Roxanne Petraeus, Co-Founder and CEO at Ethena, explains on Cheddar News' Closing Bell how her startup is making compliance training less of a burden for employees and discusses how her experience in the U.S. Army gave her the inspiration to launch Ethena.

Closing Bell

Ethena Raises $30 Million as It Aims to Make Compliance Training More Tolerable

Athena are looking to do what some may consider unthinkable, make compliance training more enjoyable startup, raising 30 million in a series of you around and saying its solution is delivering tangible results. So joining me now is Roxanne, Petraeus, co founder and Ceo at Athena, Roxanne, thanks so much for coming on the show. What makes your solution different than other options on the market? Well, thanks for having me. And I think you said it well, when you said the bar is something like tolerable, I imagine that many of your listeners are intimately familiar with the pain that is clicking through what feels like very dated 19 nineties, almost going to the D. M. V. Style compliance training. And we think that that's just a huge miss because the issues that compliance training addresses, whether it's sexual harassment, D. E. I. Code of conduct insider trading, these are all incredibly important issues and most importantly, they aren't solved. And so what companies have come to us for is a way to make that training experience, what it's actually intended to be, which is learning instead of just checking a box. That was going to be my question Roxanne, I mean, does any of the learning go out the door here, right? Obviously there are different learning styles, but we know that compliance training, even though it might not be the most fun activity, it is really important. Yeah. And for us, we really think it's not so much about fun though, of course, if we can get you to remember something, if something feels particularly impactful, that's that's ideal. But it's really about delivering value to the employees. So what we want any learner on our platform and we have about 60,000 of them. We want them to walk away from the five minutes that we ask of them saying I learned something this, you know, um made me realize that maybe a particular issue that I saw last week is actually something I should share with my compliance team. And so you know, fun is a really high bar and we certainly aim to get there. But what we're really thinking about is learning gallup showed that over 90% of employees taking traditional training actually don't really see any difference before and after. So you think that that's just a huge missed opportunity and that's that's the bar that we are aiming to jump quite high over. So here's something unique. I'm reading this now. You're a former U. S. Military combat veteran, so clearly know a thing or two about training Roxanne. How did that experience help you make this a better company. Yeah. My experience in the army was one of mostly seeing really great training. The army teaches you for example how to jump out of an airplane in three weeks through repetition through simulating the environment. Uh, teaches you know, soldiers to deploy to combat all of that. So I saw that I experienced it and I thought that it was really amazing and made me the leader that I am today. But the army also struggles with something that corporate America, you know, struggles with which is check the box training. They'll pack hundreds of soldiers into a room once a year, talk at them for an hour, make you sign, you know, at that time probably a document and say God it don't do bad stuff for a year. And not surprisingly that just doesn't work. Study after study continues to come out, showing for example that the military is still struggling with things like sexual harassment, sexual assault and the training that they're doing generally isn't working now. There are great units that are trying more innovative approaches, exactly what we had. Athena are trying to do. But yeah, just seeing the disconnect between the best training in the world that deploys America's best fighting force all over the world and then you know, just super check the box dry, Perfunctory is what inspired me to start. Athena very cool. Roxanne come back on the show, congratulations on the latest funding that's Roxanne, Petraeus, co founder and Ceo at Athena