It did not start as a company. It started as a gift.
célula.in is a management app for churches that believe in the cell vision. It was born in 2011, at Igreja Batista Central de Belo Horizonte, out of the frustration of two of its members: Fabrício Tavares and André Gonzaga.
They had the idea of building the tool, and they had the backing of pastor Roberto Bottrel, who led the youth network. In August 2014, the church started using the app.
At the church's annual cell group conference, other churches saw the tool working and wanted the same. It was after that moment that Célula Software was born and that Alexander joined the team.
Alexander went to work in the cell group office at Igreja Batista Central de Belo Horizonte when the church was already past 500 cell groups. Spreadsheets were gone, but the system in place dated from the early 2000s.
The problem was not the ugly screen. It was what that system forced people to do.
Almost everything that happened organically in the small group stopped at the staff's working hours.
Multiplying a cell group, moving a coaching group, recovering a password, closing a group: it all ran into trouble or depended on the church office.
A cell-group church is always in motion. Someone makes a decision for Christ on a Thursday night, a group grows and needs to multiply, a participant starts missing meetings and someone needs to notice.
When the church's system cannot keep that pace, it stops helping and starts holding the church back.
At the other end, André came in as a cell group leader, opened the system to enter the week's attendance and could not believe what he saw. He set up a conversation with pastor Roberto Bottrel, who led the network. “I work in this field. Nothing fairer than trying to help.”
Fabrício arrived at the same place by another road. He also led a cell group, and had also got stuck in the same system. He nudged André in the middle of a service and asked whether he wanted to sit down and build a new tool to give the church as a gift.
André had already been talking to Roberto for three weeks. People from the same church, with similar ideas, but the ends were still loose.
In 2011, at a meeting Fabrício places in September, André and Fabrício sat down in Roberto's pastoral office. On the other side of the same problem was the church office, already dreaming of the same thing.
Three points of view that rarely meet came together there: the administrative side, which carried the process by hand, the pastoral side, which wanted to see the cell groups it led, and the cell group leadership, which wanted to record the life of the group without depending on anyone.
“A cord of three strands is not quickly broken” (Ecclesiastes 4:12, NIV).
For more than a year the project had no name. It turned up in a conversation in Roberto's room: célula.in, the idea of being in célula, inside the cell group. The domain was registered in November 2012, and development began in early 2013, at night and on weekends. In August 2014, the church started using it.
The idea was never to sell. It was to hand the tool over to the church and open the source, so that any church could use and improve what had been built.
The references were open source systems, with people spread out, each contributing a piece, and a good product coming out of it.
One detail brought the plan down.
Software that gets no maintenance dies, or worse, locks in whoever depends on it. And open source only solves the problem for those who have someone able to look after the code.
Most churches in Brazil do not have, and will not have, a team of developers. That is not the church's mission.
That is when the sums changed. If the goal was to reach real churches, handing over what we had built was not enough. Someone had to keep it standing, year after year, fixing, improving and answering.
Célula Software was born for that, in February 2015, six months after the church started using the app.
The commercial side came from what churches needed, not from the company's ambition.
The church does not get left stranded. That was the deal at the start and it still is.
If something unexpected happens, Célula Software will seek a solution so that no church is left without the tool that helps it care for people even better.
Two things that are already true today:
That is why almost everything in célula.in happens in the hands of the people living it.
The leader plans the multiplication, the supervisor approves it, and nobody has to wait until Monday for the church structure to catch up with what has already happened in practice.
When the church office stops typing, it goes back to serving people. That was always the point. It is not about a smaller team, it is about giving the team back to the work only people can do.
Reports, targets and indicators are useful, and célula.in has all of them. What changes everything is the reason.
Attendance falling is not a bad number on a dashboard, it is someone who stopped showing up and perhaps nobody has noticed yet.
Measuring in order to care is pastoral. Measuring in order to demand is something else.
No bots, no artificial intelligence, no canned replies.
Whoever reads your message and whoever answers it is a person who knows the app and knows the routine of a cell-group church.
And it holds for everyone who opens célula.in, on any plan. Leader, supervisor, pastor or church office, nobody needs a middleman to ask a question or to solve a problem at the moment it turns up.
célula.in is only one piece contributing to the growth of the church. People are cared for by people. The app just clears out of the way whatever gets in the way of that care.
célula.in was born from three sides talking to each other, and it stays that way.
Most of what goes into the app starts in a support conversation, in a supervisor's request, in a difficulty a leader reported. We listen, group what repeats and set priorities.
When an idea does not make it in, we say it does not, and we explain why. An honest no is worth more than a yes that never arrives.
Every change is published in our changelog, in plain language and without jargon, because the church has a right to know what changed in the app it trusts with the life of its groups.
A cell-group church changes. The app changes with it.
Fabrício Tavares. Came from statistics and data visualization. He also led a cell group, and he was the one who proposed, in the middle of a service, sitting down and building something for the church.
André Gonzaga. Trained in computer science. He was leading a cell group when he opened the old system and decided it could be done better. He started the first conversation, the one everything came from.
Alexander Reis. He came later, from the cell group office at Igreja Batista Central de Belo Horizonte, where he lived through nearly every process that makes a large cell-group church work. He is the one who brings to the table what churches need.
None of the three came to this from the outside. All of them led a cell group, walked new believers through assimilation, put an event together against the clock, and have solved an office problem at the last minute. That is why we speak the same language as the people who use célula.in.
None of this would have happened without pastor Roberto Bottrel.
He never had any tie to the company. He had something rarer: he dreamed along with us. He was the one who opened his office door, who connected ends that did not know each other, who took the idea to the other pastors and to the church's technical team, and who carried the project when it had neither a name nor a single line of code.
In every conversation about how the project was going, he said the same thing, with the same eagerness: that something genuinely good for the church would come out of it.
Roberto passed away in December 2023. célula.in exists because he believed first.
We love the church, and we love the cell-group church.
That is how this started, and that is how we carry on. Every new feature is born from a real church, with a real leader trying to care for someone.
You can always count on us.
Updated on August 20, 2026