Hallow — a Catholic audio prayer app that seeks to compete with secular meditation apps like Calm and Headspace — reached a milestone this weekend when it logged the one billionth prayer prayed with the app.

Alex Jones, Hallow’s CEO and one of its co-founders, posted on X that the achievement was “[a]bsolutely insane” given that it occurred exactly seven years to the day after he incorporated Hallow as an organization. Seven years is of note to the app’s founders given that, in biblical terms, seven represents perfection, completion, and a covenant with God. Jones wrote:

7 years ago…to the day…June 21, 2018

We incorporated Hallow as an organization. No app. No users. Just $10 I put in a bank account.

Then today. June 21, 2025…

We cross 1 billion prayers prayed.

What.

God is real.

God is good.

God be praised.

Thanks be to God.

Jones has long said how unlikely it is that he would be the one to bring millions of people to prayer. During his time in high school and college, at the University of Notre Dame, Jones had fallen away from his Catholic faith to the point that he considered himself agnostic or atheist, he later explained to the Irish Rover, a Notre Dame student newspaper. After graduating from Notre Dame’s business school in 2015, he went to perhaps the most common destination among those graduates: the consulting firm McKinsey & Company.

In the spiritual void of McKinsey, Jones began using apps like Calm and Headspace to meditate. And yet, he told the Irish Rover, he “kept feeling a pull towards something spiritual, something Christian.” So Jones began to reach out to former professors and mentors at Notre Dame with questions about Christian meditation. Among them were the Rev. Pete McCormick, the former rector of his dorm, and John Cavadini and the Rev. Kevin Grove, both theology professors. “Fr. Pete laughed and said I must have slept through some classes,” Jones later told Notre Dame’s business school. It was then that he “began to discover this rich, beautiful world of Catholic contemplative prayer that honestly I’d never heard of before,” Jones told the Irish Rover.

If Jones’s story — going from an atheist college student and a technocratic consultant to the igniter of one billion prayers — seems surprising, his co-founder’s story sounds even less likely. Erich Kerekes, who remains the company’s CFO, also worked for McKinsey after graduating from Notre Dame, but his role was to advise tech companies in Silicon Valley.

“I was born and raised Catholic, but pretty much the epitome of culturally Catholic,” Kerekes explained at an event this April at the University of Notre Dame. “We would pray every once in a while, but it wasn’t super important to my family.” Kerekes began to learn more intellectually about the faith at Notre Dame after he began dating a girl who was more devout, he said. But by the time his friend Alex Jones asked him if he wanted to quit his job and join him in building Hallow, he “didn’t feel like a big part of the Church … even at that very moment.” Kerekes explained that Jones hadn’t offered him “a position, equity, co-founder status, or any money at all” — he had simply asked him to take the question of whether to join Hallow to prayer. Kerekes fully expected to say no and to stay in Chicago at McKinsey. He even applied to two rental properties in Chicago with his former roommates with the intent of doing so.

And yet Kerekes left his lucrative job at McKinsey “right before a promotion, to stay in a city that didn’t feel like home, with no promise of equity or title at Hallow, to pursue a calling.”

Jones and Kerekes were joined in founding Hallow in San Francisco by their friend Alessandro DiSanto, an investment banker at Goldman Sachs, who had lived in the same dorm at Notre Dame as Jones, and who had not experienced the same alienation from the faith as his co-founders. The app launched in December 2018, from $25,000 raised on Kickstarter.

The team then spent weeks pitching Hallow to “almost 100 venture capitalists,” Kerekes explained last month at Notre Dame, and yet they came up “nearly dry.” Kerekes recounted that, after their failure to get more funding for the project, “Alex truly fell to his knees and surrendered it all…. And he said, ‘If this thing goes well, we’re never going to take the credit for it.’” The next morning, Kerekes said, the group attended Mass and heard the Gospel account of Peter’s miraculous catching of numerous fish upon Christ’s command. Funding then “began materializing” over the next few days, Kerekes said. “It was as if God had been waiting for us to give it all up to Him,” he said.

Several weeks later, the three traveled to the campus of the University of Notre Dame to try to make some business connections among fellow Catholics. While there, the three attended Mass at Jones’s and DiSanto’s former dorm, Keough Hall, where I happened to be attending Mass that Sunday. The dorm’s rector explained how the three had quit their jobs at McKinsey and Goldman Sachs to found this fledgling startup. To Notre Dame students — for whom visions of McKinsey and Goldman Sachs danced in their heads — quitting a life of financial security and success to make a Catholic app for zero salary just three and a half years after graduating sounded like the definition of insanity. As it was, it was not at all clear that this venture would achieve any success. Making the situation all the more surprising was the fact that it wasn’t as though the three were religious fanatics — Jones had until recently considered himself an atheist, after all.

After the founders’ post-Mass talk, I downloaded the app. It looked much the same then as it does now, and the Rosary and Divine Mercy Chaplet that come free with the app were voiced by the same Notre Dame graduates that the app still features.

While on that Notre Dame visit, Jones also spoke at a conference about his nascent project. His comments there showed what a low bar of expectations he had for the app: “[I]f it can make a real impact in my life and the lives of my friends, it is worth it to at least try,” he said.

Less than two years after launch, Hallow celebrated its first million prayers. Then, in 2022, the app celebrated 100 million prayers. Now, of course, they have celebrated 1 billion.

Earlier this year, Jones, who is the largest individual equity holder in Hallow, announced that he would give all of his equity and ownership in the app back to the Catholic Church. “All of this was a gift given to me by the Lord and His Church,” he said. “It deserves to be returned.”

In celebrating the one billion prayers in a message released to users of the app, Jones said, “A billion prayers prayed? I don’t even know how to wrap my mind around that. Glory to God. All thanks to God.”

For his part, DiSanto quoted the gospel of Matthew: “For human beings this is impossible, but for God all things are possible.”

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