Stocks and the labor market continue to be chilled by fears of AI-driven disruption to traditional and tech businesses alike.
One new Columbus-based company, Theanna, is positioning itself to do some of that disrupting.
Theanna is a new Software as a Service (SaaS) consultancy targeting women tech founders. The platform melds an AI-empowered knowledge base with the deep human experience of founder Nomiki Petrolla and a live community of like-minded entrepreneurs.
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Petrolla’s early career focused on product strategy in multiple industries. As a consultant, she says she encountered many women looking for support with issues—and priorities—that were a bit different from male founders.
First, she says, women often were looking to build sustainable businesses they can lead on their own terms, not necessarily unicorns.
Second, for women looking to pull in venture capital, it’s well documented they’re going to face significant hurdles. “Last year, all women teams only received 1.2 percent of venture capital. That set the spark for me: Let’s help women build without needing capital,” Petrolla says.
Her first venture, PDS Lab, was a female-founder-focused product accelerator. It was successful enough that Petrolla soon wanted to scale to help more woman entrepreneurs. She decided to build a software platform that could multiply the number of founders she could mentor and also network them together.
Theanna was the answer. “Our software is a trifecta,” Petrolla says.
“We bring in the community aspect, but on top of that we give them the tooling to build their business. Then, we pull data from your tools, so that’s fed into AI to analyze and help you build. That three-prong approach allows them to reduce time to decision-making and get results faster.”
Theanna currently boasts 227 founders, from a crowdfunding platform helping farmers in Africa to a fintech firm in Queensland, Australia.
While there are competitors, Petrolla says no product development platform provides all three aspects Theanna does: business strategy and goal setting, analytical decision-making and community support.
Sarah Delevan, founder of the Good Food CFO, says Theanna has allowed her to build the company she’s been dreaming about for years. The Good Food CFO helps small, clean-food industry businesses—ranchers, farmers, artisans and grocers—understand their financial picture and grow.
After years being a fractional CFO in the food industry, Delevan knew her experience could be automated and packaged in the form of SaaS, but she didn’t know how to get there until she found Petrolla. “She summarized, ‘You don’t need to be a programmer or developer to create software in this day and age.’ I remember trying to find a developer who I could work with [to] help me, but … I had to know a lot of info I just didn’t know. She said, ‘I can help you figure that out,’ ” Delevan says.
Using Petrolla’s process, Delevan developed an initial version of her software in about five months. “We had 40 users right out of the gate, which is exciting for us. And now we’re iterating,” Delevan says—and earning revenue.
Theanna itself is still growing, Petrolla says. “Currently we serve tech entrepreneurs, but our goal is to serve woman founders regardless of the sector or vertical you are in,” she says.
Though Theanna is not a fundraising platform, Petrolla says she one day aims to create a fund through which Theanna can invest in women founders ready for scale—ultimately helping to address the issue of capital scarcity.
About Theanna
theanna.io
Location: Virtual, based in Columbus
Leadership: Nomiki Petrolla, founder and CEO
Business: AI-assisted product accelerator
Founded: December 2024
Employees: 4
Funding: Bootstrapped
Cynthia Bent Findlay is a freelance writer.
This story appears in the Spring 2026 issue of Columbus CEO. Subscribe now.
This article originally appeared on Columbus CEO: Columbus-based Theanna Empowers Women Entrepreneurs in the Tech Arena
Reporting by Cynthia Bent Findlay, Columbus CEO / Columbus CEO
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
