There's a certain gravitational pull that comes with having already sold a company to Oracle for $1.6 billion. So when Leigh Jasper, who co-founded that company—the construction software giant Aconex—decided to take another swing at enterprise software, the capital came quickly.
Firmable, Jasper's Melbourne-based sales intelligence startup, announced a $14 million Series A round on March 2, 2026. AirTree led the investment, with backing from a constellation of Australian tech veterans: Sue Morphet, the former Pacific Brands CEO; Sam Kroonenburg, who co-founded A Cloud Guru; Redbubble's Martin Hosking; and Rob Phillpot, Jasper's former Aconex co-founder. It's the kind of investor roster that signals insider confidence—people who've seen this playbook work before.
The round arrives roughly two and a half years after Firmable's $9 million seed, also led by AirTree partner John Henderson in October 2023.
The Pedigree Problem (Or Advantage)
Jasper isn't alone in bringing Aconex DNA to Firmable. Co-founder Paul Perrett served as Aconex's chief operating officer before becoming CEO of MessageMedia, which he sold to Sweden's Sinch for $1.7 billion. Chief Product and Technology Officer Karthik Venkatasubramanian makes it three Aconex alumni at the top.
This kind of founder pedigree cuts both ways. It opens doors and accelerates fundraising, certainly. But it also sets a high bar—investors who write checks based on past performance expect lightning to strike twice.
What Firmable is building feels adjacent to, rather than derivative of, the Aconex model. The company develops AI-native sales intelligence tools tailored for the Asia-Pacific market, combining proprietary company and contact databases with real-time buying signals. Think of it as trying to answer the question every B2B sales team obsesses over: which companies are actually ready to buy right now?
The platform deploys what Firmable calls AI agents—software that automates tasks like CRM data enrichment, account prioritization, and even drafting outreach emails. These capabilities plug directly into HubSpot and Salesforce, embedding themselves into the daily workflows sales teams already use rather than asking them to adopt yet another standalone tool.
Currently, the company operates across Australia, New Zealand, and eight additional Asia-Pacific markets. Its customer base has grown to over 1,000 accounts, including recognizable names like CBRE, G2, Monday.com, Marsh, and Canon. Whether that customer count translates to sticky, high-revenue contracts remains less clear from the outside.
The APAC Gambit
Much of Firmable's pitch centers on being an Asia-Pacific alternative to American incumbents like ZoomInfo, which dominates the sales intelligence category but has historically focused on US and European data. Regional players often claim better local data accuracy and deeper understanding of compliance requirements—Australia's notoriously strict privacy laws, for instance, or the complexity of doing business across Southeast Asia's fragmented markets.
The Series A capital will primarily fund an expansion into the United States, which might seem counterintuitive for a company that built its identity around being APAC-first. But perhaps that's the point—establish credibility in a neglected geography, then use that as a wedge into the much larger American market.
Firmable also plans to deepen its proprietary data and buying signal capabilities. In January 2026, the company launched Search Intent, a feature that surfaces company-level search behavior to identify businesses actively researching solutions. A more targeted New Zealand product launched the previous May. And a late-February job posting for a "Founding SDR, SEA" based in Singapore hints at aggressive Southeast Asian expansion underway.
The sales intelligence market has become crowded in recent years, with venture capital pouring into companies promising to solve the same fundamental problem: helping salespeople figure out who to call and when. Whether Firmable's geographic focus and AI automation provide enough differentiation to carve out durable market share—or whether the company can scale before well-capitalized American competitors turn their attention southward—will likely determine if this Aconex sequel gets a similar ending.
For now, at least, the investors who know Jasper best are betting it will.
