When Hupo co-founder and CEO Justin Kim first started his company about four years ago, the company wasn’t selling AI-powered sales coaching to banks, financial services, or insurance companies. The company originally started as Ami, a mental wellness platform focused on how people deal with pressure, form habits, and change behaviors over time.
“I’ve always been a huge sports fan, whether it’s basketball, football, F1, mixed martial arts, and what draws me to all of them is performance. In my free time, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about what really drives human performance. People are very different, but across sports, there are clear patterns in how performance manifests,” Kim said in an interview with TechCrunch.
His curiosity ultimately shaped his professional focus. As Kim began exploring factors that improve job performance, one theme kept emerging: mental resilience. Based on that idea, he founded a startup in 2022.
Early work with Meta, which backed the startup with a seed round, helped solidify hard-won lessons. Software only works when it fits into everyday behaviors like how people already live and work, Kim told TechCrunch, and tools designed to help people “improve” often fail if they’re critical, abstract, or disconnected from the actual work.
Those ideas became the core of the startup and today shape Hupo’s approach to sales coaching. We’re less about replacing human judgment and more about helping people at the moments that really matter in banking, insurance, and financial services.
Kim said the change wasn’t as dramatic as she thought. “The central issue in both cases is performance at scale. In banking and insurance, results differ not because of motivation, but because of differences in training, feedback and confidence. Traditional coaching cannot influence everyone, and managers cannot be present in every conversation.”
Kim said AI that understands conversations in real-time allows teams to receive consistent coaching, even in highly regulated and complex industries.
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Hupo has raised $10 million in Series A led by DST Global Partners with participation from Collaborative Fund, Goodwater Capital, Marine Capital, and Strong Ventures. Additionally, the Singapore-headquartered startup currently serves dozens of customers across Asia Pacific and Europe, including Prudential, AXA, Manulife, HSBC, Bank of Ireland, and Grab.
“BFSI (Banking, Financial Services and Insurance) is a notoriously difficult space for early-stage companies, but our customers typically grow their commitments 3-8x within the first six months,” the founders said. “We plan to expand into the US in the first half of this year, where a distribution-focused financial model has created a strong need for scalable coaching.”
Kim began his career at Bloomberg selling enterprise software to banks, asset managers, and insurance companies, where he saw first-hand how complex regulated sales can be. He then worked in product development at Viva Republica, the Korean fintech company behind Toss, learning how technology built on real user behavior can reshape traditional financial services.
“Hupo is at the intersection of those experiences. I understood the buyers, end users, and operational realities of selling financial products,” Kim said. “Once AI was able to understand the context and coaching in real time, it became clear that sales coaching, especially banking and insurance, was the perfect place to apply it.”
Kim said that while many AI sales coaching tools start with technology, Hupo took a different approach and built its platform based on the way banks and insurance companies operate. “One of the biggest lessons I learned is that, especially for large companies, you need to understand their business and industry in detail,” he added, noting that Hupo’s models are trained from the beginning on real financial products, common objections, customer types, and regulatory requirements.
The latest round brings the company’s total funding since its 2022 founding to $15 million. The new funding will be used to expand its products including real-time coaching capabilities, expand its enterprise-grade deployments, expand its go-to-market efforts in banking, financial services and insurance, and strengthen its team.
Kim says that in five years, Hupo wants to go beyond sales coaching to help teams perform at scale, providing clearer insights and actionable guidance to managers and employees, even those with tens of thousands of people.
