A note on our recent fundraising

  • Photo of Roxanne Petraeus
    Roxanne Petraeus

Since launching in February 2020, we’ve had one goal in mind: transform traditional compliance training into an impactful experience that builds inclusive workplaces. We began with harassment prevention training and now, with a year of tremendous growth behind us, we’re more primed than ever to give employees the tools they need to make the right decisions.

We’ve expanded beyond harassment prevention training to the broader ethical and compliance landscape, providing new training including Code of Conduct, Anti-Bribery, and other important topics. This growth was fueled by our latest $2M seed extension funding led by GSV.

The past year has been a year of serious reflection for everyone, everywhere. The systems that we live and work in aren’t working, at least not for all of us. Organizations are realizing that the check-the-box, we’re-only-doing-this-to-cover-our-tracks approach to training is broken—training has to actually be effective to change behavior and prevent bad behavior from happening in the first place.

That’s where Ethena steps in, with a research-backed approach to building training that makes difficult conversations not only more common, but actionable. (And, dare we say, fun?)

As one of the very few women-led venture-backed companies out there, we feel it’s important to demonstrate our progress and share our vision. Here are some of our major milestones that led us to this next round of funding:

  1. Traction & retention: From scaling businesses to global enterprise, we’re proud to have over 20,000 learners training with Ethena.
  2. Expanding our product: Our enterprise clients guided us to new and exciting training courses including Code of Conduct, Anti-Bribery, and Anti-Money Laundering. For a deeper dive into where we plan to go, check out our latest TechCrunch feature.
  3. Building a team for growth: Our team has been rapidly growing to meet the diverse needs of our rising learner base, and as our product and customer base grow together, we’re excited to welcome Leonard Shen to our advisory team. As former Chief Compliance Officer of AmEx, Visa, and PayPal, he’ll play a critical role in steadying our course for 2021 and onward.

“[Ethena] is expanding its offering from anti-sexual harassment training to a wide variety of training courses focused on compliance, from financial compliance to code of conduct measures. The shift wasn’t because of a lack of interest from customers, the co-founder said, but instead demand from existing enterprise customers to offer more than just a singular topic.” - TechCrunch

At Ethena, we’re creating the future of compliance training. Our goal is to give employees the tools and learning experiences to help them take action. This additional funding allows us to keep building, iterating, and learning; we’re so grateful to our customers, investors, and advisors for our past year, and we’re looking forward to what’s next.

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