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.

On The Prayer, Alex is co-author, publisher, and marketing lead. He took Stefania Leao's original Portuguese manuscript and shaped it into a finished book, restructuring the chapters, writing 25 pages of the hardcover edition himself, and leading the visual identity of the project from cover to typography to the thirty illustrations he created. He then built the marketing engine that carried The Prayer from a single English title to a devotional published in six languages — English, Portuguese, Italian, French, Spanish, and Russian — reaching #1 Amazon Best Seller in English, Portuguese, and Italian, with the remaining editions climbing.

He designed the awards strategy that won the book three international honors, and drove the campaign that brought it to readers in seven languages, including a Chichewa edition that reached churches in Malawi after a pastor there found the book through the press coverage and Alex shipped copies to him directly. The Russian edition, Молитва, he is guiding personally, in tribute to his family's heritage.

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