Pewbeam has secured investment from Resilience17 to build what the venture firm describes as the AI layer for church services, capital that will help the young Nigerian startup expand its team, strengthen its AI infrastructure, and reach significantly more churches. The round arrives less than a year after founder Dára Sobaloju first posted the idea publicly, and it lands at a moment when the product's early numbers already look remarkable for a company still finding its footing.

The idea traces back to Sobaloju's own experience sitting inside the exact problem he eventually set out to fix. Before founding Pewbeam, he was a Head of Church Media and had built a career in product and technology, giving him firsthand understanding of a workflow that breaks down almost every Sunday in churches worldwide: volunteers expected to follow a live service in real time, locate the right scripture or slide, and get it on screen without interrupting the flow of worship, often with technology that simply could not keep up. That frustration became the company's founding principle, captured in Sobaloju's own words that the most important words spoken in a room shouldn't be lost to the people they were spoken to.

What Pewbeam actually does is deceptively simple to describe but technically demanding to execute. The software uses AI to listen to what is being said during a live church service and automatically surface the relevant scripture or slide the moment it's needed, whether a preacher quotes a verse directly or paraphrases it entirely. That paraphrase handling matters enormously in real church settings, where pastors rarely stick to verbatim quotations, and it's part of why the product has spread the way it has.

The growth curve since launch has been steep. Pewbeam launched in March, and by June, 6,217 churches across 28 countries had run Pewbeam live in their services on a single Sunday. That free trial usage has since converted into real paying customers at a notable clip, with 509 churches across more than 20 countries now paying customers as of the Resilience17 announcement. Strikingly, that growth happened without any real marketing spend. Pewbeam has grown without spending on marketing, with the paying churches coming largely through pastors and volunteers recommending it to other churches, a distribution pattern that speaks to genuine product trust in a category where credibility is hard won.

That trust factor is something the company treats as central to its entire strategy. As the team has put it, trust in a church service is probably the hardest thing to earn in their category, a reality that has pushed reliability, alongside improving detection accuracy and speed, to the center of ongoing development. Beyond its core scripture detection feature, Pewbeam has also been expanding into adjacent tools, including Pewnote, designed for individual church members and built around AI generated sermon notes and a feature the founder calls Shazam for the Bible, alongside AI powered lyrics support for worship teams managing music during services.

With fresh capital now behind it, a rapidly growing base of paying churches spanning more than 20 countries, and a founder who built the product directly from lived experience inside church media teams, Pewbeam looks like one of the more distinctive examples of vertical AI finding real traction in a category few African startups have seriously tackled before.