Meta-backed company Hupo finds growth after focusing on AI sales training starting with mental health

When Justin Kim, Co-Founder and CEO of You are not therewho first launched his company about four years ago, wasn’t selling AI-powered sales training to banks, financial services or insurance companies. The company originally started as Ami, a mental health platform that focuses on how people manage stress, form habits, and change behavior over time.

“I’ve always been a huge fan of sports — basketball, soccer, Formula 1, mixed martial arts — and what draws me to them all is performance. In my spare time, I spend a lot of time thinking about what actually drives human performance. People are very different, but across sports, there are clear patterns in how performance unfolds,” Kim said in an interview with TechCrunch.

His curiosity ultimately shaped his professional focus. Kim began exploring what drives performance at work, and one topic kept surfacing: mental resilience. This idea led him to found a startup in 2022.

Early work with Meta, which backed this startup in its seed round, helped sharpen some hard-won lessons: software only works when it fits into everyday behavior like the way people actually live and work, and tools designed to help people “get better” often fail if they are judgmental, abstract, or disconnected from real work, Kim told TechCrunch.

These ideas followed the startup through its pivot, and today they shape Hupo’s approach to sales training; It’s less about replacing human judgment and more about helping people in the moments that really matter in banking, insurance and financial services.

Kim said the transformation was not as dramatic as it might seem. “The fundamental problem in both cases is performance at scale. In banking and insurance, results vary, not because of motivation, but because training, feedback, and trust vary. Traditional training cannot reach everyone, and managers cannot participate in every conversation.”

AI that understands real-time conversations now allows teams to receive consistent training, even in a complex, highly regulated industry, Kim noted.

Hupo has raised a $10 million Series A led by DST Global Partners, with participation from Collaborative Fund, Goodwater Capital, Janwar Capital, and Strong Ventures. Additionally, the Singapore-headquartered startup now serves dozens of clients in Asia Pacific and Europe, including Prudential, AXA, Manulife, HSBC, Bank of Ireland and Grab.

“BFSI (Banking, Financial Services and Insurance) is a very challenging sector for early-stage companies, but our clients typically scale contracts by 3-8x within the first six months,” the founder said. “We will expand into the US in the first half of this year, where distribution-intensive financial models create a strong need for scalable training.”

Kim began his career at Bloomberg, selling enterprise software to banks, asset managers and insurance companies, where he saw the complexity of structured sales. He later worked on product development at South Korean fintech Viva Republica, the company behind Toss, and learned how technology built on real user behavior could reshape traditional financial services.

“Hupo is at the intersection of those experiences. It understands the buyer, the end user, and the operational realities of selling financial products,” Kim said. “Once AI was able to understand context and coach in real-time, it became clear to me that sales training – especially in banking and insurance – was the place to apply it.”

Many AI sales training tools start with the technology first, but Hupo took a different approach, building its platform around how banks and insurance companies work, Kim said. “One of the biggest lessons I’ve learned is that, especially with large institutions, you have to understand their business and industry in detail,” he added, noting that Hupo’s models are trained from the beginning on real financial products, common objections, customer types, and regulatory requirements.

The latest round brings its total funding to $15 million since the company’s founding in 2022. The new capital will go toward expanding its product, including real-time training features, expanding enterprise-level deployments, and increasing go-to-market efforts in banking, financial services, insurance, and team building.

Within five years, Kim says he wants Hupo to go beyond sales training and help large teams perform at scale, giving managers and employees clearer insights and actionable guidance, even across tens of thousands of people.