Introducing a New Wave of Hyper-Personalized Parenting Advice
Spero Ventures invests in Huckleberry Labs
When I tell people my 18-month-old son sleeps through the night and routinely wakes up around 9:00 A.M., they’re shocked. I usually try to reassure them that we’re just lucky, but the truth is that it’s only part luck. The other part is Huckleberry.
Huckleberry makes sleep expertise accessible to every family. They pair pediatric sleep experts with AI to create a custom sleep plan for every child — and it costs $15/month. As a parent, I track sleep, eating, and other habits using their beautifully designed baby tracker.
Based on that information, along with a behavioral questionnaire, Huckleberry analyzes kids’ sleep patterns and makes specific, actionable recommendations for improving sleep quality, duration, and predictability.
The Story of Huckleberry
Huckleberry was founded by Jessica and Seng Toh, parents who had struggled for months trying to improve their son’s sleep. They sought out the best books, blogs, and resources, but it seemed like all the information in the world still didn’t help. So, they brought on a high-priced sleep consultant to evaluate their situation. That helped, but it was expensive.
Jessica and Seng recognized that there were millions of other families like theirs who’d gone through a similar struggle, but couldn’t afford a personal consultant. And there was simply no middle ground between the ocean of parenting information and the inaccessible expertise of a specialist. As engineers, they realized they could build a system that automated and scaled the key aspects of that expertise to reach every parent.
Huckleberry employs sleep consultants with decades of expertise, but the technology gives them superpowers through a data collection platform and recommendation engine that creates customized sleep plans for every family. This allows experts to serve 100x more families at a fraction of the cost.
My Experience With Huckleberry
I learned about Huckleberry after meeting the founders and before becoming a first-time parent. It wasn’t until I had my son in 2019 that I truly appreciated the magic Huckleberry creates for parents. I’ve been tracking his habits since birth, and began using Huckleberry’s sleep plans when he was 5 months old. It was amazing to see how Huckleberry’s simple, personalized recommendations about my son’s room environment, schedules, and routines resulted in really predictable behavior.
I remember my first vacation with my son, when Huckleberry made a huge, immediate difference. As soon as we left home, the change of scenery caused my son to wake up during the night unable to find his pacifier. As a consequence, I was waking up 2-3 times every night to locate the pacifier.
Feeling desperate, I looked to Huckleberry. One of their recommendations was to attach a stuffed animal to the pacifier, so he could find it easily by himself. It solved the problem immediately.
This advice was personalized based on my son’s behavioral patterns. It’s possible that after talking to 12 other parents and spending two hours on Google, I could have figured it out, but Huckleberry gave me the perfect piece of advice, exactly when I needed it — and it worked. Like magic.
On top of that, it’s user friendly. So much so that all of my son’s caretakers, including my mother and mother-in-law, use it regularly.
Sleep is Only the Beginning
Huckleberry’s founders know that sleep is one of the biggest pain points for parents of young children, so that’s the first behavioral issue they tackled. They’ve garnered more than 500,000 app downloads thanks to that promise alone. But what they’ve created can be applied to many other aspects of a child’s life beyond sleep.
Soon, Huckleberry will empower parents to take on challenges like tantrums, picky eating, and potty training with simple, actionable, and timely advice.
Huckleberry represents a new wave of hyper-personalized parenting advice, redefining the expectations of parents encountering these challenges for the first time. It still takes a village, but tools like Huckleberry offer a new way for parents to find useful information at the moment when they need it, helping them sort through the noise. That’s why it gives us great pleasure to announce Spero’s investment in the future of parenting through Huckleberry Labs.
Welcome to the Spero family, Jessica and Seng!