The Youngest Billionaire in the UK Started Building Wealth in Bed

Twenty-six-year-old Hopin app creator Johnny Boufarhat has become the youngest billionaire in the United Kingdom. Boufarhat perfectly targeted a winning niche with his video conferencing app during the coronavirus pandemic at a crucial moment. When Britain plunged into a deep lockdown, his virtual business rode the high waves. The idea originated two years earlier, but at that time, investors were not ready to support him. However, everything comes in its own time. Now, the value of his business has reached £4.1 billion, and Boufarhat’s wealth is estimated at £1.5 billion. According to the Sunday Times rich list, this young man born in Sydney is ranked 113th on the list.

The whole story actually arose from his own need to attend events remotely. The idea to develop such an app was born in 2018 while he was lying in his girlfriend’s bedroom in London’s King’s Cross. Bedridden due to an autoimmune disease, he spontaneously began writing code for a program that enables live conference streaming over the internet, writes Mirror.

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In two years, Hopin slowly grew and expanded into a small team of eight developers; today, it has around 500 employees located mainly in the US and the UK, but interestingly, they have no offices. During the pandemic, Hopin’s user base skyrocketed to five million, and among the 80,000 clients are American Express and Hewlett-Packard. By January 2021, Hopin had generated £54 million in sales, with forecasts that this amount could rise to £130 million this year.

Although he was not supported when he started his project, Boufarhat was confident in his success. In November 2019, he famously told business angels, ‘Hopin will be the fastest-growing company in the world.’ When, as he says, everything went crazy, he managed to secure millions to launch the app in March last year.

Among the richest young people in the United Kingdom are the Duke of Westminster Hugh Grosvenor (30) with over £10 billion in wealth, Ed Sheeran (30) with £220 million, and Harry Styles (27), the richest member of One Direction with £75 million.

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