Glorify Is on the Rise—Who Owns the Christian App?
Faith-based app Glorify is pairing venture capital with Christianity. Who owns Glorify and is it public? What's the outlook for the Christian app?
Dec. 3 2021, Published 11:58 a.m. ET
Top Christian daily devotional and wellbeing app Glorify is in the limelight as institutional investors flock to the platform. At just two years old, the app is young—even for a startup. But the owners behind the company are young, too.
Who owns Glorify and will the freshly funded company find a home in the public market?
Investors backed Glorify in $40 million Series A.
In a major move for Glorify, institutional investors have stockpiled millions into a Series A funding round aimed at making Glorify fly. The round is worth $40 million and lead investors include a16z (Andreessen Horowitz), SoftBank Latin America Fund, K5 Global, and other noteworthy institutions.
Individual celebrities are biting, too. Kris Jenner, Corey Gamble, Jason Derulo, and Michael Bublé have a stake in the young Christian app company.
Who owns Glorify?
Glorify co-founder and co-CEO Ed Beccle is garnering a lot of attention, mainly because he's just 22 years old. Despite his young age, Beccle has already founded and sold another company that produced a multi-million-dollar exit. Beccle knows what works—which is why he dropped out of high school at just 16 years old to pursue his serial entrepreneurship aspirations.
Beccle said in an interview, "It's hard not to get a little bit philosophical when you’re young, and you’re doing exciting things, [and] maybe you make more money than regular people your own age. For me, at least, I stopped and thought, 'Well, I can afford all the Ubers and Uber Eats in the world, and I don’t really spend any other money. I don’t have a mortgage or dependents. What would I do if I could do anything?'"
For Beccle, the answer is tech, and Glorify is his next venture into that realm. Beccle also founded Hintsa, a professional training and coaching platform.
Beccle isn't the only owner. He gets help from the other co-founder and co-CEO, Henry Costa. Beccle and Costa met at a coworking space in London when Costa was involved in the world of angel investing (not a pun on Christianity, but we'll let it float).
According to Costa's LinkedIn, he also co-founded Grasp, an HR tech app that serves as a "wellbeing platform enabled by smart data and technology, driven by people." Beccle is also a co-founder of Grasp, which proves that the duo is heavily intertwined in an entrepreneurial sense.
Fortunately for Beccle and Costa, the co-founder duo retains a majority stake in the company worth a collective $100+ million.
Is Glorify publicly traded?
Glorify just landed its Series A funding round, which officially brings it into the major arena. However, the company remains far away from being publicly traded. There isn't a set number of funding rounds a company must get through in order to go public, but startups tend to wait until at least Series E before diving into the expensive regulatory landscape that's the public market.
Right now, Glorify needs to use its cash flow for growth, development, and expansion—not bookrunners and listing fees.
