About four years ago, when Justin Kim, co-founder and CEO of Hupo, launched his company, it was initially called Ami and focused on mental wellness—specifically how people handle pressure, form habits, and change behavior over time. Kim, a sports enthusiast fascinated by human performance across basketball, football, Formula One, and MMA, was inspired by patterns he observed in sports performance to explore what drives performance at work. This curiosity led him to discover mental resilience as a key theme and ultimately inspired him to found his startup in 2022. Early collaboration with Meta, which supported the startup during its seed round, taught Kim important lessons: software solutions succeed only when they fit naturally into daily life and work routines, and tools aimed at improving people often fail if they feel judgmental, abstract, or disconnected from actual work. These insights shaped the company’s pivot from a mental wellness platform to Hupo’s current focus on AI-powered sales coaching tailored for banking, insurance, and financial services. Their approach emphasizes supporting people during critical moments rather than replacing human judgment. According to Kim, the transition was not drastic since the underlying issue in both domains is scaling performance. In financial services, inconsistent results are due less to motivation and more to variations in training, feedback, and confidence. Traditional coaching cannot reach everyone, and managers cannot monitor every interaction. Hupo addresses this gap by using AI that comprehends conversations in real time, providing consistent coaching even in the highly regulated and complex BFSI (Banking, Financial Services, and Insurance) sector. Hupo recently secured $10 million in a Series A funding round led by DST Global Partners, with participation from Collaborative Fund, Goodwater Capital, January Capital, and Strong Ventures. Headquartered in Singapore, the startup serves dozens of clients across APAC and Europe, including Prudential, AXA, Manulife, HSBC, Bank of Ireland, and Grab.

Kim highlighted that BFSI is a challenging sector for early-stage companies, but Hupo’s clients typically expand their contracts by three to eight times within six months. Plans are underway to expand into the U. S. in the first half of this year to address the strong demand for scalable coaching in distribution-heavy financial models. Kim’s career began at Bloomberg, selling enterprise software to banks, asset managers, and insurers, which exposed him to the complexities of regulated sales. He later contributed to product development at South Korea’s fintech Viva Republica (behind Toss), gaining insights into how tech shaped by actual user behavior could transform financial services. Hupo represents the convergence of these experiences, leveraging Kim’s understanding of buyers, users, and operational realities in financial product sales. Once AI advanced enough to understand context and provide real-time coaching, it became clear to Kim that sales coaching in banking and insurance was the ideal application. Unlike many AI sales coaching tools that start with technology-first approaches, Hupo built its platform around industry-specific operations. Kim emphasized the importance of deeply understanding the business and sector, highlighting that Hupo’s AI models were trained from the outset on authentic financial products, typical objections, client profiles, and regulatory compliance. This latest Series A brings Hupo’s total funding to $15 million since its 2022 founding. The company plans to use these funds to enhance product features, especially real-time coaching, scale enterprise deployments, boost go-to-market efforts within BFSI, and expand its team. Looking ahead, Kim envisions that within five years, Hupo will extend beyond sales coaching to enable large teams to perform at scale—equipping managers and employees with clearer insights and practical guidance, even across tens of thousands of individuals.