Meta-backed startup Hupo is emerging as one of the early breakout stories of 2026, after a bold pivot from mental wellness to AI-powered sales coaching that is beginning to pay off across the global banking and insurance industry. The Singapore-based company has just closed a fresh funding round and is now preparing to take its AI coaching platform into the U.S., betting that financial services sales teams worldwide are ready for real-time, AI-driven performance support.
Hupo’s journey began around four years ago under a different name: Ami, a mental wellness platform built around helping people manage pressure, build habits, and change behavior over time. Those behavioral science roots never went away; instead, they now sit at the core of Hupo’s repositioning as a sales coaching tool for highly regulated industries where every client conversation can impact revenue, compliance, and customer trust.
Co-founder and CEO Justin Kim describes the move as less of a leap and more of an evolution. “The core problem in both cases is performance at scale,” Kim explained, noting that in banking and insurance, outcomes diverge not because people lack motivation, but because “training, feedback, and confidence differ. Traditional coaching can’t reach everyone, and managers can’t sit in on every conversation.” That insight pushed the team to ask how AI could deliver the same kind of psychological resilience and high-quality coaching that Ami once targeted for mental wellness, but now inside day-to-day sales conversations.
Today, Hupo’s platform listens to and analyzes sales calls in real time, surfacing prompts, objection-handling guidance, and compliance-sensitive nudges tailored to banking, financial services, and insurance (BFSI) teams. Rather than focusing on replacing human decision-making, the product is designed to “help people in the moments that really matter” by providing consistent coaching support when a customer is asking tough questions or navigating complex financial products. Hupo’s models have been trained from the outset on real financial products, common objections, client archetypes, and regulatory scenarios, giving the system a domain-specific edge that general-purpose AI tools often lack.
The pivot has quickly translated into commercial traction. Hupo now counts more than 20 enterprise customers, including major insurers and banks such as AXA, Prudential, Manulife, HSBC, Bank of Ireland, Grab, and UOB, according to recent filings and company statements. In many cases, Kim says those early customers ramp up their usage rapidly: “BFSI is a notoriously difficult vertical for early-stage companies, but our customers typically expand contracts 3x to 8x within the first six months.” Investors argue that such numbers are unusual for a startup still in its first few years of operation, particularly in a sector known for slow procurement cycles and heavy compliance checks.
The renewed momentum has caught the attention of global investors. Hupo recently secured around 10 to 14 million dollars in Series A financing, led by DST Global Partners, bringing its total funding to roughly 15 million dollars since its 2022 founding. Meta’s New Product Experimentation team, which participated in an earlier seed round, backs Hupo as its first early-stage startup investment in the Asia-Pacific region, underscoring the tech giant’s interest in vertical AI tools for enterprise. The new capital will be deployed into richer real-time coaching features, enterprise-scale deployments, and expanded go-to-market operations in BFSI, alongside aggressive hiring.
For Kim, who previously sold enterprise software to banks and insurers while at Bloomberg, the move into AI sales coaching is a natural convergence of his past and present. “Hupo sits at the intersection of those experiences. I understood the buyer, the end user, and the operational reality of selling financial products,” he said, adding that once AI could “understand context and coach in real time, it became obvious… that sales coaching especially in banking and insurance was the right place to apply it.” That combination of domain fluency and performance science has become a central part of Hupo’s pitch to risk-averse financial institutions evaluating AI vendors.
Meta’s endorsement and Hupo’s early growth are also feeding into a broader narrative about AI in financial services, as regulators and boards scrutinize how algorithms shape frontline behavior. Industry backers argue that Hupo’s design choices — training on industry-specific data, emphasizing compliance, and keeping humans in the loop — make it easier for banks and insurers to experiment with AI without handing over the reins entirely. “It’s rare to see a company generate real enterprise revenue this quickly, and even rarer to see it happen in a market as complex and hard to penetrate as banking and insurance,” said Collaborative Fund partner Andrew Montgomery, calling Hupo’s early performance “not just about growth; it’s about earning trust in one of the most demanding enterprise environments.”
Looking ahead, Hupo is setting its sights on North America, with plans to enter the U.S. market in the first half of this year, targeting distribution-heavy financial models that depend on large, dispersed salesforces. Over the next five years, Kim wants the company to move beyond sales coaching alone and become a broader performance layer for large organizations, “helping large teams perform at scale” and giving managers and employees clearer, data-driven guidance across tens of thousands of people. If the current growth trajectory continues, Hupo’s pivot from mental wellness to AI sales coaching may be remembered less as a risky reset and more as a timely read on where human performance and enterprise AI are converging.
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