Meta-Backed Hupo Sees Growth After Shifting to AI Business Coaching from Mental Wellbeing

When Justin Kim, co-founder and CEO of You are not therelaunched his company about four years ago, he wasn’t selling AI-based business coaching to banks, financial services or insurance companies. The company started as Ami, a mental wellness platform focused on how people handle pressure, form habits, and change behavior over time.

“I’ve always been a big fan of sports – basketball, football, Formula 1, MMA – and what draws me to all of them is performance. In my free time, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about what actually drives human performance. People are very different, but in all sports there are clear patterns in how performance manifests itself,” Kim said in an interview with TechCrunch.

His curiosity ultimately shaped his career direction. Kim began exploring what determines job performance, and one theme kept coming up: mental resilience. This idea led him to found a startup in 2022.

Early work with Meta, which supported that startup through the seed cycle, helped refine some hard-won 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 are judgmental, abstract, or disconnected from real work, Kim told TechCrunch.

These ideas have followed the startup throughout its pivot and shape Hupo’s approach to sales coaching today; 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 change is not as drastic as it seems. “The central issue in both cases is performance at scale. In banking and insurance, results vary, not because of motivation, but because training, feedback and trust differ. Traditional coaching cannot reach everyone and managers cannot participate in every conversation.”

AI that understands conversations in real time now allows teams to benefit from consistent coaching, even in a complex and highly regulated industry, Kim noted.

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

“BFSI [Banking, Financial Services and Insurance] is a notoriously difficult sector for start-ups, but our clients typically increase deals 3-8x in the first six months,” the founder said. “We will be expanding into the US in the first half of this year, where distribution-focused financial models create a strong need for scalable coaching.”

Kim began his career at Bloomberg, selling enterprise software to banks, asset managers and insurers, where he saw how complex regulated sales could be. He then worked on product development at Viva Republica, the South Korean fintech company behind Toss, learning how technology built around real user behavior could reshape traditional financial services.

“Hupo sits at the intersection of these experiences. I understood the buyer, the end user and the operational reality of selling financial products,” Kim said. “Once AI became capable of understanding context and real-time coaching, it became clear to me that business coaching, particularly in the banking and insurance industry, was the right place to apply it.

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

The latest round brings total funding to $15 million since the company’s inception in 2022. The new capital will be used to expand its product, including real-time coaching features, expand enterprise-level deployments, increase go-to-market efforts in banking, financial services and insurance, and strengthen the team.

In five years, Kim wants Hupo to go beyond business coaching and help large teams operate at scale, giving managers and employees clearer insights and practical advice, even for tens of thousands of people.