(RNS) — Serial entrepreneur Scott Beck believes he has a mission to help churches and Christian ministries spread God's work and help others. After years of financial losses, he believes his investment in building a faith-based tech company will soon pay off.
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The Gloo booth at the National Religious Broadcasters convention in February 2026, in Nashville, Tenn. (RNS photo/Bob Smietana)
Bob Smietana
July 9, 2026
RNS
(RNS) — Scott Beck has long hoped the faith-based tech company he founded in 2013 would help churches and other Christian groups harness technology to spread God’s word and help save the world.
More than $400 million in losses and 13 years later, that dream faces a critical juncture.
Leaders at Gloo Holdings Inc. hope a stock sale on Friday (July 10) will bring in more than $20 million to the faith-based company to help keep it going and make it a kind of one-stop shop for outsourcing church services.
But a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission ahead of a proposed stock offering for Gloo Holdings Inc. shows the company, headquartered in Boulder, Colorado, faces significant challenges, having lost more than $240 million in fiscal years 2024 and 2025. The company has also reported a total deficit of $438 million since its founding in 2013, as of last summer.
Gloo’s “recurring operating losses, negative cash flows, limited liquid resources and dependence on external financing,” have left its future in doubt, according to the filing.
“Because it is not possible at this time to predict the outcome of future equity placements or additional borrowings, substantial doubt remains regarding our ability to continue as a going concern during the following year,” according to the SEC filing.
(RNS) — Scott Beck has long hoped the faith-based tech company he founded in 2013 would help churches and other Christian groups harness technology to spread God’s word and help save the world.
More than $400 million in losses and 13 years later, that dream faces a critical juncture.
Leaders at Gloo Holdings Inc. hope a stock sale on Friday (July 10) will bring in more than $20 million to the faith-based company to help keep it going and make it a kind of one-stop shop for outsourcing church services.
But a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission ahead of a proposed stock offering for Gloo Holdings Inc. shows the company, headquartered in Boulder, Colorado, faces significant challenges, having lost more than $240 million in fiscal years 2024 and 2025. The company has also reported a total deficit of $438 million since its founding in 2013, as of last summer.
Gloo’s “recurring operating losses, negative cash flows, limited liquid resources and dependence on external financing,” have left its future in doubt, according to the filing.
“Because it is not possible at this time to predict the outcome of future equity placements or additional borrowings, substantial doubt remains regarding our ability to continue as a going concern during the following year,” according to the SEC filing.
The Gloo website. (Screen grab)
Gloo’s leaders, including CEO Beck, a former Blockbuster and Boston Market executive, and Pat Gelsinger, former Intel CEO and Gloo’s executive chair and head of technology, hope to sell seven million shares in the upcoming stock offering. Company leaders have offered to buy $6 million in stock, according to a news release. As of April, the company had $33 million in cash, while continuing to run deficits.
But Beck told RNS in an interview earlier this year that the company has finally reached critical mass. About 140,000 churches and ministry leaders are signed up for its services, which include technology, marketing and fundraising products. It has also signed contracts to provide tech services and access to what he called “network capability providers” for major Christian nonprofits like Wycliffe Bible Translators and the American Bible Society.
“We have one side paying us millions of dollars a year,” he said. “We have the other side paying us, you know, thousands a year. And those two sides have now really exploded in terms of their growth.”
The company’s leaders predict the company will turn a profit by the end of 2026. During the first quarter, Gloo brought in $41.5 million — more than twice the revenue in the first quarter of 2025 — and the company’s leaders have predicted revenue will top $195 million this year. While the company still lost $17 million in the first quarter of 2026, that is an improvement from the first quarter of 2025, when the company lost $27 million.
The question is whether other investors still have faith in Gloo’s vision for the future.
It’s not clear if Wall Street believes in Gloo. The company’s stock dropped to under $4 a share in early July, down from a high of $9.50 in November 2025, when the company went public. The new shares in Friday’s offering will sell for $3.25.
Paul Hawkinson, associate professor of strategy and finance at North Park University in Chicago and a former investment banker, said it’s not unusual for early-stage companies to lose money for years. And the financial disclosures Gloo made in its recent filing are also common in stock offerings so that potential investors understand the risk of investing, he said. The challenge facing Gloo is whether or not investors still believe the company can become profitable.
“It is indeed a real risk — and if investors lose confidence, then they may well run out of capital,” Hawkinson told RNS in an email.
Hawkinson said Gloo is relatively small for a public company, which brings challenges. The company, he said, seems to believe that its investments in technology and in buying other companies that serve churches will lead to profitability. “But as a small public company whose investor base is highly concentrated, they’ve had to rely on consistently raising external capital (equity and debt) to fund this vision,” Hawkinson said in an email. “To date, they’ve not been able to translate that strategy into core operating cash flow, and until they do, the stock will likely remain depressed.”
He wondered if Gloo might be better as a private company.
“It is an interesting business model, but also complex as they seem to be integrating many platforms and services in the faith-based space,” he said. “They also face enormous competition from many startup/existing AI-enabled platforms.”
Scott Beck. (Courtesy photo)
Gloo is the latest venture for Beck, an investor with a knack for helping build iconic franchises — Blockbuster, Boston Market, Einstein Bros. Bagels and Angi — and a history of involvement with Christian nonprofits. He’s long hoped to give churches and other faith-based groups access to the technology and economies of scale that corporations have long used. That way, they could spend more time on their ministries and less time on the mundane back-office support needed to run a nonprofit, he said.
Beck said churches are often disconnected from each other. While they serve the same God, they don’t have the same software or back-office tech from which large corporations take advantage. But making that dream a reality has been difficult for Beck, who has invested about $150 million in the project.
“People would say, ‘Well, you can’t get churches on a common platform. You can’t get them to cooperate on anything,’” Beck told Religion News Service in an interview during the National Religious Broadcasters convention earlier this year in Nashville.
Beck started working as a teenager at Waste Management Inc., the garbage hauling company his father co-founded, and later was an early investor in major franchises. He said he’s seen the power of what he called the “collective might” of organizations that work together.
Along with providing back-office information technology services, Gloo has also bought up a host of church service providers in recent years, including the church marketing company Masterworks, research outfit Barna Group, Outreach Inc., which publishes a magazine and provides marketing services, and a podcast run by Canadian pastor and leadership guru Carey Nieuwhof. It also acquired Westfall Group Inc., a church donor support company, and has partnerships with the popular Bible app YouVersion, the Human Flourishing Program at Harvard University, and InterVarsity, an evangelical campus ministry.
The company also runs Gloo Media Network to provide marketing for churches and has developed its own Gloo AI Studio.
Its strategy has started to pay off over the past year.
The company has signed contracts with 25 nonprofits that pay at least a million dollars a year for IT services, according to the SEC filing. And more than 140,000 churches and ministry leaders use at least some of Gloo’s other products, such as a texting service to follow up with visitors, an artificial intelligence product that creates shareable video clips of sermons, Barna research and Gloo Insights demographic data.
Churches can also sign up for both free and subscription Gloo plans, with access to resources for sermons, media clips from the hit Jesus show “The Chosen” and data from Barna. Gloo also offers churches help with fundraising and marketing.
Gloo leaders believe that the more churches get used to using Gloo’s products, the more services they will buy. “These flywheels are turning,” Beck said.
Though Gloo has been around for more than a decade, its efforts have shifted over time, and for some stretches, it was unclear what exactly the company did. In its early years, it provided data mining and marketing for churches, and worked closely with He Gets Us, a massive pro-Jesus marketing campaign. In recent years, company leaders have often spoken about making AI a “force for good.” Gloo has created AI models shaped by Christian values, and has recruited former NASA staffers and other experts to build its AI platform.
The shift to providing IT services to churches — and buying companies that provide products and services to churches — appears to have finally gotten Gloo closer toward a sustainable business model.
Signs of Gloo were everywhere at the annual gathering of the National Religious Broadcasters at the Gaylord Opryland Resort and Convention Center in Nashville in mid-February. The opening session of the convention kicked off with a video ad for the company — just ahead of a video greeting from President Donald Trump — and a display for the company occupied prime real estate in the mammoth exhibit hall.
“Powering your reach,” read a stand-up Gloo ad in one of the convention center’s lobbies. “Scale your reach with targeted marketing and donor engagement solutions.”
That message of scaling reach with tech was also part of the key pitch for Rebecca Kelly, who was brought on last September as Gloo’s chief growth officer after a career at Western Union financial services. The company, she told RNS, has two audiences. The first is churches and pastors, and the second is large Christian ministries and nonprofits.
“How do we serve those two audiences? By powering their tech and by powering their reach,” she said.
Kelly’s pitch, which was repeated by company executives during a series of interviews at the NRB convention, can be boiled down like this: Leaders of churches are called to focus on ministry, not technology and back-office operations like bookkeeping or other infrastructure. Using AI and its expertise with new technology, Gloo can take on those logistics so that churches can focus on ministry.
For Kelly, coming to Gloo felt as much a calling as a job opportunity. She said she took a year off to have a baby and was planning to shift into the ministry rather than return to the corporate world. Then Gloo came calling.
Like other Gloo staffers, Kelly said she knows that technologies like AI are reshaping the world around us and believes Christians should have an active role in determining how those technologies are used. She hopes Gloo can help churches and other Christian groups do God’s work in the world.
“I’ve never in my career felt the Lord so near to the work I’m doing every day,” she said. “It’s one of the most special moments of my career ever.”
Scott Evans, longtime CEO of Outreach Inc., the church marketing and media company, said joining forces with Gloo was a way to expand the mission of his company, which Gloo bought in 2024. Evans got his start in church marketing when he moved to San Diego to help start a church in the early 1990s. Evans, who had worked in marketing, was the church’s associate pastor.
“The senior pastor said, ‘Scott, you’re the guy with a marketing degree. It’s your job to make sure somebody shows up on grand opening Sunday,’” said Evans. “It’s like, no pressure. And so I got to help do the church marketing for our little church, and it grew.”
That marketing eventually turned into Outreach Inc. Evans said he had been thinking and praying about the future when Beck called him about buying the company. It was a way to expand what Outreach was already doing and to help more churches.
For example, he said, Outreach has a site called Sermon Central, where an AI tool can help churches create video clips of a sermon, post them online and then create a small group study guide — tasks most pastors don’t have time to do. “In that case, AI is making their sermon more efficient and more effective,” Evans said.
Brad Hill, the chief partner success officer at Gloo, said the organization hopes to identify other companies like Outreach that are already helping churches and expand their reach. The hope is to set up what he called a “permanent, redemptive engine.”
“Once we invest in or acquire somebody, my role is to make sure we’re helping them grow,” he said. “And we’ve done that now more than a dozen times.”
According to Gloo’s SEC filings, those acquisitions brought in 56% of the company’s revenue in 2025.
For Beck, starting the company has been an act of faith. He said about 13 years ago, he began worrying that while technology was racing ahead, churches were being left behind. He and his wife, Theresa, decided to come up with a solution and launched Gloo.
“Theresa and I just put all of our eggs in one basket and put all of our cards on the table and put our relationships and our network and our capital (in) to be able to help this ecosystem get connected,” he said.
He told RNS that after years of start-up struggles, the company is on the right track. The road has not been easy.
Earlier this year, Gloo laid off staff, while Beck and Gelsinger cut their salaries to $1, in hopes of helping the company become profitable by the end of the year.
Beck said the company will continue to cut costs and that God has guided them along the way.
“God gave me a conviction,” he said. “That was, in order for the church to get the benefit of the next generation of technologies, it’s got to be connected. Go, connect the church. Now, that’s a really big thought, and that’s the journey that we’ve been on.”
