Johnny Boufarhat was fed up. A rare allergic reaction in 2015 left him with a misfiring immune system, making him crave in-person contact as he stayed inside to avoid further health flare-ups.
“It was so bad that for years, I could barely go outside,” Boufarhat, 27, said in a June 2020 blog post. “I wanted to go to events. I wanted to meet people.”
That frustration led him in early 2019 to start writing code in his London apartment’s kitchen for an online events platform that became Hopin Ltd. This month, the startup raised $450 million from investors including Brad Gerstner’s Altimeter Capital Management at a $7.8 billion valuation. At that level, Boufarhat’s stake is now worth about $3.2 billion, making him one of the world’s youngest self-made billionaires, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
A Hopin spokesperson declined to comment on Boufarhat’s net worth.
Technology and the ease of raising venture capital has created far greater numbers of new billionaires than ever before and at increasingly younger ages. Boufarhat’s fortune highlights Hopin’s surging growth in the pandemic’s fallout, making it a major winner from the global shift to online meetings after governments ordered lockdowns and told workers to stay at home.
Clear Vision
Hopin had six employees at the start of 2020 and now has more than 800. The firm accelerated its growth this year through acquisitions, including video technology firms StreamYard, Streamable and Jamm. In June, the London-based firm announced the purchase of Boomset, a management platform for in-person and hybrid events, and the following month said it acquired event-marketing firm Attendify.
Boufarhat’s vision for Hopin was clear to his early backers.
He has “an incredible passion” for his business, said Tom Wilson, a partner at London-based venture capital firm Seedcamp, who led Hopin’s 2019 pre-seed investment round.
“We were very quick to commit in the room, which isn’t something we do all the time,” Wilson said, recalling his and his colleagues’ response to Boufarhat’s pitch. “We all turned to each other and went, ‘Wow, this is pretty amazing.’”
Boufarhat — Hopin’s chief executive officer — was born in Australia to parents from Lebanon and Armenia, but moved as a teenager to the U.K. He obtained a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering and management from the University of Manchester, where he developed an app for students to find discounts.