May 1, 2025 // Diocese

Hallow Co-Founder Reflects on Journey of Faith

Paula Lent

Erich Kerekes, the chief technology officer and co-founder of Hallow, a Catholic prayer and meditation app with 23 million downloads worldwide, is very quick to share anecdotal stories about how the Lord’s guiding hand has been at work in his company. From signing a contract with Jonathan Roumie before he became a household name, to having a Super Bowl commercial featuring Mark Wahlberg run just three days before the app’s Lenten Prayer Challenge was about to begin – the stories are seemingly endless. But perhaps that’s to be expected. After all, in his own words, “The whole story of Hallow is God steering the ship.” 

As part of South Bend’s IDEA Week – a South Bend-Elkhart regional partnership co-sponsored by the University of Notre Dame that draws well-known speakers to discuss innovation, entrepreneurship, and community – Kerekes returned to his alma mater to share Hallow’s founding story and offer insights on the intersection of faith and technology at Notre Dame’s Legends restaurant on Thursday, April 24. 

Being back on campus was fitting given it was there where Kerekes’ faith journey began.

“The story of Hallow is pretty intertwined with my own faith journey, as well as the faith journey of my co-founder [Alex Jones], so I’ll start there,” Kerekes told the audience. “I was born and raised Catholic, but pretty much the epitome of culturally Catholic. Mass was not a mandatory thing: If we all happened to be around Sunday evening, then we would go. … We would pray every once in a while, but it wasn’t super important to my family. … I didn’t know a lot of the core tenets of the Gospel … and it wasn’t really until I got here to Notre Dame that I started going a bit deeper into it because my girlfriend at the time was really into her faith and we ended up having some big conversations about it.” 

It was a “super fascinating” three-hour conversation with his girlfriend’s dad during his junior year that ultimately set Kerekes down an important path. Realizing Kerekes considered himself Catholic but didn’t know much about the faith, he urged Kerekes to explore and seek the truth, telling him: “What you believe is such an important thing; it’s going to have an impact on the rest of your life and all the decisions that you make. You need to explore it to the point of conviction, so you can plant your flag somewhere and say, ‘This is what I believe and why,’ because it’s going to affect everything.”

Finding that to be “a pretty compelling argument,” Kerekes set about a journey of exploration. Notre Dame proved to be fertile grounds for embarking on this quest, and Kerekes was assisted in his journey by an impactful class on C.S. Lewis and many conversations with his dorm rector, Father Ron Vierling. Yet, while his intellectual understanding of the faith was growing in strides, his personal relationship with God was not.

Upon graduating, Kerekes was hired by management consulting firm, McKinsey and Company. During his first week, the company put on a “super ostentatious retreat for the entire Chicago office,” Kerekes recalled. Renting a private island in Puerto Rico, leaders at McKinsey provided yacht transportation and wined and dined Kerekes and his peers with the finest food, wine, and cigars. In a providential moment, Kerekes got off the yacht, grabbed a cigar, and fell into conversation with fellow Notre Dame alum, Alex Jones. The two had graduated the same year but only met once before.

“We ended up getting into this big conversation, like: ‘OK, clearly, we’re in a workplace that values materialism, and it’s going to be asking us to work a lot of hours. How can we continue to make sure we’re growing spiritually during this time?’” Kerekes recalled.

Even though they never worked on a project together during the three years they were at McKinsey, the two stayed in touch, continuing that conversation. Two years later, they found themselves trying to figure out how to reorient their lives while putting in 80-hour workweeks.

“We were trying to figure out, how can we take a step back from all this and focus on what matters?” Kerekes said. At the time, meditation apps were becoming prevalent. But, while recognizing the usefulness of the apps for combatting stress by lowering heart rates, the pair ultimately found the apps lacking due to their disconnection from Christianity.

“So that led us to ask the question, ‘What is the intersection between those kinds of meditative practices and our Christian faith?’” Kerekes said. “And that’s when the whole world of contemplative prayer was opened up to us.” The two began implementing lectio divina, praying with the Bible, and the Ignatian Examen, and “it totally changed our lives,” Kerekes recalled. “It brought us much deeper into the faith that we were looking to grow. … We were actually growing in our relationship with God for the first time in a long time.”

Together with their friend, Alessandro DiSanto, an investment banker with Goldman Sachs at the time, Kerekes and Jones eventually discerned to quit their jobs to begin Hallow.

“When we first created Hallow, we really did it kind of for ourselves, because we had found these new prayer techniques, this new way of living, that made a huge difference in our lives,” Kerekes said. “And we knew that we needed a kind of guide and digital companion along with it.”

They were also inspired by the desire to bring the resources and aids they had discovered to more people. The team realized that a prayer app was a great evangelization tool – it could meet people where they were both physically (i.e., on their phones) and spiritually. And it seemed the market was ripe. Looking at data, they recognized that while many people were leaving organized religion, there was not a corresponding rise in atheism; rather, people were becoming “spiritual but not religious.” The number of people who reported praying on a weekly basis had remained consistent between 1988 and 2018. And while meditation apps were all the rage, 80 percent of people prayed regularly, while only 14 percent meditated regularly.

They began by creating a simple app that they shared with people they had connections with before going full-time with Hallow in December of 2018, raising $25,000 through Kickstarter in order to take the product further. Needing more funds, Kerekes and Jones put their business consulting hats back on and spent several weeks pitching the app to almost 100 venture capitalists. But after coming up nearly dry, they each separately took their venture to prayer.

“Alex truly fell to his knees and surrendered it all,” Kerekes shared. And he said, “If this thing goes well, we’re never going to take the credit for it.” Meanwhile, Kerekes said, “I was separately praying on my own, and I had this realization that just because I believed I was being asked to do this didn’t mean that it was going to be successful.” He was therefore able to come to peace with allowing God to do whatever He wanted with his obedience in pursuing the app, regardless of the outcome. The next morning at Mass, they heard the Gospel account of Peter’s miraculous catch of fish. And, throughout the next few days, funding began materializing for Hallow. “It was as if God had been waiting for us to give it all up to Him,” Kerekes reflected about the experience.

Hallow is now the number one prayer app in the world and boasts more than 23 million downloads and more than 900 million prayers completed through it. The team has expanded to 100 full-time employees and has raised more than $105 million in venture funding with some of the best investors from around the world.

And for the Hallow team, prayer remains the heart of it all.

“When we have big decisions to make at the company, the first thing we do is take it to prayer,” Kerekes said. “We’ll usually spread out and do our own individual prayer, find out if we think we can hear what God’s telling us … and then we come back together and we talk about it.”

In honor of IDEA Week, Kerekes also spoke on the intersection of faith and technology, noting distinctions in ways Hallow can be used for better or worse. He warned against two uses of the app: Merely listening to its content instead of actively praying and also making it the center of one’s faith life.

“There needs to be a distinction between listening and praying,” Kerekes said. “Praying the Rosary and listening to the Rosary aren’t quite the same thing. … When we have prayers on the app, the narrator was praying when they recorded it; but at the time of your listening to it, you’re the one who’s praying. And prayer is an active thing.” To encourage active participation in prayer, Hallow’s audio-guided sessions often include an invitation to enter into silent reflection, sometimes with an open-ended prompt.

Addressing the latter concern, Kerekes noted that Hallow was designed as a tool to help people grow in their personal relationship with God with the expectation that such growth would drive them to then participate more in other essential aspects of the faith, such as Mass and confession.

One of Kerekes’ favorite definitions of prayer comes from St. Thérèse of Lisieux, who said, “Prayer is a surge of the heart; it is a simple look toward heaven.” In his own life, Kerekes said he is continuously trying to orient himself toward the Lord throughout his day. “Prayer being a simple look toward heaven and spending time with God, I realized you could do that day in and day out, not just during your set-aside time for prayer,” Kerekes said.

One could say, for him, prayer is a way of life.