“It caused people to really start thinking about their lives, asking the deeper questions, asking the hard questions. “It was a horrible pandemic and it completely disrupted life,” she said. “And I've always wondered why, when you're looking for novenas or prayers or anything online, it feels like you're stuck in 1997?.You have over a billion Catholics in the world, why are there not really great technology products and consumer companies built for these religions? Because every other aspect of my life has been digitized.”īoyle said General Catalyst decided to invest in Hallow after watching the app’s growth during the worst of the coronavirus lockdowns in the U.S., when churches throughout the nation were closed and people were invested in finding faithful spiritual options in the digital world.īoyle said she thinks the interest in religious technology will last beyond the COVID pandemic. “I'm a practicing Catholic, I have been my entire life, and I've always been interested in technology,” Boyle said. “What struck me most about his pitch was not what he was saying, but where he was saying it: on a university campus where students are passionate about crypto, self-driving cars and the future of AI, not the lectio divina ,” Boyle wrote.īoyle told The Pillar that the Hallow pitch also struck her because she was tired of seeing outdated Catholic apps and websites, and Hallow seemed to take design seriously. Katherine Boyle, a practicing Catholic at General Catalyst who spearheaded the investment, wrote recently that she was struck by Jones’ chutzpah, after he pitched a religious app during a 2019 open pitch day at Stanford Business School. Jones announced in April the app had received $12 million in new funding from venture capital group General Catalyst, a firm which has also invested in companies like Warby Parker, Airbnb, and Kayak, to name just a few. We're growing really quickly and lots of people are finding out about it.” “We just crossed 10 million prayers completed on the app and 150,000 downloads or so. “We've reached way more folks than we ever thought possible,” he said. To that end, two and a half years ago, he launched the Hallow app. As he came back to the Catholic Church, Jones said he wanted to give others the experience of meditation that he had had. Praying lectio divina brought about a deeper sense of peace than Jones had ever felt with secular forms of meditation, he said - one that also left him grappling with the purpose and meaning of his life. “And the word that stuck out to me was ‘hallow’ in ‘hallowed be thy name’ and.that experience completely changed my life.”
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“I Googled how to do lectio divina, and opened up Scripture to a random passage, and it was Christ teaching us the Lord's Prayer,” he said. They laughed, he said, but they also helped Jones discover the contemplative, meditative techniques and devotions of the Catholic Church.
Out of curiosity, Jones started to ask Catholic priests and religious brothers and sisters if there was anything to the connection he was feeling between meditation and faith. Jones said he was surprised to find that he was drawn to think about God, faith, and the spiritual life while he was meditating. It was during this time that he started using Headspace, a secular meditation app that guides users through mindfulness exercises or meditation based in the Buddhist tradition. But after college graduation, he became enthralled with the idea of meditation. In high school and college, Jones stopped practicing Catholicism altogether, and considered himself either an agnostic or an atheist during this time. “The short story is I was raised Catholic to the extent that my mother dragged me to Mass,” Jones said. Share A chat with Hallow’s founder and chief investorĪlex Jones, founder and CEO of Hallow, told The Pillar that he had the idea for the app after his faith journey took him from Catholicism to atheism and back to Catholicism again, by way of meditation. Mike Schmitz and Ascension Press, there is Catholic music and Gregorian Chant, as well as guided lectio divina reading, the rosary and other recorded prayers, among other features. There is the popular Bible in a Year podcast by Fr. There are recordings of people reading Bible passages in calm, meditative voices that you can fall asleep to. The Hallow app, made popular online by Catholic Influencers™, is a Catholic prayer and meditation app that markets itself as a kind of Catholic reimagination of Calm, or Headspace, which are secular, meditative apps.
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