When Justin Kim, co-founder and CEO of Hupo, first launched his company about four years ago, it wasn’t selling AI-powered sales coaching to banks, finance services, or insurance companies. The company originally began as Ami, a mental wellness platform 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 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 across sports, there are clear patterns in how performance shows up,” Kim said in an interview with TechCrunch. His curiosity eventually shaped his professional focus. Kim started exploring what drives performance at work, and one theme kept surfacing: mental resilience. That idea led him to found a startup in 2022. Early work with Meta, which backed this startup in the seed round, helped sharpen some hard-earned lessons: software only works when it fits into daily behavior like …