Hopin founder nets £100m in share sales
Johnny Boufarhat races to fortune in two years as UK video conferencing company hits $5.7bn valuation
The founder of Hopin, one of the fastest-growing tech startups ever, has sold about £100m of shares over the past year as the video conferencing company’s valuation has rocketed.
Johnny Boufarhat, who launched Hopin two years ago, has sold almost 17 per cent of his stake for between £96m and 130m, according to a Financial Times analysis of public filings.
While founders selling their shares as they raise funds from investors is routine, the quick pace of Hopin’s capital raises has allowed Boufarhat to sell shares faster than most.
Hopin, which was founded shortly before the coronavirus pandemic, has raced to a $5.7bn valuation, raising $565m from top-tier venture capital investors scrambling to invest in video conferencing as lockdowns around the world created a huge demand for remote-working technology.
The company now has 660 employees in 45 countries and says that millions of people attend virtual events run on its platform each month.
Investors including Andreessen Horowitz, Tiger Global and IVP have piled into the company in a series of rapid-fire funding rounds in 2020 and 2021. LinkedIn is among the company’s backers.
On paper, Boufarhat, at 27, is Britain’s youngest self-made billionaire, according to The Sunday Times Rich List.
His investors are effusive about Boufarhat’s qualities. “Johnny will be one of the greatest founders that Europe has ever seen. [He has] one of the most brilliant strategic minds in the business. He’s a truly category-defining leader,” said Harry Stebbings, a Hopin investor.
A filing on Monday at Companies House showed that Boufarhat has sold 16.6m shares since July 2020 in a series of transactions.
The Financial Times cross-referenced those transactions with earlier filings that showed chunks of a share class owned solely by Boufarhat being converted into share classes owned by Hopin’s outside investors.
Other public filings detail the prices paid by investors for various classes of Hopin shares, which the FT used to arrive at a range for Boufarhat’s share sales of £96m-£130m.
Hopin did not comment.
Investors in fast-growing startups may prefer a founder to sell some shares so they are not incentivised to seek an early sale of the company to turn their paper wealth into cash.
Boufarhat has retained control of Hopin in spite of the sales and dilution from new issuances to outside investors with a class of shares that commands 20 votes a piece. All the other shares are one vote a piece.
Such voting structures, which give outsized power to founders, are also common in venture-backed companies.