- Female-founded Atheni raises £350K backed by angel investors including Alex Chesterman OBE and support from Innovate UK
- The startup has achieved AI adoption rates above 90% within 90 days across education, manufacturing, financial services, and private equity
- Atheni is building a platform that helps organisations move beyond AI access to measurable AI capability and business impact
The AI industry has spent the past three years obsessed with building bigger models, faster chips, and more powerful tools. Yet a growing body of evidence suggests the real challenge is no longer access to AI, but knowing how to use it effectively.
UK startup Atheni believes that gap could become one of the most expensive problems facing modern businesses. The female-founded AI adoption company has raised £350K to scale its methodology for helping organisations use AI more effectively.
The round is backed by angel investors including Alex Chesterman OBE, founder of Zoopla and Cazoo, alongside support from Innovate UK.
The funding will support the rollout of the Atheni Accelerator platform and prepare the company for a larger fundraising round later this year.
From client work to scalable platform
Atheni did not begin as a software company. Founded in 2023 by Mackenzie Howe and Louise Ballard, Atheni is developing a browser-based platform designed to sit alongside tools such as ChatGPT, Claude, and Copilot, providing personalised guidance that helps employees improve decision-making, judgement, and outcomes rather than simply generating more content.
Before building a platform, Howe and Ballard spent two years working directly with organisations to understand why AI adoption efforts were failing despite widespread investment in tools and training.
Their research uncovered a consistent problem: employees often had access to AI but lacked the confidence, capability, or context to use it effectively in their day-to-day roles.
Rather than relying on one-off workshops or generic training programmes, the founders developed a methodology focused on embedding AI guidance directly into everyday work.
Over the past two years, Atheni has tested that approach across a diverse range of organisations, including further education providers in South Wales, Durham University Business School, manufacturers in the North East, private equity firms, and FCA-regulated financial services companies.
According to the company, those programmes consistently delivered adoption rates above 90% within 90 days.
The new Atheni Accelerator platform aims to scale that methodology by providing role-specific AI guidance while helping leaders measure whether genuine capability is being built across teams.
Why investors are betting on AI adoption rather than AI tools
The company’s timing reflects a growing concern across the AI industry. While organisations continue spending heavily on AI technology, many struggle to generate measurable business value from those investments.
Research cited by Atheni highlights the scale of the challenge. MIT’s Project NANDA found that 95% of enterprise AI pilots deliver no measurable P&L impact. Meanwhile, Microsoft’s 2026 Work Trend Index found that only 19% of AI users work in organisations where both individual capability and organisational readiness are high.
Atheni argues that the problem is not the technology itself but the gap between access and meaningful usage.
“Most AI startups are building better tools. At Atheni, we are building master craftspeople. Organisations can tell you how many people have access to AI, but not whether anyone is using it to think more clearly, challenge an assumption or do work they couldn’t do before. That is the gap. Atheni measures it and shows organisations how to close it,” says Mackenzie Howe.
Louise Ballard, added: “AI is the Ferrari in the driveway, but most people are still driving it to the shops. Atheni shows people what it can really do, in the work they are already doing.”
The competitive landscape
The most direct competitor is now UK-based Multiverse, which recently raised $70 million at a $2.1 billion valuation, bringing its total funding to $570 million, and has explicitly repositioned itself from an apprenticeship and edtech platform into what it calls Europe’s “AI adoption platform,” targeting the same challenge of building genuine workforce AI capability at scale.
Another adjacent player was Sana, the Swedish AI-powered workplace learning company, though it is no longer an independent competitor: Workday acquired Sana for $1.1 billion in September 2025.
Atheni’s differentiation lies in its focus on measuring behavioural change rather than software usage. The company argues that opening an AI tool is not the same as improving how people think, decide, and work.
Female founders tackling one of AI’s biggest opportunities
Atheni’s raise is also notable in a funding environment where female founders continue to receive a disproportionately small share of venture capital.
According to Beauhurst data, fully female-founded companies secured just 1.75% of UK equity investment in 2025. Female-led AI startups face an even wider funding gap, with average funding significantly lower than their male-led counterparts.
“I back founders who spot what others miss early. Louise and Mackenzie recognised two years ago what’s only now becoming clear: buying AI tools isn’t the same as changing how people work. The gap between those who can use AI effectively and those who can’t is becoming one of business’s costliest challenges. Few are tackling it at the depth and scale required, and I’m excited to back Atheni as part of the solution,” says Alex Chesterman OBE.
