Atheni AI Raises £350K to Solve the Real AI Problem: Nobody Knows How to Use It

Atheni AI's approach is not to build another AI model. Instead, the company focuses on behaviour change. Its platform acts as a "digital coach" that embeds role-specific, personalised guidance directly into everyday workflows. It is vendor-agnostic, meaning it works with ChatGPT, Claude, Copilot, and other tools without locking users into a single ecosystem . The goal is to move employees beyond basic summarisation and email drafting toward genuinely new, higher-value work.

Why Traditional Training Is 'One Piano Lesson, Expecting a Concerto'

Ballard argues that conventional corporate training fails for three interconnected reasons:

1. Training is generic and outdated immediately. "Training is too generic and out of date the moment it goes live," Ballard said in a LinkedIn post . In a podcast interview, she noted that traditional training videos are made once and then quickly become irrelevant because AI tools change so fast .

2. Volume of use is not the same as capability. Companies measure frequency — how many hours employees spend in an AI tool — and mistake that for progress. Ballard contrasts this with a focus on depth: "Someone using AI four hours a day might be doing trivial tasks, while 20 minutes of high-level work can deliver far more value" .

3. One-off sessions don't change behaviour. "They do a workshop and think the job's done. One piano lesson and they expect a concerto," Ballard notes . The deeper issue is that AI is fundamentally different from prior workplace technologies. It has "no fixed edges" — instead of a clear task and workflow, it offers infinite possibility. Most people default to the familiar, low-value tasks they already know .

Atheni's alternative is continuous, tailored coaching that measures whether an employee can do genuinely new work, not just how often they click .

The Fundraising Challenge: A 'Credibility Gap' for Female Founders

Ballard and her co-founder, Mackenzie Howe, spent two years building Atheni's methodology through direct consulting with clients before they ever wrote a line of platform code . Ballard had spent three decades in corporate communications and sold her PR agency. Howe was an institutional investment consultant. Neither fit the typical AI founder mould that investors expect.

"We came from the people side, not the tech side," Ballard said, describing the challenge of being taken seriously despite their combined decades of experience .

The bias they faced reflects a systemic problem. A 2025 UK House of Commons report found that female-only founding teams received just 2% of equity investment in 2024, while all-male teams captured over 80% of capital . The pattern is even more stark in AI specifically: between 2012 and 2022, all-male teams raised 80% of total VC capital in AI, while all-female teams raised a mere 0.3% .

Ballard herself highlighted on LinkedIn that in 2025, just 1.75% of UK equity investment went to all-female founding teams .

Despite the headwinds, Atheni AI closed a £350,000 pre-seed round in May 2026. The round was backed by angel investors including serial entrepreneur Alex Chesterman OBE (founder of Zoopla, Cazoo, and LoveFilm) and received support from Innovate UK . Chesterman was an early believer, telling the founders that they had "spotted two years ago what's only now becoming obvious" . The round was relatively modest — reflecting the uphill battle female founders still face even with strong customer traction and a clear market gap.