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, financial 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.
Kim has always been a big sports fan, drawn to basketball, football, Formula One, and MMA by the theme of performance. In his free time, he spent a lot of time thinking about what actually drives human performance. He observed that while people are very different, clear patterns in performance show up across sports. This 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. Kim learned that software only works when it fits into daily behavior, mirroring how people already live and work. He also found that tools designed to help people improve often fail if they are judgmental, abstract, or disconnected from real work. Those ideas followed the startup through its pivot, and today they shape Hupo’s approach to sales coaching. The focus is 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 this highly regulated, complex industry.
Hupo has raised a $10 million Series A funding round led by DST Global Partners, with participation from Collaborative Fund, Goodwater Capital, January Capital, and Strong Ventures. The Singapore-headquartered startup now serves dozens of customers in APAC and Europe, including Prudential, AXA, Manulife, HSBC, Bank of Ireland, and Grab. The BFSI sector is a notoriously difficult vertical for early-stage companies, but Hupo’s customers typically expand contracts three to eight times within the first six months. The company will 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. Kim understood the buyer, the end user, and the operational reality of selling financial products. Once AI became capable of understanding context and coaching in real time, it became obvious to him 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, but Hupo took a different approach, building its platform around how banks and insurers operate. One of the biggest lessons Kim has learned is that, especially with large enterprises, you have to understand their business and industry in detail. Hupo’s models were trained from the start on real financial products, common objections, client types, and regulatory requirements.
The latest funding round brings Hupo’s 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.