Jab Justin Kim, Co-Founder and CEO Hopowhen he first started his company four years ago, he wasn’t selling AI-powered sales coaching to banks, financial services, or insurance companies. The company originally started as AMI, a mental wellness platform that focused on how people manage stress, manage behavior over time and change behavior.

“I’ve always been a huge sports fan – basketball, football, Formula One, MMA – and what draws me to all of them is performance. In my free time, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about how to actually push human performance. People are very different.

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

Early work with META, which supported the startup in its seed stage, helped sharpen some hard-earned lessons: software only works if it fits into the daily behaviors people already live and work in, and tools designed to help people “improve” often fail if they’re judgmental, abstract, or disconnected from real work.

These ideas carried over from the beginning through his pivot, and today they form Hopo’s approach to cell coaching. 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 shift was not as dramatic as it might seem. “In both cases the fundamental problem is efficiency at scale. In banking and insurance, results vary, not because of motivation, but because of differences in training, feedback and confidence. Traditional coaching can’t reach everyone, and managers can’t sit in on every conversation.”

AI that understands conversations in real-time now allows teams to receive constant coaching, even in the most formal, complex industry, Kim said.

HUPO has raised a $10 million Series A round led by DST Global Partners, with participation from Mutual Fund, Goodwater Capital, January Capital, and Strong Ventures. In addition, the Singapore-headquartered startup now serves dozens of customers in APAC and Europe, including Prudential, Axa, Monolife, HSBC, Bank of Ireland, and Grab.

“BFSI [Banking, Financial Services and Insurance] “It’s a notoriously difficult vertical for early-stage companies, but our customers typically increase contracts 3-8x in the first six months,” said the founder.

Kim began his career at Bloomberg, selling enterprise software to banks, asset managers, and insurance companies, where he saw how complex formal sales can be. He later worked in product development at the South Korean fintech Viva Republica, the company behind Toss, learning how technology built around real-world consumer behavior could reshape traditional financial services.

“Happo 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 was able to understand context and understand coaching in real-time, it became clear to me that sales coaching—specifically in banking and insurance—was the right place to apply it.”

Many AI sales coaching tools start with technology first, Kim said, but Hoopo took a different approach, building its platform around the way banks and insurers work. “The biggest lesson I’ve learned is that, especially with large enterprises, you have to understand their business and their industry in detail,” he added.

The latest round has reached $15 million in total funding since the company was founded in 2022. The new capital will go toward expanding its products, including real-time coaching features, scaling enterprise-grade deployments, and growing go-to-market efforts in banking, financial services, and insurance.

In five years, Kim says he wants Hoopo to expand beyond sales coaching and help large teams perform at scale, providing managers and employees with clear insights and actionable guidance, even tens of thousands of people.