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, kind habits, and alter habits over time.
“I’ve at all times been a giant 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 interested by what truly drives human efficiency. Individuals are very totally different, however throughout sports activities, there are clear patterns in how efficiency reveals 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 day by 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 right now 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 might sound. “The core downside in each circumstances is efficiency at scale. In banking and insurance coverage, outcomes fluctuate, 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, advanced trade, Kim famous.
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Hupo has raised a $10 million Sequence A led by DST International 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 troublesome vertical for early-stage firms, however our clients sometimes increase contracts 3–8x throughout 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 advanced 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 consumer habits may reshape conventional monetary providers.
“Hupo sits on the intersection of these experiences. I understood the client, the tip consumer, and the operational actuality of promoting monetary merchandise,” Kim stated. “As soon as AI turned able to understanding context and training in actual time, it turned apparent to me that gross sales teaching—particularly in banking and insurance coverage—was the appropriate place to use it.”
Many AI gross sales teaching instruments begin with the know-how first, Kim stated, however Hupo took a unique strategy, constructing its platform round how banks and insurers function. “One of many largest classes I’ve discovered is that, particularly with giant enterprises, it’s important to perceive their enterprise and trade intimately,” he added, noting that Hupo’s fashions have been educated from the beginning on actual monetary merchandise, frequent objections, consumer sorts, and regulatory necessities.
The most recent spherical brings complete funding to $15 million for the reason that 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 group.
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 hundreds of individuals.
