When Justin Kim, co-founder and CEO of Hupo, first started his company around four years ago, it wasn’t focused on providing AI-powered sales coaching for banks, financial services, or insurance companies. Instead, it launched as Ami, a mental wellness platform aimed at helping people manage pressure, develop habits, and change their behavior over time.
“I’ve always been passionate about sports—basketball, football, Formula One, MMA—and what interests me is performance. In my spare time, I’ve spent a lot of time pondering what truly drives human performance. People are different, but across various sports, there are clear patterns in how performance is expressed,” Kim shared in an interview with TechCrunch.
His curiosity soon framed his professional endeavors. Kim began investigating what drives workplace performance, with one key theme consistently emerging: mental resilience. This insight led him to establish a startup in 2022.
Early collaboration with Meta, which supported the startup during its seed round, helped him learn valuable lessons: software is effective only when it integrates smoothly into people’s daily routines, and tools meant to aid improvement often fall flat if they are judgmental, abstract, or disconnected from actual work, according to Kim.
These insights guided Hupo through its transformation, and they now underpin the company’s approach to sales coaching—focused more on assisting people during crucial moments in banking, insurance, and financial services rather than replacing human judgment.
Kim explained that the transition wasn’t as radical as it might appear. “The core challenge in both cases is performance at scale. In banking and insurance, results fluctuate not because of motivation but due to variances in training, feedback, and confidence. Traditional coaching can’t reach everyone, and managers can’t oversee every conversation.”
AI technology that understands conversations in real-time now allows teams to receive consistent coaching, even in highly regulated and complex industries, Kim pointed out.
Hupo has recently secured a $10 million Series A funding round led by DST Global Partners, with contributions from Collaborative Fund, Goodwater Capital, January Capital, and Strong Ventures. The Singapore-based startup now serves numerous clients across APAC and Europe, including Prudential, AXA, Manulife, HSBC, Bank of Ireland, and Grab.
“Banking, Financial Services, and Insurance [BFSI] is notoriously challenging for early-stage companies, but our customers typically expand their contracts by 3–8x within the first six months,” the founder noted. “We plan to expand into the US in the first half of this year, where distribution-heavy financial models create a strong need for scalable coaching.”
Kim’s career began at Bloomberg, where he sold enterprise software to banks, asset managers, and insurers, giving him insight into the complexities of regulated sales. He later worked on product development at the South Korean fintech company Viva Republica, creators of Toss, where he learned how technology tailored to real user behavior could transform traditional financial services.
“Hupo combines these experiences. I understood the buyer, the end user, and the operational realities of selling financial products,” Kim said. “Once AI became capable of understanding context and providing real-time coaching, it became clear to me that sales coaching—especially in banking and insurance—was the ideal application.”
While many AI sales coaching tools prioritize technology, Kim noted that Hupo built its platform around the needs of banks and insurers. “One of the biggest lessons I learned is that, particularly with large enterprises, you must understand their business and industry in detail,” he added, explaining that Hupo’s models were developed from the outset using real financial products, common objections, client types, and regulatory requirements.
With this latest funding round, Hupo’s total financing reaches $15 million since its inception in 2022. The new investment will further develop its product, including real-time coaching features, scale enterprise-grade deployments, boost marketing efforts in banking, financial services, and insurance, and expand the team.
In five years, Kim envisions Hupo extending beyond sales coaching to help large teams perform at scale, providing managers and employees with clearer insights and practical guidance, even across vast numbers of personnel.
