Meta-backed Hupo finds growth after pivot to AI sales coaching from mental wellness

Then Justin Kim, co-founder and CEO of Hupowhich first launched its company about four years ago, it didn’t sell AI-powered sales coaching to banks, financial services firms or insurance companies. The company originally started as Ami, a mental wellness platform that focuses on how people handle pressure, form habits, and change behavior over time.

“I’ve always been a big sports fan – basketball, football, Formula 1, MMA – and what appeals to me is performance. In my spare time, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about what actually drives human performance. People are very different, but in all sports there are clear patterns in how performance is manifested,” Kim said in an interview with TechCrunch.

His curiosity ultimately shaped his professional focus. Kim started researching what drives performance at work, and one theme kept emerging: mental resilience. That idea led him to found a startup in 2022.

Early work with Meta, which backed this startup in its seed round, helped hone some hard-earned lessons: Software only works if it fits into everyday behavior, like how people already live and work, and tools designed to help people “improve” often fail when they are judgmental, abstract, or disconnected from real work, Kim told TechCrunch.

These 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 change wasn’t as dramatic as it seems. “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 trust differ. Traditional coaching can’t reach everyone, and managers can’t be on every call.”

Thanks to AI that understands conversations in real-time, teams can now get consistent coaching, even in the highly regulated, complex industry, Kim noted.

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. Additionally, the Singapore-based startup now serves dozens of customers across APAC and Europe, including Prudential, AXA, Manulife, HSBC, Bank of Ireland and Grab.

“BFSI [Banking, Financial Services and Insurance] is a notoriously difficult industry for early-stage companies, but our clients typically grow contracts three to eight times within the first six months,” said the founder. “We will expand into the US in the first half of this year, where distribution-heavy financial models are creating 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 in product development at South Korean fintech Viva Republica, the company behind Toss, where he learned how technology built around real user behavior could reshape traditional financial services.

“Hupo is at the intersection of those experiences. I understood the buyer, the end user and the operational reality of selling financial products,” said Kim. “When AI became able to understand context and coaching in real time, it became clear 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 and built its platform around the way banks and insurers operate. “One of the biggest lessons I learned is that, especially with large enterprises, you need 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, customer types and regulatory requirements.

The latest round brings total funding to $15 million since the company’s founding in 2022. The new capital will go toward expanding the product, including real-time coaching features, scaling enterprise-level implementations, increasing go-to-market efforts in banking, financial services and insurance, and growing the team.

Kim says that in five years, 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 for tens of thousands of people.