A 26-year-old has become the UK’s youngest self-made billionaire after starting business at the start of the Covid pandemic.
Johnny Boufarhat, a graduate in mechanical engineering at the University of Manchester, raised funds last March to launch the Hopin video conferencing app after Britain fell into its first lockdown, forcing major roads and businesses to close their doors.
The idea came about two years before the Covid emergency – although he couldn’t secure any money to get it off the ground, reports Der Spiegel.
It started in his girlfriend’s bedroom in King’s Cross, London in 2018 after he was bedridden due to a mysterious illness.
It was around this time that he began coding the program that would allow conferences to be broadcast live over the Internet.
Hopin’s zoom model supports home work and enables employees to remotely network and communicate via video calls.
Since launching last year, the user base has grown to over five million, giving American Express and Hewelett-Packard a customer value of £ 4.1 billion.
The company’s rising value has left Boufarhat at £ 1.5 billion net worth, ranking him 113th on the Sunday Times Rich List – a list of the UK’s richest people.
Johnny Boufarhat, who has become Britain’s youngest self-made billionaire
(Image: Hopin)
Boufarhat was born in Sydney after his parents – a mechanical engineer and an accountant – moved to Australia from Lebanon during the 1975-1990 Civil War.
The family moved to Los Angeles and then Dubai before Boufarhat traveled to the UK to study mechanical engineering.
While studying, Boufarhat developed an app that gives students discounts in restaurants.
After graduating in 2018, he was diagnosed with an autoimmune disease that made it impossible for him to get out of bed. At that moment he had a moment with a lightbulb.
By the age of 21 he was so ill he was bedridden in his girlfriend’s apartment in King’s Cross, London, where he worked for the Multiplex Construction Group. He started coding hopin, which grew into a small team of eight developers over the next two years.
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On the subject of matching items
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On the subject of matching items
In November 2019, Boufarhat told investors it was “the fastest growing company in the world” just before the Covid-19 pandemic began.
He managed to raise millions of funds to launch the app last March, after which “things went crazy,” he said.
During the pandemic, the user base rose to five million, with 80,000 organizations – including American Express – using it.
Johnny Boufarhat’s app Hopin
(Image: Hopin)
Hopin had sales of £ 54 million through January 2021 and is expected to bring in £ 130 million this year.
Although registered in the UK, Boufarhat now lives in Barcelona with his fiancée who works with him.
The company has no offices and its 500 employees are mainly based in the US and UK.
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Boufarhat – who admits he’s incredibly work-oriented – worked once, seven days a week, but now takes half a day off on Saturdays.
He told the Sunday Times, “I’m very, very work-oriented. I just want to be as effective as possible, positive for the world … I’m bored – I don’t drink, I don’t do that.
“I make sure that all of my food is organic. That’s the biggest change I’ve made.
“I am very, very work-oriented”.
The entrepreneur also ranks third on a list of the richest young people in the UK.
