When Justin Kim, co-founder and CEO of Hupo, first launched his firm about 4 years in the past, it wasn’t promoting AI-powered gross sales teaching to banks, finance providers, or insurance coverage firms. The corporate initially started as Ami, a psychological wellness platform centered on how individuals handle stress, type habits, and alter conduct over time.
“I’ve at all times been an enormous sports activities fan – basketball, soccer, Components One, MMA – and what attracts me to all of them is efficiency. In my free time, I’ve spent loads of time fascinated about what truly drives human efficiency. Persons are very completely different, however throughout sports activities, there are clear patterns in how efficiency exhibits up,” Kim stated in an interview with TechCrunch.
His curiosity ultimately formed his skilled focus. Kim began exploring what drives efficiency at work, and one theme stored surfacing: psychological resilience. That concept led him to discovered a startup in 2022.
Early work with Meta, which backed this startup within the seed spherical, helped sharpen some hard-earned classes: software program solely works when it suits into each day conduct like how individuals already stay and work, and instruments designed to assist individuals “enhance” usually fail if they’re judgmental, summary, or disconnected from actual work, Kim instructed TechCrunch.
These concepts adopted the startup by its pivot, and at this time they form Hupo’s strategy to gross sales teaching; much less about changing human judgment and extra about serving to individuals within the moments that basically matter in banking, insurance coverage, and monetary providers.
Kim stated the shift wasn’t as dramatic because it may appear. “The core downside in each circumstances is efficiency at scale. In banking and insurance coverage, outcomes differ, not due to motivation, however as a result of coaching, suggestions, and confidence differ. Conventional teaching can’t attain everybody, and managers can’t sit in on each dialog.”
AI that understands conversations in real-time now permits groups to obtain constant teaching, even within the extremely regulated, complicated business, Kim famous.
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Hupo has raised a $10 million Collection A led by DST World Companions, with participation from Collaborative Fund, Goodwater Capital, January Capital, and Sturdy Ventures. As well as, the Singapore-headquartered startup now serves dozens of consumers in APAC and Europe, together with Prudential, AXA, Manulife, HSBC, Financial institution of Eire, and Seize.
“BFSI [Banking, Financial Services and Insurance] is a notoriously tough vertical for early-stage firms, however our prospects sometimes broaden contracts 3–8x inside the first six months,” the founder stated. “We’ll be increasing into the US within the first half of this yr, the place distribution-heavy monetary fashions create a powerful want for scalable teaching.”
Kim began his profession at Bloomberg, promoting enterprise software program to banks, asset managers, and insurers, the place he noticed how complicated regulated gross sales might be. He later labored on product growth at South Korean fintech Viva Republica, the corporate behind Toss, studying how expertise constructed round actual person conduct might reshape conventional monetary providers.
“Hupo sits on the intersection of these experiences. I understood the client, the tip person, and the operational actuality of promoting monetary merchandise,” Kim stated. “As soon as AI grew to become able to understanding context and training in actual time, it grew to become apparent to me that gross sales teaching—particularly in banking and insurance coverage—was the proper place to use it.”
Many AI gross sales teaching instruments begin with the expertise first, Kim stated, however Hupo took a distinct strategy, constructing its platform round how banks and insurers function. “One of many greatest classes I’ve realized is that, particularly with massive enterprises, you must perceive their enterprise and business intimately,” he added, noting that Hupo’s fashions have been educated from the beginning on actual monetary merchandise, widespread objections, consumer sorts, and regulatory necessities.
The newest spherical brings complete funding to $15 million because the firm was based in 2022. The brand new capital will go towards increasing its product, together with real-time teaching options, scaling enterprise-grade deployments, rising go-to-market efforts in banking, monetary providers, and insurance coverage, and constructing out the crew.
In 5 years, Kim says he desires Hupo to transcend gross sales teaching and assist massive groups carry out at scale, giving managers and workers clearer insights and sensible steerage, even throughout tens of hundreds of individuals.
