Two graduates of University College London have become multi-millionaires after the business they launched at the start of the Covid pandemic delivering office equipment to remote workers was acquired.

Michael Ginzo, 30, and Sami Bouremoum, 34, who studied engineering and computer science, respectively, at the London university, sold their company, Hofy, to Deel, a San Francisco-based payroll and HR technology company with 4,000 employees.

The terms of the deal for Hofy, which employs 120 people, are undisclosed but it is thought to have valued the business at about £100 million. Venture capital firms including Day One Ventures, 20VC and Kindred Capital had invested a combined $30.2 million and will also benefit from the sale.

Before the pandemic, Ginzo and Bouremoum had started a business called Whip offering fleets of e-bikes and e-scooters to employers, investing their savings of “tens of thousands of pounds”. But they quickly shut down that venture in March 2020 when the lockdowns took hold and launched Hofy, which delivered a fully assembled home office to remote workers anywhere in the UK in five working days or less.

Three weeks later, the pair landed their first contract from the Care Quality Commission, the health and social care regulator, worth £100,000 for 500 home-working set-ups. Ginzo said they had to move quickly, identifying a warehouse in Stoke on Gumtree, the classified listings site, and hiring some builders who had been laid off due to the pandemic to work there. They also agreed a deal with AnyVan, a removals business, whose work had dried up during the strict first lockdown, and sourced the chairs, desks and what Ginzo describes as IT peripherals such as screens, mice and keyboards, from small local businesses.

In January 2021, the pair relaunched the website so new employees could order their home-working set-up. “The idea was that employees would be able to set the rules around what they wanted to offer and then, employees, as part of onboarding to your business, could self-serve,” said Ginzo. They started offering the service internationally, promising to deliver a full remote-work set-up, now also including laptops, to remote workers anywhere in the world in ten working days.

Ginzo worked as a product developer at Deel just before launching Hofy. When he was confident the start-up was at an appropriate stage and scale, he got back in touch with his former boss, Deel’s chief executive Alex Bouaziz, to see if they might work together on a partnership.

“We serve a very similar customer base, which is people hiring globally and hiring remotely. It was a really neat partnership because what Deel has is customers coming to them saying, ‘Hey, I want to hire someone in Brazil. Can you help me with the legal [requirements], payments etc? Then they hire them and realise, ‘Oh crap! I need to get them a laptop.’ And that’s when [Deel] would refer them over to us.”

Ginzo, a minority shareholder, said the payday was a “full circle” moment. It comes ten years after he first became interested in entrepreneurship thanks to a conversation at a careers fair with a founder who said he had recently sold his business to Google for $150 million.

“I was like, ‘Oh great, congratulations! How much of the company did you own? He said 55 per cent and as I did the maths I was like, ‘Wow, that’s a lot of money.’ And then next to us is a stand [advertising] going to work for IBM or PwC. It didn’t make sense [to do that]. So that’s what got me on the path, realising it’s possible to start a business that you can grow and sell, and generate a hell of a lot of value,” said Ginzo.

He said the first thing he will do with his share of the proceeds is to take his wife on honeymoon. They got married in May last year but he hasn’t yet had the time to go away.

Deel’s Bouaziz said Ginzo is “one of the best entrepreneurs I’ve seen in the UK and I’m very excited to double down on our UK office”. The acquisition of Hofy is the eighth for Deel, which was founded in 2019 and was valued at $12 billion during its most recent fundraising round in 2022.