When Justin Kim, Co-Founder and CEO hoopoWhen it first launched its company about four years ago, it wasn’t selling AI-powered sales coaching to banks, finance services, or insurance companies. The company originally started as Amy, a mental wellness platform that focused on how people manage pressure, form habits, and change behavior over time.
“I’ve always been a big sports fan – basketball, football, Formula One, MMA – and the thing that attracts me to all of them is the performance. In my free time, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about what really drives human performance. People are very different, but across all sports, there are clear patterns to what performance looks like,” Kim said in an interview with TechCrunch.
His curiosity ultimately shaped his professional focus. Kim began to explore what drives performance at work, and one theme kept emerging: mental flexibility. That idea inspired him to found a startup in 2022.
Early work with Meta, which backed this startup in a seed round, helped hone in on some hard-earned lessons: Software only works when it fits into daily behavior like how people already live and work, and tools designed to help people “improve” often fail if they’re judgmental, abstract, or disconnected from real work, Kim told TechCrunch.
Those ideas followed the startup through its pivot, and today they shape Hoopoe’s approach to sales coaching; Less about changing human decisions and more about helping people in the moments that really matter in banking, insurance and financial services.
Kim said this change is not as dramatic as it may seem. “The main problem in both cases is performance at scale. In banking and insurance, results differ, not because of motivation, but because training, feedback and confidence differ. Traditional coaching cannot reach everyone, and managers cannot be involved in every conversation.”
Kim said AI that understands conversations in real time now allows teams to receive consistent coaching, even in a highly regulated, complex industry.
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Hoopoe has raised $10 million Series A led by DST Global Partners with participation from Collaborative Fund, Goodwater Capital, January Capital, and Strong Ventures. Additionally, the Singapore-headquartered startup now serves dozens of clients in APAC and Europe, including Prudential, AXA, Manulife, HSBC, Bank of Ireland and Grab.
“BFSI (banking, financial services and insurance) is an extremely tough vertical for early-stage companies, but our clients typically extend contracts 3-8x within the first six months,” the founder said. “We will expand into the US in the first half of this year, where delivery-heavy financial models create a strong need for scalable coaching.”
Kim started his career at Bloomberg selling enterprise software to banks, asset managers and insurers, where he saw how complex regulated sales can be. He later worked in product development at South Korean fintech Viva Republica, the company behind Toss, and learned how technology built around real user behavior can reshape traditional financial services.
Kim said, “Hupo sits at the intersection of those experiences. I understood the buyer, the end user, and the operational reality of selling financial products.” “Once AI was able to understand context and coach in real time, it became clear to me that sales coaching – particularly in banking and insurance – was the right place to implement it.”
Many AI sales coaching tools start with technology first, but Hoopoe took a different approach, building its platform based on the way banks and insurers operate, Kim said. “The biggest lesson I learned is that, especially with larger enterprises, you have to understand their business and industry in detail,” he said, noting that Hoopoe’s model was trained from the beginning on real financial products, common objections, customer types, and regulatory requirements.
The latest round brings the total funding raised since the company’s founding in 2022 to $15 million. The new capital will go towards expanding its product, including real-time coaching features, scaling enterprise-grade deployments, enhancing go-to-market efforts in banking, financial services and insurance, and building out the team.
Kim says he wants Hoopoe to expand beyond sales coaching in five years to help larger teams perform at scale, giving managers and employees clear insights and practical guidance, even among thousands of people.
