Five years ago the fund manager Phil King put A$10 million into a bitcoin miner based in Launceston, Tasmania, buying a convertible note. On paper that note is now worth A$160 million, a return of 16 times, according to King, who runs Regal Partners and ranks the bet alongside the stake in QuadPay that Zip Co bought as its US expansion vehicle in 2020, as Future Generation reported. The bitcoin miner became Firmus Technologies, an AI-infrastructure builder that tried, and failed, to list on the ASX last month at a A$44 billion valuation. The Australian Financial Review went through the shareholder register that attempt produced and found King’s name sitting next to Nvidia’s, Blackstone’s, and that of Nick Curtis — the father of Firmus’s co-chief executive, Oliver Curtis.
Firmus is a neocloud: it buys Nvidia GPUs, racks them in leased or purpose-built data centres, and rents the compute to AI labs and cloud resellers, rather than operating a general-purpose cloud platform the way Amazon, Microsoft or Google do. It is one of several such operators that converted bitcoin-mining sites and know-how into AI infrastructure once GPU demand outran what the big three cloud providers could build on their own — the same pivot behind Iren, the Nasdaq-listed neocloud co-founded by brothers Dan and Will Roberts, now valued at about $19 billion, more than Qantas or the ASX itself. Dan Roberts was a year ahead of Oliver Curtis at St Ignatius’ College, Riverview, the Sydney private school whose other alumni include a former prime minister, Tony Abbott, and a former deputy prime minister, Barnaby Joyce.
Curtis’s own route ran through markets rather than mining. His father, Nick Curtis, is a mining financier who came up through Macquarie Bank and now chairs Lynas Rare Earths; one phone call to his father’s contacts got Oliver a work-experience placement at the stockbroker Southern Cross Equities while he was still at school, the AFR’s account notes. Nick Curtis now holds 5.6 per cent of Firmus. Oliver Curtis later became known for something else: in 2016 he was convicted of conspiring to commit insider trading with his childhood friend John Hartman, who tipped him off on upcoming trades at the fund manager Orion between May 2007 and June 2008. The pair split about $1.4 million in profits across 45 trades, according to ABC News. Curtis was sentenced to two years and served one, at a minimum-security prison in Cooma, before founding Firmus with his cousin Tim Rosenfield and Jonathan Levee in 2019.
The valuation run
Firmus’s valuation rose from A$1.85 billion in September 2025, on a A$330 million raise cornered by Ellerston Capital with Nvidia joining in, to the A$44 billion (about US$30.6 billion) target set for the float 13 months later — a roughly 24-fold increase. In between, Firmus raised a US$505 million round led by Coatue at a US$5.5 billion valuation in April 2026, then a fully subscribed US$2 billion round, backed again by Coatue and Nvidia plus Blackstone and Jane Street, that valued the company above US$10.5 billion by August, according to a funding timeline compiled by certifiedstrategic.com. Total equity raised in the twelve months to that August round topped US$3 billion.
| Valuation ($bn) | |
|---|---|
| Apr 2026 | 5.5 |
| Aug 2026 | 10.5 |
| Oct 2026 (IPO target) | 30.6 |
Source: certifiedstrategic.com, compiling AFR and Reuters reporting. The October figure is also quoted as A$44 billion, the IPO's target equity value
The pre-IPO cap table, as reported by Forbes Australia, gave Curtis 13 per cent, Coatue 8.4 per cent, Nvidia 7.2 per cent, Blackstone 6.7 per cent and his father 5.6 per cent. Further down the register sat Regal, Wilson Asset Management, Jane Street, the Tweed Coast-based Tectonic Investment Management, Sydney’s Archibald Capital, and the Maas Group — the family-controlled construction and quarrying business run by Wes Maas, which paid about A$410 million for a 3.2 per cent stake in 2026, per certifiedstrategic.com’s tracker.
How the float came apart
To justify asking investors to pay roughly three times its August private valuation, Firmus introduced a metric that appears in no finance textbook: “EV+1/EBIT+2.” As Reuters Breakingviews’ Antony Currie explained it, the numerator is enterprise value calculated using the net debt Firmus expects to be carrying in 12 months, and the denominator is the EBIT it hopes to earn in 24 months — on the theory that data-centre builders fund up to 90 per cent of construction with debt and start billing hyperscaler customers within a year. Currie’s objection: any slip in permits, power connections or equipment delivery pushes “+1” out to “+2” or “+3”, and the ratio can’t be checked against anything that has actually happened yet. Morningstar separately estimated Firmus was carrying about $30 billion of debt, six times its own forecast earnings — meaning the $11-a-share offer priced roughly a dollar of equity for every dollar of debt, according to InsideAI News. Only about 42 per cent of the register was subject to lock-up, so a majority of existing holders could have sold on day one.
The float also landed days after Firmus’s biggest domestic infrastructure deal came apart. Project Southgate, announced in October 2025 as a $73 billion venture with the data-centre operator CDC to build up to 1.6 gigawatts of AI-factory capacity across Australia by 2028, had delivered just 42 megawatts — under 3 per cent of that target — before the two companies quietly ended it. CDC’s founder, Greg Boorer, said the companies’ approaches had become “misaligned” as Firmus pursued its own developments and expansion into Asia, DataCenterDynamics reported. Firmus said the two sides had “mutually agreed earlier this year not to proceed” and that the decision did not touch its contracted customer capacity.
Local fund managers did the arithmetic and balked. Jun Bei Liu of Ten Cap put fair value below $10 billion and said “confidence evaporated” once the roadshow reached super funds. Oscar Oberg of Wilson Asset Management, a holder since the first raise, stuck with the founders: “We back the management team to deliver because they have so far,” per Forbes Australia’s reporting. Firmus withdrew the offer on 9 October, the day after institutional bidding closed, rather than cut the price, saying the terms on offer “would not reflect its long-term growth prospects.”
Australia generally will take dim views on people taking a risk.
That was Curtis’s own explanation for the flop, delivered to doubters along with a dare to “come back and chase me in 12 months.” Firmus is now raising US$2 billion to US$3 billion privately from existing backers and, Sharecafe reported, is weighing a Nasdaq listing in 2027 instead, closer to where its usual comparator trades. CoreWeave, the US neocloud most often cited against Firmus in banker pitch decks, is now worth about $60 billion after its own Nasdaq listing, even as its bonds have drawn the kind of AI-debt scrutiny chronicled elsewhere. Some of Firmus’s backers have a reason to want the next attempt to move fast: under terms the AFR has reported, certain investors receive extra shares if Firmus has not listed anywhere by 30 November — three weeks from now.