Theanna: The platform helping women build tech startups

Women aren't short of great ideas for tech businesses. They're short of the support that turns those ideas into companies.

Of the $289 billion in venture capital deployed globally in 2024, all-female founding teams received just 2.3%. In the US, the figure for women-only teams is closer to 1%. And the money is only part of it. Engineering help, networks, the people who open doors, the cultural permission to figure things out as you go. Men have had easier access to all of it for decades.

So women with strong ideas get stuck at the starting line, trying to validate, build and fund a product inside a system that wasn't built for them.

That's the problem Nomiki Petrolla is solving with Theanna.

TL;DR

• What it is: A US-based, women-only platform that walks female founders through every stage of building a tech business, from idea to revenue
• Who it's for: Women building tech startups for the first time, including doctors, lawyers and multi-business owners with no software background
• The problem it solves: Women receive a tiny fraction of venture funding and almost none of the structured, technical, step-by-step support that helps first-time tech founders get to a paying customer
• Why it matters: Most founder tools either inspire without guiding, or guide without execution. Theanna does both, and is built on 15 years of product leadership rather than generic startup advice

What is Theanna?

Theanna is a platform that takes a woman with an idea for a tech business and walks her, step by step, to her first paying customer.

Most of the founders signing up have never built software before. Doctors, lawyers, multi-business owners. Capable people who know exactly what they want to build but don't know what to do on a Monday morning to actually get there.

Theanna is US-based, has 159 paying members, and launched the first cohort of its virtual accelerator programme, Women Build Cool Shit, in January 2026.

How does Theanna work?

When a founder signs up, Theanna asks her about her business, her industry, her one-liner, whether she has funding. That information powers a personalised experience built around three modes: build, connect, and analyse.

Build is the heart of it. Each founder lands in one of four stages depending on where she is. Idea, launch, grow, or scale. Each stage has 11 milestones, and each milestone breaks down into around 15 specific tasks. So a founder in the idea stage doesn't see a vague instruction to "validate your problem." She sees the problem statement milestone, opens it, and works through tasks designed to get her there in a few hours rather than a few weeks. The whole thing runs on more than 600 specialised GPTs, built on Anthropic's models, that get smarter the more a founder uses them. And unlike a generic chatbot, Theanna will actively tell you to stop typing and go do the thing in the real world.

Connect is the community layer, closed to women only, with regular sessions from investors, exited founders and engineers. Theanna has run more than 70 events since May.

Analyse is the newest piece, launched the day before this interview was recorded. It plugs into a founder's Stripe and her own goals, tracks revenue and streaks, and surfaces what's actually working versus what's just keeping her busy.

Pricing is $99 a month or $1,000 a year. The goal Theanna sets every founder is paying customers by week 12.

Meet the founder: Nomiki Petrolla

Nomiki spent 13 years taking other people's ideas from zero to one, and most of those people were men.

She worked as a product manager and head of product across multiple startups, including a deep-learning AI company building optimisation tools for large financial services teams. She loved the work. She also knew she'd never have a higher role at someone else's company than the one she had.

The push came when her youngest daughter, then an infant, got seriously ill. Nomiki decided it was time to stop building other people's things.

When she went out on her own, women started reaching out to hire her. The more she worked with them, the clearer the pattern got. They didn't have the same access to capital, to engineers, to the networks her former male bosses had taken for granted. So she ran a year-long one-on-one programme with 43 founders, took everything she'd learned from product leadership and from that cohort, and built Theanna around what was actually missing.

The thing she'll tell you is missing first is education. Most first-time founders assume tech business means venture business. Nomiki disagrees. She'll point out that 99.5% of businesses are lifestyle businesses, and that a $10–15 million lifestyle business is something to be proud of, not a consolation prize. Theanna is built so a founder can go either way.

Why we love Theanna

Most products built for women in tech are basically vibes. Communities, panels, encouragement. Lovely, mostly useless when you're staring at a blank Notion page on a Tuesday morning trying to figure out what to do next.

Theanna is the opposite. It's a system, not a hug. Eleven milestones a stage, fifteen tasks a milestone, a chatbot that tells you to close the laptop. Built by someone who actually knows how to ship software, for women who haven't done it before.

The other thing we love is the order Theanna puts things in. Most founder programmes hand you a deck template before you've got a customer. Nomiki's view is that you should know whether anyone will pay you before you start asking anyone to fund you, and Theanna is built around that order. Get to revenue, then decide if venture is actually the right path. For the founders it isn't, you've built a real business. For the founders it is, you're walking into the room with traction instead of a pitch.

More of this, please.

We sat down with Nomiki to learn more about Theanna and how she's helping women build the tech businesses they've been told not to bother trying. You can listen to the full conversation on The Discovery Call podcast on Spotify or YouTube below.