With a £2.06 billion fortune, Johnny Boufarhat is the wealthiest person in the Sunday Times Young Rich List of people in the UK aged 30 and under.
Aged 27, Sydney-born Boufarhat became Britain’s youngest self-made billionaire last year with the success of Hopin, the video-conferencing app launched from his girlfriend’s London flat in 2020.
The hyper-growth events platform was valued at £5.6 billion last year and has raised an astonishing £750 million in funding.
It has grown from a few hundred event creators using its platform to hundreds of thousands of organisations, with millions of attendees showing up for events each month.
Writing candidly in 2020 after its £32m Series A round, CEO Boufarhat revealed how a rare and severe reaction to medication made him “allergic to the world” – and led ultimately to Hopin.
Also cracking the top five of the Young Rich List are 30-year-old identical twins Oliver and Alexander Kent-Braham, founders of online car insurer Marshmallow.
Sharing a £455m fortune, the brothers are the wealthiest new entrants. Valued at £900m, Marshmallow last year became one of the first unicorns to be launched by black British-born entrepreneurs and was 10th on our InsurTech 50 ranking.
The Kent-Brahams, who jointly own just over half of Marshmallow, were educated at Reed’s, the Surrey fee-paying school where former UK tennis No.1 Tim Henman was once a pupil. Although they both played tennis for Great Britain at under-16 level, the twins abandoned dreams of turning professional to establish Marshmallow.
By way of comparison, Manchester United’s French international Paul Pogba, 29, is the wealthiest footballer in the list with a £77 million fortune.
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Christian Facey – co-founder of AudioMob, a tech company also launched in 2020 that develops in-game audio ads – is equal 15th in the Young Rich List alongside Manchester City and England star Raheem Sterling.
AudioMob has seen client successes with artists including Ed Sheeran and Nas alongside brands like Intel, Jeep and KitKat.
“The Young Rich List used to be dominated by musicians and footballers. We are now finding a wave of twenty-something entrepreneurs who have managed to quickly build fortunes through vlogging, esports and Instagram-friendly retail,” said Robert Watts, who compiles the Sunday Times Rich List.
“Not all of these business founders needed millions of pounds in investment or a flair for coding. Many have been able to build global businesses with little more than a phone, a laptop and an instagram account – intuitive, simple to use tech that millions of people can access without breaking the bank.”
The complete Sunday Times Rich List will be available to the paper’s digital subscribers and will be online at https://www.thetimes.co.uk/sunday-times-rich-list