Back in 2022, Evangelical Dark Web reported on the rise of Gloo, a Christian tech company that uses targeted marketing for church growth while operating chat bots and other digital communications features for churches. At the time, they were described as Algorithm Christianity and the embodiment of Rick Warren in a company. Since then, they have acquired similar companies under their corporate umbrella, creating a powerhouse of Christian-branded tech companies.
In November of 2025, Gloo will be debuting an Initial Public Offering (IPO) on the NASDAQ. Already, it is unusual that a Christian company would go public, as many prefer private ownership to preserve the mission, but Gloo is different in the scale and scope of their operations: they are a tech company that is seeking to ride the wave of Artificial Intelligence while serving the nonprofit market. Where Gloo brands itself as shaping technology as a force for good, the question is not whether they are indeed good, but whether the company is a good investment.
Prospectus Analysis
When a company files an IPO, they create a prospectus that informs investors about the nature of the company while also serving to sell the IPO. In this case, Gloo will trade under its namesake and is expected to debut between $10-12, raising about $100.1 million. The IPO values the company at roughly $532 million. The stock is expected to begin trading on November 19th.
Early on, Gloo’s prospectus boasts of the market size and customer reach they presently have across their various brands. A rule of thumb on the show Shark Tank was to view with suspicion companies that tout the size of their market because the market can be broadly defined and enlarged to give the appearance of exponential growth. In this case, $245 billion in faith organization revenue is functionally all the money contributed to churches and other nonprofits, most of it goes to salaries, mortgages/leases, or missions, so it is not realistic that they will acquire a large portion of it. Moreover, of the clients they have, they include many major names. He Gets Us is one of their most lauded clients, but they serve The Chosen, YouVersion, and numerous megachurches under their various brands. Already, they boast of 140K churches in America, with many large organizations already captured, so much of their growth would come from smaller churches and NGOs, which presents a monetization roadblock. This leads directly to the Income Statement.
With major clients already captured, Gloo generated a total of $32 million through July 31st of 2025, which is adjusted for the acquisition of Midwestern. The acquisition is the difference between the Historical 2025 and the Pro Forma 2025. Even if accounted for non-cash expenses like Depreciation and Amortization, Gloo is wildly unprofitable in its early stages and would need to both acquire more clients and further monetize them. At a $44.8 million loss, they lose more in operating income than they generate in revenue, so the business has not yet achieved scale. The massive increase in General and Administrative expenses is due to the acquisitions they made that increased their employee headcount.
They need the IPO to inject one hundred million into the business while paying back other investors.
Regarding the breakdown of revenue, the Management Discussion portion of the Prospectus states the following:
We generate four types of revenue (the first three of which we account for as platform revenue): (1) subscriptions, which are primarily recurring revenue streams, (2) marketplace, which consists primarily of one-time revenue streams, (3) advertising, which are primarily re-occurring revenue streams, and (4) platform solutions, which includes both recurring and re-occurring revenue streams. For the six months ended July 31, 2025, approximately 70% of our revenue was recurring and re-occurring. Recurring revenue is derived from monthly or annual subscriptions and ongoing contracts, and accounted for approximately 44% of our total revenue for the six months ended July 31, 2025. Re-occurring revenue is derived from repeat customer purchases, most often of digital and physical products from Outreach, and accounted for more than 20% of our total revenue for the six months ended July 31, 2025.
Essentially, they have subscribers to Gloo+ and Outreach that drives their core revenue streams. From there, they can upsell other products and services across their family of brands. This scale has yet to be achieved, but the company appears to have bloated costs from all their acquisitions which their revenues cannot make up for in the near term unless they have substantial growth.
According to Lifeway, 70% of US churches have 100 or fewer weekly attendees, while the largest 9% of churches contain half of churchgoers. Given that their customer base already includes numerous megachurches and large NGO’s is in the faith nonprofit sector, they will have a difficult time selling their product to the average church.
Gloo+ Platform
Gloo’s website sells Gloo+ at $500/year for an annual subscription or $49/month. This allows users to send SMS text messages and unlimited emails as needed. It also features the New Mover Program, which sends out 50 postcards per month to newcomers to the area. The AI writing assistant promises to save time by creating automated communications and follow-up. The uniqueness of training AI models to avoid tonal mismatch and secularized language is the value proposition for Gloo+. They have additional content and community perks for subscribers.
Core weaknesses of the product would be the pricing could be too low for what it offers, while the Free version offers too much. Moreover, multicampus churches can create sub-accounts, but they would only pay more after establishing three subs, rather than charging more for the first sub-account. $500 is a drop in the bucket for a multicampus megachurch, and with a reported 57K in paying customers, they are averaging roughly $500 in revenue per customer across all brands. Megachurches are easier to sell on Gloo+, but they clearly are not monetizing these churches enough. All their promises of AI have very limited monetization when combined with their other features. Many churches have existing infrastructure to manage church communications which is either in-house or through an existing competitor.
Family of Brands
Gloo’s strategy of customer acquisition allows it to possess an ecosystem that converts their subscriptions into additional sales. The customer buys Gloo+, and they then upsell them on mailing, marketing, and other services, which they offer a discount to their subscribers. Their family of brands includes the following brands:
Visitor Reach: In July, Gloo acquired 51.2% stake VistorReach for $9 million. VisitorReach specializes in Search Engine Optimization that enlarges a church’s online presence through tailored advertisements, including SMS texting. Basically, they bring visitors to the website. Through an app, they further simplify and automate communications with visitors, like a CRM for churches. Their VisitorTap uses NFC allowing users to fill out visitor cards via their phone, providing the church with a visitor’s information for communication. Notably, this has been implemented by Elevation Church. Their platform also specializes in church-wide communications, and they offer ChurchTech, which for either $65 or $100 monthly, creates sermon clips for social media distribution. This service has not yet been integrated into Gloo+.
Outreach: Outreach is a Christian printing company that specializes in direct mailers, bulletins, Outreach Magazine, and printed banners. They are like Vistaprint, but they specialize in churches and have serviced clients like Compassion, Awana, and The Chosen. Acquired in January of 2024, roughly one third of Gloo’s revenue through July 2025 derived from Outreach (roughly $10 million). The Outreach New Mover Program (described above) is a feature integrated into the Gloo+ platform.
Most notably, they own ChurchLeaders, which is home to Ed Stetzer and has a large digital presence in the Faith genre. Church Leaders has promoted Side B theology (pro homosexuality), which would include Andy Stanley, Preston Sprinkle, and Gregory Coles. Stetzer has long been the theological brain behind the He Gets Us campaign, which was poorly received by Christians while being financially imprudent. Within American Christianity, they are theological liberals.
Sermon Central is a resource that assists pastors in writing sermons, developing illustrations, and providing outlines, similar to Docent Research Group. The Pro Version costs $17/month and can be easily integrated into Gloo+.
Apart from Outreach Magazine (print) and ChurchLeaders, the other media brands have niche audiences that should probably be consolidated or terminated. For Every Moms has 217K followers on Facebook, but virtually zero engagement across all social media sites. FaithIt has 885 followers on Facebook and similar social media engagement. Per SimilarWeb, Evangelical Dark Web outperforms For Every Moms, FaithIT, and Outreach Magazine (online) on a shoestring budget. This reflects glaring inefficiencies in their digital content, which when integrated into Gloo is unnecessarily bloating their operating expenses. This is also nearly impossible to rectify, as the content creation market is so personality-driven. Even Buzzfeed learned that audiences cared about the talent, not the outlet.
From a revenue standpoint, Outreach presents major upside to its integration into Gloo, allowing the company to monetize their customers for more than $500, even if it is at a low margin, but it came at a price of $40 million in mostly debt financing. Print media is a mature industry with not a deep moat so while profitable, they were likely paying a premium for the niche. The added upside is that they receive the customer base.
Midwestern: Midwestern is a profitable company acquired by Gloo for $31.7 million in which they own an 80% stake. Midwestern specializes in flexible talent and web development. Companies will employ Midwestern to subcontract temporary labor needs. In the six month period ending July 31st, they generated roughly $5.8 million in revenue and had an operating profit of $1.3 million. This was likely a vertical integration acquisition to streamline product development while having outside clients that will improve the income statement.
Servant.io: software and technology development that specializes in faith organizations. Notably, they created the app for the Come and See Foundation which owns The Chosen. Gloo uses Servant to develop its AI services. As of March 12, 2025, they acquired a 45.1% stake for $5.6 million.
Masterworks: Masterworks specializes in donor engagement, creative development, digital marketing and direct mailing. Essentially, they make advertisements across multiple mediums to raise money for churches. They were acquired for $11.8 million.
Barna: As of February 2025, they acquired 49% stake in Barna Holdings for $4.9 million, which produces polls and cultural analysis. Gloo+ gives a three-month trial to Barna, which is a $183/year subscription.
Carey Nieuwhof Communications Limited: Carey Nieuwhof is a milquetoast, liberal pastor who specializes in church growth and so-called leadership development. His podcast interviews big name egalitarian pastors like Rick Warren and Craig Groeschel. On February 18th, they acquired this company, which hosts a 59K subscriber YouTube channel, for $7.1 million in hopes that their special courses would bolster their content offerings included in Gloo+. Nieuwhof left the church he founded to sell leadership development, which is the church equivalent of life-coaching. This was a horrendous acquisition for Gloo and a reflection of the poor theological ecosystem the company leadership surrounds itself with.
Christianity Today: In April of 2024, Gloo acquired “certain assets of Christianity Today International for a contractual purchase price of $5,500,000.” In 2025, they are paying Christianity Today $326K for advertisements.
While it appears that they contracted over $100 million in acquisitions, they will mostly be through this means of debt-equity rather than cash purchases. On the balance sheet, the price tags for these acquisitions will appear as Mezzanine Equity, which is high risk debt that bears a higher interest rate that can be converted into equity. Gloo reports $360 million in Mezzanine Equity.
The mass-acquisition strategy for Gloo reflects great ambition and has the potential for integration of digital and print media outreach under a single brand. There is a decent value proposition for churches within the platform, but some of the excessive purchases served to dilute shareholders as they were financed through stock. Being a Canadian, Carey Nieuwhof is hardly a major name in the Bible Belt, but his business being acquired at a price equivalent to half their quarterly revenue is a ridiculous waste by management. Management will likely have to cut costs to appease shareholders, which means a necessary reduction in their workforce.
Conclusion
As a company, Gloo is very much Algorithm Christianity under a corporate America banner that owns various brands of lukewarm Christianity. Many Christians are probably unaware of the brands they own, particularly those of Outreach and ChurchLeaders falling under the Gloo umbrella. Admittedly, their customers range across the spectrum but the company is very much seeker sensitivity and egalitarian theology. These churches might know how to put butts in seats but are contemporary consumerism masquerading as the Church. The Gloo+ product is both interesting and useful for large churches, though the use of AI chatbots and church-issued spam texts could easily draw scrutiny.
As an investment, management has bloated the company through an aggressive acquisition strategy, which, while core brands like Outreach and VisitReach offer easy integration, other acquisitions are questionable purchases that negatively impact shareholders. Doubtless, they will appeal to the AI trend that is hot on the street, but marketing and communications are the core to this company, not artificial intelligence. Nevertheless, they have yet to properly integrate their entire family of brands. If anything, their product requires a Premium tier to bundle their other subscriptions into the Gloo platform to effectively monetize their Megachurch customers. Further product innovation provides substantial upside, but they must also demonstrate an ability to streamline costs. They have the ingredients to be a Christian-Tech powerhouse, but do they have the acumen to see its fruition? Such remains to be seen.
One Response
Off topic, but Stone Choir retired the podcast. In three years they became more mainstream than anyone would have imagined.