Hupo Pivots to AI Sales Coaching, Secures Meta-Backed Growth
▼ Summary
– Hupo, founded in 2022, originally started as a mental wellness platform called Ami before pivoting to focus on AI-powered sales coaching for the banking, financial services, and insurance (BFSI) sector.
– The company’s approach is shaped by lessons that effective software must fit into daily workflows and avoid being judgmental or disconnected from real work, aiming to assist rather than replace human judgment.
– Hupo has raised a total of $15 million, including a recent $10 million Series A round, and serves major customers like Prudential, AXA, and HSBC in APAC and Europe, with plans to expand into the US.
– Its AI platform is designed specifically for the BFSI industry, using models trained on real financial products, objections, and regulations to provide real-time, scalable conversation coaching.
– The founder’s vision is for Hupo to evolve beyond sales coaching within five years to help large teams perform at scale by providing clear insights and guidance to managers and employees.
The journey from a mental wellness platform to a leading AI sales coaching solution for the banking, financial services, and insurance (BFSI) sector demonstrates a powerful focus on human performance at scale. Hupo’s evolution was driven by founder Justin Kim’s long-standing fascination with what drives peak performance, whether in sports or in professional settings. This curiosity led to the initial creation of Ami, a platform centered on building mental resilience and positive habits. Early backing and collaboration with Meta during the seed stage provided crucial insights: effective software must integrate seamlessly into existing daily workflows, and tools meant to help people improve fail when they feel judgmental or disconnected from actual tasks. These foundational principles directly informed the company’s strategic pivot.
The shift to AI-powered sales coaching felt like a natural progression rather than a complete reinvention. The core challenge remained the same: enabling consistent, high-level performance across large organizations. In industries like banking and insurance, results often vary not due to a lack of motivation, but because of inconsistent training, sporadic feedback, and differing levels of confidence among sales teams. Traditional coaching methods simply cannot reach every employee, and managers cannot monitor every client conversation. Hupo’s AI platform addresses this gap by understanding sales conversations in real-time, providing immediate, consistent coaching even within highly regulated and complex financial environments.
This focused approach has attracted significant traction and investment. The Singapore-based company recently secured a $10 million Series A funding round led by DST Global Partners, with participation from Collaborative Fund, Goodwater Capital, January Capital, and Strong Ventures. This brings Hupo’s total funding to $15 million since its 2022 founding. The startup now serves a growing list of enterprise clients across APAC and Europe, including major names like Prudential, AXA, Manulife, HSBC, Bank of Ireland, and Grab. Despite the BFSI sector being notoriously challenging for early-stage companies, Hupo reports that its customers typically expand their contracts by three to eight times within the first six months of use.
Kim’s professional background equipped him with a unique perspective for this venture. His early career at Bloomberg involved selling enterprise software to financial institutions, giving him firsthand experience with the complexities of regulated sales. Later, working on product development at the fintech company Viva Republica (behind Toss) taught him how technology built around genuine user behavior can transform traditional finance. Hupo sits squarely at the intersection of these experiences. “I understood the buyer, the end user, and the operational reality of selling financial products,” Kim explained. The advent of AI capable of nuanced, real-time contextual understanding made sales coaching in banking and insurance the obvious application.
Many competing tools begin with the technology itself, but Hupo built its platform from the ground up around the specific operational realities of banks and insurers. A key lesson has been that success with large enterprises requires a deep, detailed understanding of their business and industry. Consequently, Hupo’s AI models were trained from the outset on real financial products, common client objections, various customer profiles, and strict regulatory requirements. The new capital will accelerate product development, including enhanced real-time coaching features, support the scaling of enterprise-grade deployments, fuel market expansion in the BFSI sector, including a planned entry into the U.S. market this year, and facilitate team growth.
Looking ahead, Kim envisions Hupo expanding its impact beyond sales coaching within five years. The goal is to help entire large organizations perform at scale, providing managers and employees with clearer insights and actionable guidance, even across teams numbering in the tens of thousands.
(Source: TechCrunch)
