While Justin Kim, co-founder and CEO of You are not therefirst launched his company about four years ago, not selling AI-powered sales training to banks, financial services, or insurance companies. The company originally started as Ami, a mental health platform focused on how people manage stress, form habits, and change behavior over time.
“I’ve always been a big sports fan – basketball, football, Formula One, MMA – and what interests me is performance. In my free time, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about what really drives human performance. People are very different, but in sports, there are clear patterns in performance,” said Kim in an interview with TechCrunch.
Curiosity ultimately creates a professional focus. Kim began exploring what drives performance at work, and one theme kept emerging: mental toughness. That idea led him to found a startup in 2022.
Early work with Meta, which supported this startup in the seed round, helped hone some hard-earned lessons: software only works when it fits into everyday behavior like how people already live and work, and tools designed to help people “improve” often fail if they’re abstract, abstract, or disconnected from real work, Kim told TechCrunch.
These ideas followed the beginning through the pivot, and now they form Hupo’s approach to sales coaching; less about changing human judgment and more about helping people at a critical time in banking, insurance, and financial services.
Kim said the change wasn’t as dramatic as he thought. “The core problem in these cases is performance at scale. In banking and insurance, the results are different, not because of motivation, but because training, feedback, and confidence are different. Traditional training cannot reach everyone, and managers cannot sit in every conversation.”
AI that understands conversations in real time now allows teams to receive consistent training, even in complex, highly regulated industries, Kim said.
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Hupo has raised $10 million Series A led by DST Global Partners, with participation from Collaborative Fund, Goodwater Capital, January Capital, and Strong Ventures. In addition, the Singapore-headquartered startup currently serves dozens of customers in APAC and Europe, including Prudential, AXA, Manulife, HSBC, Bank of Ireland, and Grab.
“BFSI (Banking, Financial Services and Insurance) is a very difficult vertical for early-stage companies, but customers typically expand their contracts 3-8x within the first six months,” says the founder. “We will expand into the US in the first half of this year, where our highly distributed financial model creates a strong need for scalable coaching.”
Kim began his career at Bloomberg, selling enterprise software to banks, asset managers, and insurance companies, where he saw how organized sales became. He then worked in product development at South Korean fintech Viva Republica, the company behind Toss, learning how technology built on real user behavior can reshape traditional financial services.
“Hupo sits at the intersection of these experiences. I understand the buyer, the end user, and the operational reality of selling financial products,” said Kim. “Once AI can understand context and real-time training, it’s becoming clear that sales training – especially in banking and insurance – is the right place to apply it.”
Many AI sales training tools start with technology first, Kim said, but Hupo takes a different approach, building a platform around the way banks and insurance companies operate. “One of the biggest lessons I learned is that, especially with large companies, you need to understand the business and the industry in detail,” he said, noting that Hupo’s model was trained from the start on real financial products, common objections, client types, and regulatory requirements.
The latest round brings the total funding to $15 million since the company was founded in 2022. The new capital will go to expand the product, including real-time coaching features, scaling the company-class deployment, increasing go-to-market efforts in banking, financial services, and insurance, and building teams.
In five years, Kim said he wants Hupo to go beyond sales training and help large teams perform at scale, giving managers and employees clearer insights and practical guidance, even with tens of thousands of people.