When Justin Kim, co-founder and CEO of Hupo, first launched his company about four years ago, it wasn’t selling AI-powered sales coaching to banks, finance services, or insurance companies. The company originally began as Ami, a mental wellness platform focused on how people manage pressure, form habits, and change behavior over time.
“I’ve always been a big sports fan – basketball, football, Formula One, MMA – and what draws me to all of them is performance. In my free time, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about what actually drives human performance. People are very different, but across sports, there are clear patterns in how performance shows up,” Kim said in an interview with TechCrunch.
His curiosity eventually shaped his professional focus. Kim started exploring what drives performance at work, and one theme kept surfacing: mental resilience. That idea led him to found a startup in 2022.
Early work with Meta, which backed this startup in the seed round, helped sharpen some hard-earned lessons: software only works when it fits into daily behavior like how people already live and work, and tools designed to help people “improve” often fail if they are judgmental, abstract, or disconnected from real work, Kim told TechCrunch.
Those ideas followed the startup through its pivot, and today they shape Hupo’s approach to sales coaching; less about replacing human judgment and more about helping people in the moments that really matter in banking, insurance, and financial services.
Kim said the shift wasn’t as dramatic as it might seem. “The core problem in both cases is performance at scale. In banking and insurance, results vary, not because of motivation, but because training, feedback, and confidence differ. Traditional coaching can’t reach everyone, and managers can’t sit in on every conversation.”
AI that understands conversations in real-time now allows teams to receive consistent coaching, even in the highly regulated, complex industry, Kim noted.
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Hupo has raised a $10 million Series A led by DST Global Partners, with participation from Collaborative Fund, Goodwater Capital, January Capital, and Strong Ventures. In addition, the Singapore-headquartered startup now serves dozens of customers in APAC and Europe, including Prudential, AXA, Manulife, HSBC, Bank of Ireland, and Grab.
“BFSI [Banking, Financial Services and Insurance] is a notoriously difficult vertical for early-stage companies, but our customers typically expand contracts 3–8x within the first six months,” the founder said. “We’ll be expanding into the US in the first half of this year, where distribution-heavy financial models create a strong need for scalable coaching.”
Kim started his career at Bloomberg, selling enterprise software to banks, asset managers, and insurers, where he saw how complex regulated sales could be. He later worked on product development at South Korean fintech Viva Republica, the company behind Toss, learning how technology built around real user behavior could reshape traditional financial services.
“Hupo sits at the intersection of those experiences. I understood the buyer, the end user, and the operational reality of selling financial products,” Kim said. “Once AI became capable of understanding context and coaching in real time, it became obvious to me that sales coaching—especially in banking and insurance—was the right place to apply it.”
Many AI sales coaching tools start with the technology first, Kim said, but Hupo took a different approach, building its platform around how banks and insurers operate. “One of the biggest lessons I’ve learned is that, especially with large enterprises, you have to understand their business and industry in detail,” he added, noting that Hupo’s models were trained from the start on real financial products, common objections, client types, and regulatory requirements.
The latest round brings total funding to $15 million since the company was founded in 2022. The new capital will go toward expanding its product, including real-time coaching features, scaling enterprise-grade deployments, growing go-to-market efforts in banking, financial services, and insurance, and building out the team.
In five years, Kim says he wants Hupo to go beyond sales coaching and help large teams perform at scale, giving managers and employees clearer insights and practical guidance, even across tens of thousands of people.