Why We Invested: Huckleberry
October 2025
Alline Akintore
We’re thrilled to announce Oregon Venture Fund’s investment in Huckleberry’s pre-seed round.
Everyone defines what “professional growth” means. However, the one constant is feedback: consistent, real, actionable, and timely.
Providing feedback is often a long and daunting process in the workplace. Feedback is overdue for a change. Today, at many organizations, only executives receive 360 reviews. For everybody else, feedback remains top-down, episodic, locked inside company silos and “owned” by HR.
Huckleberry is changing that. Through concise, voice-based prompts, anyone in the organization can seek and receive authentic 360 feedback from subordinates, peers, managers, and turn that input into a portable professional profile which may be used to generate an AI-driven coaching plan and development record.
The premise is deceptively simple: what if reputation, professional growth, and trust could be portable with us from job to job, project to project, team to team? Much like users own their LinkedIn profiles.
This portability turns your professional and reputational growth curve into an asset that you own – unlocking a new kind of virality across organizations. It also means that even though HR will have access to an employees’ profile, HR no longer has to send multiple reminders to drive the process of feedback, empowering employees to seek it out as often as needed, such as at the conclusion of a project.
For Portland-based founder/CEO Aaron Ward, this is his life’s work. As a successful, serial founder/CEO, he knows firsthand that there’s a ton of runway to shift how 360s are done. Furthermore, this is his second ‘feedback’ venture: he co-founded and grew AskNicely to $10M+ ARR – AskNicely supports organizations to collect customer feedback. Aaron partnered with fellow Kiwi, Diogo Bohm (founder/CTO), based in New Zealand, to tackle this 360 review challenge.
And the timing couldn’t be better. Not only because employees expect frequent, transparent feedback, but also: hybrid and remote work have shifted employee engagement to embrace more digital avenues and AI has finally made it possible to personalize feedback at scale.
We envision Huckleberry becoming the go-to of professional reputation and growth, much like LinkedIn is the go-to for professional connections. Huckleberry would be defining a new category at the intersection of performance management, coaching, and recruiting:
For HR leaders, Huckleberry expands the reach of 360s and drives engagement
For individuals, it becomes a lifelong growth companion
For recruiters and future employers, it’s a trusted signal of credibility and growth
That combination of user delight, viral loops, and data defensibility is what makes Huckleberry a compelling investment for us.
We're proud to lead Huckleberry’s $1M pre-seed round. The team is positioned to democratize feedback and redefine professional reputation itself.