Hopin: crash landing for Europe’s highest-flying Covid unicorn

Receive free Hopin Ltd updates

We’ll send you a myFT Daily Digest email rounding up the latest Hopin Ltd news every morning.

Remember Hopin? It’s a British virtual events company that hit a $7.8bn private market valuation in 2021, just two years after its launch, thanks mostly to a global pandemic. It was, according to our colleagues at Sifted, “officially Europe’s fastest growing startup of all time”.

Today, founder Johnny Boufarhat is excited to share some news on the company blog:

I’m excited to share that Hopin has closed on a strategic relationship with RingCentral, a trusted name in global enterprise cloud communications, that involves RingCentral acquiring our Events and Session products.

NYSE-listed Ringcentral will be buying Hopin’s “technology assets, customer relationships, and engineering, product, and go-to-market talent”, which is basically all of it.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Boufarhat — once Britain’s youngest self-made billionaire, at least on paper, a lot of which he sold — will step down as CEO, to be replaced by chief technology and product officer Badri Rajasekar. The job Boufarhat is stepping away from will be to rebuild Hopin around Superwave, a just-announced stakeholder engagement and monitoring tool that’s in beta testing, along with media streaming products StreamYard and Streamable.

At pixel time Ringcentral shares were down 4.3 per cent to value the equity at $3.85bn. In its most recent results Ringcentral reported less than $275mn in cash and long-term debt of $1.6bn, so it’s reasonable to assume it won’t be paying $7.8bn.

Further reading
— Virtual events start-up struggles as gatherings return (FT)
— Hopin founder nets £100mn in share sales (FT)