News
Manchester University graduate becomes UK’s youngest self-made billionaire
Johnny Boufarhat graduated from his mechanical engineering degree at the University of Manchester in 2018
A Manchester University graduate has become the UK’s youngest self-made billionaire at the age of twenty-six.
Sydney-born Johnny Boufarhat raised funding to help launch his own video conferencing app, Hopin, last March, after the UK entered its first lockdown and high streets and businesses were forced to close their doors.
He said the idea initially came about two years prior to the COVID-19 pandemic when, upon graduating in 2018, he was diagnosed with an autoimmune disease which left him unable to get out of bed.
While Johnny was bedridden at his girlfriend’s flat, the idea of a virtual meeting app was born and he began coding the programme, which now allows conferences to be live-streamed over the internet, much like the virtual meeting platform, Zoom.
@Johnny Boufarhat / Linkedin
These coding skills stem back to his time at university – while studying mechanical engineering, Johnny developed an app that gave students discounts at restaurants.
Last year Johnny was finally able to launch his app, and its user-base quickly skyrocketed.
Today, it has over five million users, giving it a value of £4.1billion with 80,000 clients – American Express and Hewlett-Packard included.
Hopin had sales of £54 million in the year to January 2021, and is forecast to rake in £130million this year. The company’s value has left Johnny with a net worth of £1.5billion, placing him in 113th place in the Sunday Times Rich List – a tally of Britain’s wealthiest individuals.
He admits that he is incredibly work-focussed – he used to work seven day weeks but now takes a half day off on Saturdays.
Speaking to the Sunday Times last month, he said: “I’m very, very work-focused. I just want to be as impactful as I can, in a positive way for the world… I’m boring – I don’t drink, I don’t do anything like that.”
Although his business is registered in the UK, Johnny now lives in Barcelona with his fiancée, who works with him.
His 500 staff members all work remotely across both the UK and the US.
You can see the full Sunday Times Rich List here.