Aaron Lim and the software people would actually use

A salesperson’s phone can be a peculiar little office. The filing cabinet is a chat history. The customer list is a phonebook. The reminder to call someone back may be lodged in a memory already occupied by twelve other people. Aaron Lim built a company around the work taking place inside that arrangement. His preparation included Berkeley, BlackRock and GIC. His eventual customers were often trying to get through the afternoon without copying the same message one more time.

That distance between a financial institution and an everyday salesperson is the interesting part of Lim’s career. He had experience building software for organisations with considerable resources. With Privyr, the Singapore company he co-founded in 2018, he turned toward people whose business relationships were conducted on their phones. The product would have to earn a place among the tools they already reached for.

A CRM, or customer relationship management system, sounds reassuringly orderly. Its name promises that relationships can be managed, preferably in neat rows. Yet the person doing the selling may have a different priority: answer the enquiry, send the details, remember the next conversation. Lim’s story follows his growing attention to that person, and the adjustments required to keep serving them as his own company became bigger.

A California detour

Lim was born in Singapore and moved to California with his family at four. Growing up, he had time for video games, skateboarding and hockey. Computing did not arrive as an all-consuming childhood vocation. At the University of California, Berkeley, he initially considered mechanical engineering because he liked building things. Computer science classes supplied another direction.

Small web applications and Facebook apps became projects to work on alongside his other interests. They attracted attention from startups nearby. During his junior-to-senior years, he became involved in an early-stage company’s founding team. He later returned to Singapore for National Service. The geographical sequence was unusual enough: a Singapore childhood, a California education, then a return to the country where he would eventually build Privyr.

He graduated in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. The degree gave him a technical base, but the next part of his career put that knowledge inside large organisations. At BlackRock, he was APAC CRM Lead. At GIC, he served as a Vice President. He built and launched systems for sales and investment teams, learning the business of customer information from an institutional vantage point.

Consider what that experience involves. Software can contain the correct fields and still require someone to fill them. A database can promise useful information and still depend on a person remembering to record it. The design problem extends beyond the screen. Every extra step has to find time in an employee’s day. That practical tension would become central to the kind of company Lim wanted to build.

The person holding the phone

In 2018, Lim joined Entrepreneur First in Singapore. He found his eventual co-founder, Shivam Mani Tripathi, with four days left before the programme’s team-formation deadline. Tripathi became Privyr’s CTO. The partnership combined Lim’s experience with relationship-management systems and Tripathi’s background in consumer products. Both had built startups before.

The founders spoke with hundreds of salespeople. A pattern emerged: much of the available sales software was designed around business-to-business selling, desktops and email. Consumer-facing sellers were working through WhatsApp, text messages and calls. Their supporting systems could amount to spreadsheets, manually saved phone contacts and scripts copied from one place to another.

Those tasks sound small when described separately. A single copied message is hardly an engineering emergency. Repetition changes the arithmetic. A seller handling multiple enquiries has to preserve details, choose what to send and remember who needs another reply. The same modest chore can occupy more of the working day than its modest appearance suggests.

Lim’s product approach took those existing actions seriously. Privyr would help users receive leads, contact them and follow up from the phone. Its purpose was expressed in the verbs of the customer’s work. The value could be understood without first persuading someone to appreciate the elegance of a database.

A customer’s advice during the early research stayed with Lim. The request was to improve things the customer already did, or wanted to do, rather than make an unwanted task easier. He later offered that lesson to other founders. It is an unglamorous brief for software, and a demanding one: understand someone else’s routine well enough to make a useful intervention.

A sales tool without a sales team

By August 2022, Lim could describe an entertaining business arrangement. Privyr made tools for salespeople but had no salespeople or sales processes of its own. Signup through subscription was self-serve. He said the company had reached more than 50,000 salespeople and businesses across 80 countries, despite having a small team. A product concerned with selling had found a way to let customers buy it themselves.

The numbers had begun attracting investment. In May that year, Privyr announced a US$6 million Series A led by MassMutual Ventures and Vulcan Capital. Participants included Wavemaker Partners, author Nir Eyal and former Facebook executive Gwendolyn Regina. The round gave the company resources to expand its product, reach more markets and build its team.

Lim’s chosen career highlight, however, concerned colleagues. Asked that summer about the achievement that mattered to him, he pointed to building Privyr and its team. At the time, he said no employee had left, although the earliest team members had joined more than three and a half years before. That was a snapshot of a particular moment. His pride in it supplies a more personal measure of progress than the funding announcement.

He also had an appetite for quickly testing ideas. Asked what he could discuss for hours, he chose startup validation within twenty-four hours. His explanation was direct:

“It’s crazy how much can be achieved quickly once we seek to prove/disprove instead of build.”

Aaron Lim · 2022

There is a useful tension in that sentence for an engineer. Building produces something visible. Testing may produce an answer that sends the builder elsewhere. Lim had enough experience to be interested in the answer. The customer conversations behind Privyr gave that interest a practical outlet, and the company’s early growth gave him reasons to keep pursuing it.

Learning to say CRM again

Success brought another question: how could Privyr grow revenue through larger customers? By the end of 2023, it had hired its first salesperson. A company accustomed to self-serve adoption was examining a more deliberate sales approach. The change asked Lim to revisit assumptions that had helped shape the business.

He had been reluctant to sell to enterprise buyers who might never use the product themselves. Privyr had also avoided the term CRM, partly because customers associated it with complexity or did not know it. The vocabulary that helped with individual sellers became less useful when speaking to organisations familiar with the category.

“Even though we’re built for salespeople, we initially hesitated to do sales.”

Aaron Lim · 2024

Through Wavemaker, the company worked with Salamander Advisory Services. The conversations clarified how Privyr could be presented to larger buyers: customer relationship management, content management and sales workflow automation. They also exposed requirements around security and integrations. Privyr chose to move gradually toward larger teams and small businesses. In the following months, its largest deals were five times the size of its previous largest deal.

Lim’s willingness to question the approach matters here. Growth can turn a founder’s earlier decisions into cherished possessions. A decision that worked acquires a story; the story acquires defenders. His adjustment suggests a more practical relationship with those decisions. The original focus on users could survive a change in how the company reached customers, provided the new approach still made sense for the people doing the work.

A Singapore address, a wider conversation

By August 2024, Lim was writing about Privyr serving customers in more than 125 countries. He connected that reach to the original conversations in Singapore. The same frustrations had appeared elsewhere. A local enquiry about how people used their phones had become a product with customers across borders.

The company retained an interest in specific Singapore tasks. Lim described tools for property agents, including an EdgeProp integration and a lookup against the Council for Estate Agencies registry. Another integration helped turn PropertyGuru listings into trackable Privyr Pages. The ambition to serve a broad market coexisted with attention to particular pieces of work close to home.

His December 2024 recap listed twenty-four product improvements. Among them were lead forms, an AI email parser, automatically merged duplicate leads, follow-up updates and team features. He invited customers to keep sending suggestions. Read as a record of priorities, the list returns to the small operations that first made Privyr possible: capture the information, reduce the repetition, make the next action easier to remember.

His writing continued. In April 2025, he explained mobile CRMs and their uses. His author page lists a July 2026 comparison of Zapier and Privyr for Facebook Lead Ads. These are practical subjects, concerned with where an enquiry goes and how someone acts on it. The company’s own page now reports more than 500,000 users worldwide.

There are less commercial details in Lim’s public portrait, too. In 2022, his favourite film was The Lord of the Rings; his favourite television show was Arrested Development. His ice cream choice was Belgian chocolate. The founder interested in one-day experiments also had time for a very long fictional quest and a family exceptionally bad at learning from its mistakes.

His own professional story has involved learning, returning and reconsidering. California supplied an education and an early encounter with startups. Singapore supplied the setting for institutional software work and the partnership behind Privyr. The recurring question is small enough to fit on a phone screen: what would help this person do the next useful thing? For Lim, that question has proved capable of sustaining a company.