MONEY MAKER
My parents fled a war but I became the UK’s youngest self-made billionaire worth £1.7bn…I started my company from my BED
THE UK’s youngest self-made billionaire has told how he started his company from his bed after his parents fled a war zone.
Johnny Boufarhat started online events platform Hopin at just 26 and the business quickly grew to be worth billions of pounds.
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He now has £1.7billion in his kitty according to , which ranks the wealth of the country's richest people.
But it wasn’t all plane sailing, as Johnny came from humble beginnings.
He was born to a Lebanese father who was a mechanical engineer, and a Syrian-born Armenian mother who was an accountant.
But Johnny was born in Australia after his parents moved from lebanon to flee the Civil War.
At 18 he then moved to the UK to study mechanical engineering at Manchester University.
Johnny created the Hopin app after an illness confined him to his bed.
He continued to suffer a range of symptoms after getting food poisoning and was confined to bed.
He : "Then I got so sick I was unable to leave my bed. I was starting to get weird reactions, like rashes from the sun.
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"My brain fog was so severe I couldn't remember things. I felt like I had some sort of dementia. And I had lost trust with doctors."
To connect with the outside world he started creting the code for a video conferencing app.
Mr Boufarhat told the newspaper: "I tested it in a few communities and people loved it."
He was diagnosed with an autoimmune condition and recovered after making changes to his diet but continued developing the video event app idea.
In November 2019 he raised $350,000 (£242,000) from "angel" investors, who take a chance on small businesses hoping they will become the next big thing.
At the same time he had made the same amount from the app, and realised" I didn't even need to raise money'," he told the newspaper.
Mr Boufarhat then raised $6.5million (£5million) from venture capital investors - just as covid started spreading across the world in February.
The video conferencing app was at a trial stage with several thousand users signed up to a waiting list and plans to launch in the Autumn.
Instead, Covid forced the entrepreneur to speed up its plans to launch more widely as it found major events organisers like IDG cancelling in-person events and looking for remote options.
Mr Boufarhat told the Sunday Times: "On a Friday, at midnight, we said we'll do it, and by the Monday they'd had the event and it was a great success.
"I was like, 'We need to launch.' That's when things went crazy."
Within weeks Mr Boufarhat had more than tripled staff to 23 people and he now employs 500, with many he has not even met face to face because of the pandemic.
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Hopin is used for live streaming events and conferences and is similar to Zoom, connecting people virtually when they can't be together in person.
It has since raised millions of pounds from investors and Mr Boufarhat still owns 35% of the business.
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