A 26-year-old man become the UK's newest billionaire after launching a video-conferencing app at the start of the Covid pandemic.
Johnny Boufarhat is the creator is Hopin, a video conferencing app. He raised funding just in time for Britain's first lockdown and working from home was introduced.
The Manchester Evening News reported that Johnny first came up with the idea in his girlfriend's bedroom in King's Cross, London, in 2018, after he was left bedridden due to a mystery illness.
The University of Manchester graduate started coding the programme, which allows conferences to be live-streamed over the internet.
The app uses a Zoom-style model enabling staff to network and communicate remotely via video calls.
Hopin has skyrocketed since the pandemic with a userbase of over five million including American Express, giving it a value of £4.1 billion.
Johnny's net worth is also valued at £1.5 billion, placing him in 113th place in the Sunday Times Rich List – a tally of Britain’s wealthiest individuals.
Hopin had sales of £54 million from its launch until January 2021 and forecasts estimate it to make a further £130million this year.
Although it is registered in the UK, Johnny now lives in Barcelona with his fiancée, who also works on the app.
The firm is not office based its 500 staff are mostly divided between the US and UK.
This isn't his first go at creating an app, having already developed an app that gave students discounts at restaurants.
He was born in Sydney after his parents moved to Australia from Lebanon during the 1975-1990 civil war
His parents - a mechanical engineer and an accountant -. then moved the family to Los Angeles and Dubai before Johnny travelled to the UK to study mechanical engineering.
In 2018, after graduating, Johnny was diagnosed with an auto-immune disease which left him bed-bound. It was this illness which inspired the need for the app.
At that time he was working for the construction group Multiplex. He started coding Hopin, which over the next two years grew to a small team of eight developers.
In an interview with the Times : “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.
“I make sure all my food is organic. That's the biggest change I've made.
“I'm very, very work-focused”.
He is now number three in a list of the UK’s wealthiest young people.
The seventh Duke of Westminster, Hugh Grosvenor, aged 30, came in first place in the Sunday Times Young Rich List, with an eye-watering wealth of £10.054 billion after inheriting his title and a £8.3 billion fortune following the death of his father, Gerald Cavendish Grosvenor, in 2016.
