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 corporations. The corporate initially started as Ami, a psychological wellness platform centered on how individuals handle strain, kind habits, and alter habits over time.
“I’ve all the time 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 quite a lot of time eager about what truly drives human efficiency. Individuals are very completely different, however throughout sports activities, there are clear patterns in how efficiency exhibits up,” Kim mentioned in an interview with TechCrunch.
His curiosity finally 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 habits like how individuals already reside and work, and instruments designed to assist individuals “enhance” typically fail if they’re judgmental, summary, or disconnected from actual work, Kim advised TechCrunch.
These concepts adopted the startup by means of its pivot, and in the present day 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 actually matter in banking, insurance coverage, and monetary providers.
Kim mentioned the shift wasn’t as dramatic because it may appear. “The core drawback 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 trade, Kim famous.
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Hupo has raised a $10 million Sequence A led by DST World Companions, with participation from Collaborative Fund, Goodwater Capital, January Capital, and Robust 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 corporations, however our clients usually increase contracts 3–8x inside the first six months,” the founder mentioned. “We’ll be increasing into the US within the first half of this yr, the place distribution-heavy monetary fashions create a robust 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 may very well be. He later labored on product improvement at South Korean fintech Viva Republica, the corporate behind Toss, studying how know-how constructed round actual person habits might reshape conventional monetary providers.
“Hupo sits on the intersection of these experiences. I understood the customer, the tip person, and the operational actuality of promoting monetary merchandise,” Kim mentioned. “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 suitable place to use it.”
Many AI gross sales teaching instruments begin with the know-how first, Kim mentioned, however Hupo took a special strategy, constructing its platform round how banks and insurers function. “One of many greatest classes I’ve discovered is that, particularly with giant enterprises, you need to perceive their enterprise and trade intimately,” he added, noting that Hupo’s fashions have been educated from the beginning on actual monetary merchandise, widespread objections, consumer varieties, 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 staff.
In 5 years, Kim says he needs Hupo to transcend gross sales teaching and assist giant groups carry out at scale, giving managers and staff clearer insights and sensible steerage, even throughout tens of 1000’s of individuals.
