48 The Times Magazined Beccle and Henry Costa are
the creators of a wellbeing app
called Glorify, which is a bit like
Headspace, only for Christians.
Download it, create an account
and, each time you open it on
your phone, you can listen to bite-
sized Bible passages. Or guided
meditation sessions inspired by
hymns. Or encouraging homilies
read by a smiling narrator to soothing music.
One function lets you create digital prayers,
which you can then send to people in your
contacts. All this content is strictly non-
denominational – in theory, everyone from a
Roman Catholic to a Seventh-day Adventist
should be able to enjoy it equally – and it
is free. Unless you want to unlock more
meditations, more declarations. In which case
the premium version costs £6.99 a month.
Launched two years ago, Glorify has
attracted more than 2.5 million users
worldwide and is now on the verge of serious
global success. It was recently valued at
£188 million. In some ways, this is not very
surprising. In Beccle it has at the helm
a highly gifted young tech savant, a 22-year-
old who was developing apps as a teenager,
skipping school and commuting into London
from Oxford to pursue his grand, Zuckerberg-
ish ambitions. Costa, 34, by contrast, is a
balancing older head with experience in
the world of business and finance. They are
attracting major investment. In December,
they raised £30 million. Some of this came
from venture capital firms including
Andreessen Horowitz, an early investor in
companies that would go on to become tech
giants such as Facebook and Airbnb.
Glorify has also won financial backing from
James Corden, singers Michael Bublé and
Jason Derulo and Kardashians matriarch Kris
Jenner, who all believe that Beccle and Costa
have found a gap in the market for something
that millions – maybe billions – of people
desperately want. In a world of superficial
connection, fostered by social media, Glorify
is offering something real and important; to
many, the most important thing that there
could possibly be. “It’s about being able
to connect with God,” says Costa. “And to
improve that connection on a daily basis.”
I meet Costa and Beccle at the Glorify
offices in Vauxhall, central London. We go
to a conference room and the two of them sit
across the table from me. Beccle has big blue
eyes that widen whenever he starts to enthuse
about ideas, trends and potential new features
for Glorify. Costa is perhaps a little more
businesslike. “We’re very different people,” he
says, looking at his cofounder with a smile.
“The inside of Ed’s head is a pretty beautiful
place. I kind of view it as being like a million
apps. Because he has this incredible way offinding the solutions to problems and then
putting them into product form.”
Unlike Beccle, who admits to being only
a sporadic church-goer, Costa was raised
in a Christian family. His father, a successful
financier, was a church warden, and Costa
would spend holidays on church camps. “That
was part of my upbringing,” he says.
Costa enjoyed success early in his career,
helping to found a financial technology
company but, in his heart, he had always
wanted to do something that combined his
faith with his business acumen. Only, this
seemed an incredibly unlikely possibility.
Christianity was a very hard sell, particularly
to his millennial peers. “There was what we
called the ‘ABC generation’: Anything But
Christian. You could be any other religion,
any other way of life. You just couldn’t be
Christian. It had a real stigma.”
And this is what makes Glorify particularly
interesting. Until very recently, blue chip
Silicon Valley venture capital firms were not
investing millions into Christian start-ups.
A-list celebrities were not evangelising for
them. In a short space of time, a cultural
change has been taking place. “We noticed it
in the metadata and the microsignals,” says
Costa. “That things are shifting. A lot more
people are willing to talk about their faith.
And a lot more people are returning to a faith
that they’ve grown up with.”
The reasons for this apparent shift are
varied and nuanced. And while Beccle and
Costa will spend a good chunk of our time
together analysing them, for the time being it
probably helps to keep in mind that the planet
has been through two years of a pandemic
and all the death and uncertainty that have
come with it. This, says Beccle, has prompted
high levels of anxiety and sleeplessness as
well as “a greater search for meaning” that is
inspiring people to look beyond “wellness” or
“mindfulness” for something... more.
Beccle and Costa already have 2.5 million
users. There are about 2.5 billion Christians
worldwide. The question now is how many
more people – how many more souls – can
they attract? If there’s something that faith
and good technology share, it’s scalability.
Beccle smiles and his eyes widen. “We’re going
to build,” he says, “something gigantic.”The two men met five years ago, when Beccle
was 17. He had spent the first nine years of his
life in Hong Kong, where his mother was a
fund manager and his father worked in
advertising. After relocating to Oxford, Beccle
went to St Edward’s, a public school. At the
age of 13, however, he was diagnosed with
type 1 diabetes, which caused him to miss a
good deal of school. He found himself at home
imagining possible business plans. Even when
he was at school his mind would wander,particularly during chapel. “You had to go to
chapel at school three, four, five times a week,”
he says. “You weren’t allowed your phone.
And I remember it being the greatest place for
me to sit and think of all sorts of problems
and how I wanted to approach them.”
He began developing apps. At 17, he
launched one that matched parents with
nearby private tutors for their children. He
licensed it to a Chinese company, at which
point he had no doubt that this was what he
wanted to do with his life. “I thought it was
fun, just tinkering around, trying to build lots
of different stuff.” To prevent him dropping
out all together, he cut a deal with his school
that would allow him to spend half the week
working on his businesses, which would go
on to include apps for sales management, HR
departments and the aviation industry. He was
conscious of his reputation as a wunderkind
and, on some level, relished it. “I wanted to
make this big impact on the world.”
He would commute into London and spent
long hours at a coworking space. He became
friendly with the owner. Something about the
ambitious teenager made the proprietor get
in touch with his acquaintance Costa. “He
said, ‘There’s this guy I think you should meet.
He arrives when everyone else is leaving and
leaves when everyone else arrives,’ ” says
Costa. “Ed was completely nocturnal at this
point. And so, during the small overlap when
we were both awake, we had a meeting.”
It was at this meeting that Beccle pitched
a business idea to Costa and told him, with
absolute certainty, that they were going to beE
‘I talked to Kris and Kim and
they loved what we were
doing – I didn’t know that
the Kardashians are religious’
TOM JACKSON, GETTY IMAGES