Alexander Debelov

Alexander Debelov is a Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree, serial technology entrepreneur, and the marketing force behind The Prayer: Rise with Jesus — the #1 Amazon Best Seller and three-time international book award winner he co-authored with Stefania Leão. He is best known in tech as the founder of Virool, the first native video advertising platform, which he started at twenty-three and grew to a $120M valuation, pioneering an entire ad format that reshaped how brands tell stories online.

After Virool, Alex went on to build Go X, a B2B micro-mobility company that won a Fast Company Innovation Award and deployed shared electric vehicles across U.S. campuses and cities, and Kairos, his venture studio for building ambitious technology and brand companies. Across more than a decade of building, he has been profiled across major business press as one of the defining young founders of the native-video era — but the work he is proudest of today is the quietest he has ever done.

Alex's role on The Prayer is the one he brings from his decade as an operator: he is the book's publisher, marketer, and editor. He took Stefania's original Portuguese manuscript and shaped it into a finished book — restructuring chapters, writing several of the final chapters himself, and leading the entire visual identity of the project from cover to typography to the original watercolor illustrations he painted by hand. He then built the marketing engine that carried The Prayer from a single English title to a global devotional published in six languages — English, Portuguese, Italian, French, Spanish, and Russian — driving it to #1 Amazon Best Seller in both English and Portuguese, with the Italian, French, and Spanish editions now climbing toward the same.

He recruited and directed translators in five languages, commissioned region-specific cover art for each market (from Cristo Redentor over Rio for the Brazilian edition to Venice at dawn for the Italian), and architected the awards strategy that won the book three international honors. The Russian edition — Молитва — is one he is personally guiding, in tribute to his family's heritage.

Alex is active across digital channels at debelov.com, on LinkedIn, on X as @adebelov1, and on TikTok as @humanvortex, where he shares notes from his work, his faith, and his watercolor practice.

What unites the founder and the publisher is the same impulse: building things by hand, then making sure they reach the people who need them. Whether he is shipping a product, raising a round, or launching a devotional into its sixth language, Alex approaches the work as a craft and a calling. He sees The Prayer as the project that finally married the entrepreneur and the artist in him — a book made the way good companies are made: slowly, with care, and for the reader rather than the writer.