LONDON (Reuters) – A Christian worship and meditation app, Glorify, raised $40 million from buyers together with SoftBank, enterprise capital agency Andreessen Horowitz and actuality TV star Kris Jenner, the corporate stated on Thursday.
Based within the UK in 2020, the app offers faith-based meditation to subscribers by way of inspirational quotes, worship routines and quick Bible extracts.
Whereas the quantity raised is small in comparison with the hundred-million-dollar sums usually invested by main funds in rising corporations, Glorify is one in all quite a few Christian apps which have grown lately, tapping mainstream financing sources.
The app has round 250,000 each day customers, largely in america and Brazil.
The fund elevating was led by Andreessen Horowitz, generally known as “a16z”. SoftBank’s Latin America fund additionally contributed.
Superstar buyers embody Kris Jenner and the singers Michael Buble and Jason Derulo.
“There’s an incredible Christian investor ecosystem within the U.S.,” stated Ed Beccle, who based Glorify together with Henry Costa.
Beccle stated he sought buyers whose values aligned with the corporate, though not all had been essentially Christian.
“The Christian group is each extremely social and world, however has traditionally been underserved by new applied sciences,” stated Connie Chan, basic companion at Andreessen Horowitz. “Glorify is altering this.”
The expansion of Christian apps was in play earlier than the pandemic, notably in america, however demand has skyrocketed lately as lockdowns restrict individuals’s skill to go to bodily church buildings.
Christian apps which have been arrange previously few years and have established themselves embody one referred to as Abide and one other referred to as Pray.
A Catholic prayer app referred to as Hallow stated earlier this month it had raised greater than $50 million in funding in 2021, from buyers together with Peter Thiel, with development having been accelerated by the pandemic.
Glorify stated the cash it raised might be used to increase the workforce from its present headcount of round 60 and set up new workplace places world wide.
The app additionally goals to ascertain a web-based group which permits for deeper engagement with faith-based content material “moderately than mass superficial engagement that you’re going to usually see on conventional social networks,” Beccle stated.
“In a humorous method I am migrating communities from one place to a different, so generic social networks like Instagram, Fb and so forth, seeing that they have a whole lot of extremely engaged communities and attempting to construct a context-specific place for them.”
In future, the app may embody features equivalent to Christian courting and instruments for managing church buildings and donations, Beccle stated.
(Reporting by Elizabeth Howcroft; Enhancing by Susan Fenton)
