Washington has always been a town obsessed with power. Now it is about to get obsessed with originality. That’s the quiet storm Hupside just set in motion with a $1.7M pre-seed round led by Ruxton Ventures, joined by Georgetown University’s venture arm and a network of angels who know the future isn’t about AI replacing people, it’s about measuring what makes us impossible to replace.
Founded in 2025, Hupside is flipping the conversation from artificial intelligence to original intelligence. While most companies brag about how fast their models can crunch data, Jonathan Aberman and his co-founders are asking a sharper question: how do humans create in ways AI can’t touch? Their flagship product, Hupchecker, answers it. In 10 minutes, it produces an Original Intelligence Quotient (OIQ™), benchmarking a person’s creativity against both peers and machine output, then mapping them into archetypes like Visionary, Connector, or Builder. It’s cognitive science dressed in code, not a warmed-over personality test.
Jonathan Aberman brings the venture and academic chops to steer the vision. Erich Baumgartner has the track record of 6 successful exits. Dan Johnson, PhD, carved his path as a professor at Washington & Lee decoding how creativity forms. Adam Green, PhD, built his career at Georgetown University studying originality in the brain. Together they’re pulling originality out of theory and into enterprise reality.
The early traction is real. Ten organizations are already in private beta. Justin Fanelli, CTO of the U.S. Dept of the Navy, signed on as an advisor. SOC2 compliance is underway, with NIST standards in the plan, and the product is already deployed on AWS GovCloud. This isn’t consumer-grade, it’s built for enterprises and agencies where security, compliance, and ROI rule the game.
The $1.7M will push product development, expand integrations into HRIS & L&D ecosystems, and fuel enterprise and federal sales. Public beta drops in Q4 2025. By mid-2026, they’re aiming at federal partnerships, followed by UK/EU pilots. The roadmap stacks content-level originality scoring, a dynamic team builder, and mobile/offline assessments, giving leaders tools to see creativity at scale.
This is not another AI hype machine. It’s a market bet on originality, the one resource we can’t outsource to a model. Hupside is quantifying it, protecting it, and proving it has value in a $65B AI transformation market growing at 15% CAGR.
