How Johnny Boufarhat Built the Fastest Software Startup ‘Unicorn’ in History

In the annals of venture capital, Hopin, which enables businesses to host events online, is a unicorn among unicorns: It might be the fastest business software startup to reach a private “unicorn” valuation of $1 billion, let alone the $2.1 billion it reached last month—just under a year after it was founded.

Hopin owes that achievement to its red-hot revenue growth, fueled by the pandemic, which shut down in-person events such as conferences. In interviews with The Information, CEO Johnny Boufarhat revealed that Hopin’s revenue has surged to nearly $25 million of annualized recurring revenue from the $450,000 it was generating on that basis in March—an increase of more than 50 times.