A digital home for prayer, run by a former aerial cinematographer
Steve Gatena runs Pray.com, the world's #1 app for daily prayer and faith-based audio content. Open it and you find sermons, daily devotionals, a Bible-in-a-year plan, prayer requests from strangers, and bedtime Bible stories read aloud by celebrities. It is, in his own framing, the thing that did not exist when he went looking for it: there was no ESPN for faith. So he built one.
The company sits in Santa Monica, employs around 80 people, and has raised more than $30 million from a roster of investors more familiar with consumer tech than congregations: TPG Growth, Greylock Partners, Spark Capital, and Science Inc. Gatena's pitch is not subtle and not embarrassed. He talks about prayer as the ultimate form of self care, about loneliness as a solvable problem, and about building something his children's children will still open. He calls it a generational company and means it literally.
In 2025 the Los Angeles Times handed him its Executive Leadership Award in the Small Business Founder category. In 2020 a sitting U.S. president named him a non-partisan advisor to the White House. He keeps a quiet personal footprint online and points anyone asking to a single LinkedIn. The building is loud; the builder is not.
A willful grandmother, a welfare household, and a kid who hated church
Start with the unlikely part. Gatena was raised in Thousand Oaks by a single Jewish mother on welfare; his father is Catholic. The religious instruction in his childhood came courtesy of a stubborn grandmother who dragged an equally stubborn grandson to church. He has been blunt about how that landed: religion, in his youth, was not his thing, and he hated every minute of it. The man now running a faith company spent his early years actively resisting one.
He went to the United States Air Force Academy on an athletic and academic track, then a severe training accident ended it with an honorable discharge. Most people would file that under tragedy. Gatena walked onto the football team at USC, earned a spot, and in 2009 won a Rose Bowl under Pete Carroll. He had already collected a Great West Conference Championship at UC Davis in 2005. He finished with an MS in Entrepreneurship from the USC Marshall School of Business in 2010. The pattern - get knocked off one path, sprint onto a harder one - shows up again and again.
The video years
At 22 he started REP Interactive, a video agency. It grew into one of the fastest-growing video shops in the country, the kind of place Inc. Magazine writes up. He built YouTube channels for Fortune 500 brands - Red Bull, Marriott, the LA Dodgers - and collected more than 100 awards in video and broadcast media. In 2014 the United Nations EMPACT showcase, sponsored by Dell and Intel, named him Entrepreneur of the Year. A year later he sold his first two businesses and took over as CEO of Helinet, a global aerial surveillance and production company. By his late twenties he was running a roughly $150 million operation with a fleet of around 30 aircraft, working on films like Transformers and American Made and flying missions for intelligence agencies.
A plane goes down in the Colombian jungle
While filming American Made with Tom Cruise in Colombia, Gatena's business partner and mentor - Alan Purwin, a legendary helicopter pilot - died in a plane crash. That is the hinge of the whole story. In the grief that followed, a former Navy SEAL colleague told him to listen to an audio sermon. He did. It rewired something. Gatena became a Christian, and prayer became, for him, a daily practice rather than a childhood chore.
Out of that came a question with a commercial answer: why was there no unified, well-made digital destination for faith? He pitched the idea to Matt Potter across a table at a coffee shop. Potter stepped down from a CEO role to co-found the company. The other two co-founders complete an improbable lineup - Michael Lynn, who had been managing roughly $750 million at Merrill Lynch, and Ryan Beck, a former gang member who turned his life around through faith and taught himself to code. A banker, a coder with a record, a media guy, and an operator. Pray.com launched in 2016.
The timing turned out to be brutal and perfect. A seed round of $2 million in 2017 (Science Inc., Greylock, Spark Capital) became a $14 million Series A in 2018 (TPG Growth, Science Inc., Greylock). Then a pandemic arrived and a lot of people, alone in their homes, went looking for exactly the kind of comfort the app was built to deliver. Two years after launch it was the No. 1 app for daily prayer and faith-based audio content.
Six things that explain him faster than a resume
He won a Rose Bowl as a walk-on, not a recruited scholarship player. The hard way was the only way available.
Before faith tech, he made content for Red Bull and the LA Dodgers - and has an IMDb page from his aerial film work.
He ran ~30 aircraft as CEO of a ~$150M aerial company while most peers were still writing their first business plan.
The whole company started as a pitch over coffee. Matt Potter heard it and stepped down from a CEO seat to join.
One co-founder managed $750M at Merrill Lynch; another was a former gang member who learned to code. Same cap table.
He describes prayer as “the ultimate form of self care” - and keeps his own social media nearly silent.