Motion raises $38M to build the Microsoft Office of AI agents
▼ Summary
– Harry Qi achieved significant financial success as a quant, earning about $1 million annually by age 23, but felt unfulfilled.
– He co-founded Motion, an AI calendaring and task management app, with friends in 2019 after being accepted into Y Combinator.
– Motion launched an AI agent bundle for SMBs in May, rapidly growing to over 10,000 B2B customers and $10 million in ARR within four months.
– The company raised $38 million in a Series C round and achieved a $550 million valuation, with total funding reaching $75 million from notable investors.
– Motion offers integrated AI agents for tasks like scheduling, sales, and marketing, priced from $29 to $600 monthly, aiming to be the “agentic equivalent of Microsoft Office.”
By the age of twenty-three, Harry Qi had already reached a level of financial success many only dream of, earning close to a million dollars annually. Working as a quantitative analyst at a hedge fund straight out of college, he found himself grappling with a sense of emptiness despite the lucrative rewards. The pursuit of wealth, he realized, wasn’t fulfilling his deeper desire to make a meaningful impact on the world.
This introspection led Qi, now 29, to co-found Motion in 2019 alongside his high school friend Omid Rooholfada and college peer Ethan Yu, who also came from a finance background. The trio developed an AI-powered calendaring and task management application, successfully securing a spot in Y Combinator’s Winter 2020 cohort. They left their jobs behind to focus fully on their startup, later welcoming early employee Chander Ramesh as the fourth co-founder.
For the next several years, Motion steadily expanded its user base, primarily among professional consumers. Then, in May of this year, the company introduced an integrated AI agent bundle specifically designed for small and midsized businesses. The response was explosive. Within just four months, this new segment attracted over 10,000 B2B customers and reached $10 million in annual recurring revenue.
This rapid growth caught the attention of investors, resulting in a heavily oversubscribed $38 million Series C funding round led by Stacey Bishop at Scale Venture Partners. A subsequent preemptive C2 round valued the company at $550 million post-money. To date, Motion has raised a total of $75 million from backers including HOF Capital, 468 Capital, and SignalFire, with participation from Valor Equity Partners, Fellows Fund, Leonis Capital, and Apollo Projects, the fund led by the Altman brothers. Y Combinator has supported the company in every funding round.
Ashutosh Desai, Qi’s executive coach during his Y Combinator days and a continued advisor, recently joined Motion as a full-time team member, signaling strong internal confidence in the company’s trajectory.
Motion’s core offering targets SMBs that lack the resources to develop custom AI agents in-house. The platform integrates multiple agentic functions, each assigned a human-like name, that work seamlessly together. Current features include an executive assistant for scheduling, note-taking, and email management; a sales representative; a customer support agent; and a marketing assistant capable of generating blog and social media content.
These agents connect with widely used business tools such as Slack, Google Apps, Teams, and Salesforce. Pricing is usage-based, starting at $29 per month for limited credits and agent access, scaling up to $600 monthly for expanded capabilities and higher credit allowances, with custom enterprise plans available beyond that.
Qi envisions Motion as the agentic equivalent of Microsoft Office, a unified suite rather than a collection of disjointed point solutions. He believes there’s a significant opportunity to build the next great productivity ecosystem by creating deeply integrated applications that work in harmony.
Though he admits that founding a company in the fast-moving AI industry brings considerable stress, Qi has no regrets about leaving his high-earning finance career. He maintains regular contact with customers, many of whom share how Motion has simplified their workflows, boosted productivity, or increased revenue.
Financially, he jokes, the switch was probably a poor decision, he might be earning several million more per year had he stayed in finance. Still, his current middle-class founder income feels comfortable, and the satisfaction of building something truly useful far outweighs any monetary sacrifice. His ambition now is to create an enduring company, one that stands the test of time like Microsoft.
Reflecting on his journey, Qi nods thoughtfully. What gets him out of bed each morning is the knowledge that he and his team are building tools that make a real difference in people’s professional lives.
(Source: TechCrunch)
