Pediatric App Huckleberry Raises $12.5 Million in a Telehealth Boom

When Jessica Toh had her first child, who proved to be an erratic sleeper, she wanted to use her background in computer science and statistics to understand why.

In 2017, she started Huckleberry, an app that aims to leverage AI to predict babies' sleep schedules and help caretakers get some rest.

The Irvine-based app announced it raised $12.5 million on Wednesday led by Morningside Ventures, a science-focused venture capital firm.

The Huckleberry app allows parents to track everything from feeding to pumping sessions, how often a diaper needs to be changed — and sleep. Parents plug in various information about their child, like when they were born and how many naps they take, and, leveraging data from other customers and the child's sleep schedule, the app predicts the optimal time to put a child down for a nap so they sleep better through the night.

"As more studies indicate that digital health apps can result in similar outcomes where traditional care may be unavailable, we expect the market for digital alternatives to remain robust," said Pitchbook analyst Kaia Cobain in a 2020 report on telehealth.

Huckleberry plans on expanding into new child behavioral verticals with the raise, like helping parents track exposing their children to allergens, and managing tantrums. The company works with dozens of sleep, nutrition and behavioral health experts to contextualize the data.

"It's just crazy — the more you get into it and the more you realize there are actually all these experts in these different areas, just most people don't have access to them," Toh said. "You need a very acute need before you can work with them. But the reality is that everybody has that kind of need to some degree."