Hallow Co-Founder on Building a Mission-Driven Product and Scaling a Niche App

Erich Kerekes

Hallow, Co-Founder

Erich is the CTO & Co-Founder of Hallow, a Catholic startup focused on prayer, meditation, music, bible, and sleep. The app launched 5 years ago, but has grown rapidly and recently crossed 18 million downloads, 450 million prayers completed, 4 billion minutes in prayer, 250,000 five-star reviews, and is the #1 Catholic app in the world. Erich was raised Catholic but it wasn’t a huge part of his life, until he began exploring it more deeply in college. Even then, it was more on the theology side than a personal relationship through prayer. It wasn’t until Erich’s co-founder, Alex, first approached him about Hallow that he truly discovered the contemplative and meditative side of Catholicism and started forming a deeper personal relationship with God. Over the last several years, the Hallow team has grown with the app, raising over $105M in venture funding from some of the best investors in the world and scaling the team to 80 folks. Erich grew up in Barrington, IL. He attended the University of Notre Dame School and graduated summa cum laude with a degree in Computer Science. He worked professionally in management consulting before Hallow at McKinsey & Company, and now lives in Chicago. He’s been blessed to be named a member of Forbes 30 under 30 with his two co-founders, Alex Jones and Alessandro DiSanto.

About the host

Jonathan Ozeran

Director of Product

Jonathan is a product and operations leader, company builder, investor and advisor. He has assembled, scaled and led product, design, software engineering, hardware engineering and machine learning teams across numerous financing stages (pre-seed through Series G).