Ethena

It is the second Tuesday of the quarter, and somewhere in a 200-person company, an employee opens Slack to find a five-minute lesson on what to do when a colleague overshares at a happy hour. They finish it. They do not sigh. This small, almost suspicious event is the entire thesis of Ethena.

Compliance training is the most-skipped reading in corporate life. For decades it arrived once a year as a 45-minute video with stock actors, a progress bar engineered to prevent fast-forwarding, and a final quiz that everyone passed by elimination. Ethena, a New York software company, sells the opposite: short lessons, written by people who appear to have met a human, delivered where employees already work. The companies buying it are not sentimental about training. Netflix, Zendesk, Carta and Figma are on the customer list because the old way did not work and they could measure it.

The problem they saw

A legal requirement nobody actually reads

Here is the quiet absurdity of the category: companies are legally required to train employees on harassment, ethics and security, and almost everyone involved knows the training does not change behavior. Legal teams want a completion record. Employees want it over. Vendors, for years, were happy to supply a checkbox and a certificate. The result was an entire industry optimized for the appearance of compliance rather than the substance of it.

Roxanne Bras Petraeus had watched what real training looks like. A former U.S. Army Civil Affairs officer and McKinsey alum, she had seen institutions that took preparation seriously - and then watched the corporate version, which mostly took the screenshot seriously. The gap was the opportunity. Bad training is not just boring; it quietly fails the people it is supposed to protect.

The founders' bet

An Army officer and a software engineer

In 2019, Petraeus teamed up with Anne Solmssen, a software engineer who would become Ethena's chief product officer. The two agreed on a deceptively simple premise: training could be a lot better. Not flashier - better written, better timed, and built like software rather than like a VHS tape that someone had grudgingly digitized.

Their model borrowed from how people actually learn things: microlearning. Instead of one annual marathon, employees get short, relevant lessons spaced out and pushed through Slack, email and mobile. The content is legally vetted - this is still compliance, after all - but it is written with jokes, real scenarios, and the radical assumption that the reader is an adult. The company is so committed to the bit that "humor is human" is one of its official values.

Investors found the combination convincing. Homebrew and GSV Ventures backed the seed round in 2020. Felicis led a $15.5M Series A in 2021. A year later, in June 2022, Ethena closed a $30M Series B led by Lachy Groom, with Felicis, Homebrew, Neo and a roster of angels - Jack Altman, Mathilde Collin, William Hockey, Gretchen Howard and Claire Johnson - joining in. Total funding crossed $50 million.

The product

From one course to a whole platform

Ethena launched with a single course - harassment prevention - which is the right place to start a fight with the compliance industry, because it is the course most companies legally must run and most employees most resent. It worked, and the catalog grew: diversity, equity and inclusion; code of conduct; cybersecurity awareness with a built-in phishing simulator; data privacy; anti-bribery and corruption; hiring and interviewing. Today the library spans more than 100 courses.

The platform grew underneath the content. There is an AI Training Builder that turns a company's own policy into a finished course, plus automation that handles enrollment, reminders and completion tracking so HR teams stop chasing people. There is an anonymous ethics hotline with case management for when something actually goes wrong. There is an AI policy bot that answers employees' "is this allowed?" questions on demand. The unglamorous truth of HR software is that half the value is in not having to nag - Ethena automated the nagging.

The proof

The customers, and the numbers

A nicer harassment course is a pleasant idea. A logo wall is an argument. Ethena's includes Netflix, Zendesk, Carta and Figma - companies with the resources to build training in-house and the data discipline to drop a vendor that does not perform. More than 50,000 people complete training on the platform each month, which is the metric that matters most in a category where the historical completion-with-comprehension rate hovered somewhere near zero.

The company built distribution into the product, too. It partnered with the upskilling platform Degreed to push its content into existing learning systems, and it lives natively inside Slack, where the modern workday already happens. Integrations reach into HRIS tools, Salesforce and Looker, because the people who buy compliance training do not want one more system to babysit.

The mission

Build ethical and inclusive teams

Ethena's stated reason to exist is to build ethical and inclusive teams. It is the kind of mission statement that could be wallpaper, except the company structured its product around it: training that recurs instead of training that expires, content about behavior rather than content about liability, and tools - hotlines, case management, policy bots - that exist for the moment after the lesson, when something real happens. Compliance is the wedge. Culture is the point.

The team practices the thing it sells, which in this category is rarer than it should be. Ethena is fully distributed, runs on a short list of values - play to win, embrace feedback, do our training proud, humor is human - and is led by founders who treat "the training industry is broken" as a personal grievance rather than a market summary.

Why it matters tomorrow

The next click-through

The regulatory floor keeps rising - new state harassment laws, new privacy rules, new security expectations - which means the volume of mandatory training is going up, not down. The question is whether all that training will keep being ignored or finally start to land. Ethena's wager is that AI-built, continuously updated, well-written microlearning is how a company stays both compliant and awake. If that is right, the annual training video joins the fax machine in the museum of things we used to endure.

Back to that second Tuesday. The employee closes the five-minute lesson and gets on with their day, slightly better equipped for the messy human situations that no policy PDF ever prevented. No certificate framed, no marathon survived. Just a small thing learned, on time, in the place they were already working. Multiply it by 50,000 a month, and the most-skipped reading in corporate life starts, quietly, to get read.

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