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Johnny Boufarhat has become one the youngest self-made billionaires in the world -- a news that has taken the internet by storm.
Who is Boufarhat?
He is a 27-year-old Australia-born British citizen and an entrepreneur.
Mr Boufarhat was born on 1 June 1994 in Sydney, New South Wales to immigrant parents – a Lebanese father and a Syrian-born Armenian mother. His father is a mechanical engineer, while mother an accountant.
He did his schooling from the Dubai American Academy before he went to the United Kingdom to follow in his father’s footsteps. He studied mechanical engineering at the University of Manchester.
In January 2019, he founded online virtual events company Hopin – a year before any such virtual events started gaining traction amid the COVID-19 pandemic.
What is Hopin?
Hopin – the business that Mr Boufarhat founded – is a proprietary video teleconferencing online conference-hosting platform. The interesting thing about the company is that it is a completely remote company without any office address. The pandemic seems to have turned around the fortunes of company. Since the onset of the pandemic in 2020, the platform has hosted more than 80 thousand events, working with various reputed organisations and companies like the United Nations, NATO and Unilever. The company has seen its employee strength rise from six workers to 800 workers in the span of 12 months.
Based in London, the company claims to have more than 100,000 customers on its platform – including Poshmark, American Express, and The Financial Times, among others. To put it simply, it works as a board room that office employees used before the COVID-19 pandemic shook up the working environment across the globe. This platform allows the meeting of participants to network online in new and innovative ways, facilitate exchange virtual business cards, and get a summary of their connections after an event.
How did Boufarhat become a billionaire?
A personal tragedy and the grit to overcome that has propelled Boufarhat to storm into the billionaires’ club. In 2015, he was attacked by a rare allergy – an immune system reaction to something that does not bother most other people. In his words, his “immune system went into a seemingly permanent hyperdrive”.
Now that he couldn’t move out, the allergy had him yearn for physical contact as he stayed indoors. And that is how he came up with the idea of Hopin and the rest is history. Also, COVID-19 turned out to be just another golden ticket for him in the guise of a misfortune, as the pandemic ratcheted up the significance of virtual presence over physical contact.
Hoping raised US$450 million from investors including Brad Gerstner’s Altimeter Capital Management at a US$7.8 billion valuation. At that level, Boufarhat’s stake – which stands at little over 40% -- is now worth about US$3.2 billion, making him one of the world’s youngest self-made billionaires.
