating officer in 2019, while a court order barred him from serving as a director until June 2022.
The five-year order restricted his business opportunities after he was released from prison a year after being sentenced for conspiring to commit insider trading.
Mr Curtis founded the company with 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 coolant that eventually made computers consume less power as energy prices soared.
It continued to grow to meet the demand for AI data centers after a massive wave of interest in the industry.
Now co-chief executive, Mr Curtis has moved 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) stands to make an estimated $447 million from his founding stake in Firmus Technologies, now based in Singapore.
Firmus has billionaire investors including Melbourne’s Pratt family and Alex Waislitz and is seeking a new round of investment.
The company is seeking to raise another $597 million in equity and another $819 million in debt, according to Australian financial magazine.
If successful, Firmus’ valuation would soar to around $1.8 billion and Curtis’ stake in the company would be worth around $447 million.
The company would also become part of a new holding company based in Singapore that would control both Firmus and its sister business Sustainable Metal Cloud.
“I don’t want to say that (Mr Curtis) pulled a rabbit out of a hat because he has worked very hard, but he is now in possession of a golden rabbit,” said a source close to the businessman who asked to remain anonymous.
Firmus arrived in Singapore thanks to a $150 million deal reached with the Singapore government’s ST Telemedia Global Data Centres.
The agreement allowed the technology to be implemented in 60 centres across the country and to reduce their energy consumption by half.
Tech giants Nvidia and Dell Technologies provided the technology while Firmus launched Sustainable Metal Cloud to sell power and space in its own data centers.
This move marks a big step for Mr Curtis after serving one year of a two-year sentence at Cooma Correctional Centre before being released in June 2017.
He was convicted of conspiring to commit insider trading, which netted him and his then-friend John Hartman $1.43 million.
Judge Lucy McCallum said Curtis must have known what he was doing was “very bad” but believed he could “avoid getting caught” when he was sentenced in 2016.
After his release, he told the Daily Mail Australia that he tried to make the best of a bad situation while in custody.
It is a big turnaround for the former investment banker who served a year in prison (pictured, Mr Curtis was released in 2017) for conspiracy to commit insider trading.
The happy couple now live in Singapore with their two children (pictured) so Curtis can be closer to Firmus, which is seeking an investment of more than $1.3 billion.
“There are two ways to deal with it: either you close yourself off, you close yourself off and you close yourself off. I’m not like that,” he said.
“Or you have to deal with it, adapt and adjust.”
Ms Jacencko had initially stayed in Australia while Mr Curtis lived in Singapore for his work at 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 they now have “no plans to return”.
“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 in one house together,” she told Daily Mail Australia in March.
‘In the morning, Ollie is amazing. He makes breakfast for the kids and walks them to the door. We didn’t have that opportunity before.
“Life is very different now. We are active parents together, something we never had the opportunity to do before.”