Motion Secures $38M Funding to Revolutionize SMB Productivity with Integrated AI Agents

Y Combinator-backed Motion raises fresh $38M to build the Microsoft Office of AI agents | TechCrunch

By the time Harry Qi was 23 years old, he had achieved the kind of financial success that most people will never attain: making about $1 million a year. He was working as "a quant" in his first job out of college. That's hedge-fund speak for a stock-trading analyst at a statistical-model driven "quant" fund. But, like many people who spend their energies pursuing ever more money, he felt empty. "At some point you just want to make a much bigger impact on this world," Qi, now 29, tells TechCrunch. So in 2019, he and his high school buddy, Omid Rooholfada, along with Ethan Yu (Qi's friend from college -- also working at a hedge fund) built an AI calendaring and task management app and applied to Y Combinator. They were accepted into the Winter 2020 batch and promptly quit their jobs to go be founders. Motion has since added a fourth co-founder, early employee Chander Ramesh. Over the next six years, they steadily grew Motion's mostly professional consumer customer base until, in May, they launched an integrated AI agent bundle for small and mid-sized businesses. They saw usage of their agent bundle explode. In four months, that segment of their business alone grew to over 10,000 B2B customers, and $10 million in ARR, Qi tells TechCrunch. Their growth led to a five-times oversubscribed $38 million Series C round, led by Stacey Bishop at Scale Venture Partners, and a fast preemptive C2 round at a $550 million post-money valuation. The startup has raised $75 million to date from investors like HOF Capital, 468 Capital, and SignalFire with participation from Valor Equity Partners, Fellows Fund, Leonis Capital, and some other big names, like the Altman brothers' fund Apollo Projects. Y Combinator has invested in every round as well, Qi says. The company is doing so well that Ashutosh Desai, Qi's executive coach from his YC days, and a YC advisor, joined as a full-timer as well. Motion is specifically geared toward small-mid-sized businesses that don't have bazillion-dollar budgets to custom write and train their own agents. Its appeal is that all agentic functions (each with a different human name) are integrated with the others. So far the suite includes an "executive assistant" for automating scheduling, note taking, email replies; a sales rep; customer support rep; and a blog- and social-media-post writing marketing assistant. The agents also integrate with hundreds of other typical SMB tools like Slack, Google Apps, Teams, Salesforce, etc. Motion charges via usage: a base set of credits, plus additional credits as needed, depending on the number of agents uses. Prices range from $29 per month for 1 seat, 1,000 credits and limited agent functions, to $600 for 25 seats and all agents, 250,000 credits. Then custom pricing from there. Qi views Motion like building the agentic equivalent of Microsoft Office. "There's an opportunity here to build the next Microsoft," he said. "You basically have to build all the applications." This is in contrast to buying point AI products -- a sales rep, a customer service bot, a blog-writing one -- that don't work together. Despite the admitted "stress" he endures as a founder building in AI's fast-changing field, he says he wouldn't go back to his old life. He's on a texting-friends basis with many of his customers and every day one of them tells him how Motion makes their lives easier, increases their productivity or revenue. "If I'm answering very honestly, financially speaking, it was still a bad decision. I'd probably be making somewhere between three and ten million a year right now," he jokes, while also noting that his now middle-class, early-stage founder income is still comfortable. But he also dreams of building an enduring company, like a Microsoft. "Was this the right path?" he nods, thinking of his customers. "What gets you out of bed is just knowing you actually built something useful."

Motion lands $38M in funding to expand its agentic AI suite for SMBs - SiliconANGLE

Motion lands $38M in funding to expand its agentic AI suite for SMBs Agentic artificial intelligence startup Motion, officially known as Nexusbird Inc., said today it has closed on a $38 million Series C round of funding that brings its total amount raised to date to $75 million and its valuation to $550 million. Today's round was led by Scale Venture Partners and saw participation from a host of others, including existing backers HOF Capital, 468 Capital, SignalFire and Y Combinator, and new investors Valor Equity Partners, Fellows Fund, Leonis Capital and over a dozen angel investors. Founded in 2019 by its Chief Executive Harry Qi, a former hedge fund analyst, Motion started out by building an AI-powered calendar and task management application, and got its big break when it was accepted into Y Combinator's Winter 2020 batch. The company slowly but surely grew its customer base over the next six years, until pivoting in May with the rise of AI agents. That month, it debuted a suite of AI agents that are designed to perform very specific tasks that can help to automate business processes at SMBs, which lack the multi-million dollar budgets required to develop their own AI products. The suite caught on like wildfire, and in just four months Motion was able to grow its business-to-business customer base to over 10,000, while its annual recurring revenue soared to over $10 million. In an interview with Techcrunch, Qi said that one of the main advantages of Motion's agentic AI suite is that each of the agents is deeply integrated with the others. So the executive assistant agent, which automates note taking, scheduling and email replies on behalf of company executives and other professionals, knows exactly what the other agents, including a sales representative, project manager and marketing assistant, are doing. Qi is nothing if not ambitious, telling Techcrunch that he believes there's an opportunity for Motion to become "the next Microsoft". He explained that the company's strategy is to build all of the key productivity agents and bundle them in one package. That differs from the current way of doing things, where most organizations purchase separate point AI solutions that don't integrate with one another. In contrast, Motion's agents work together as a cohesive team, mirroring the collaborative nature of human employees Integration is a big thing for Motion, and its agents also play nicely with third-party software tools such as Salesforce, Microsoft Teams and Slack, so users can call them up no matter where they're working. The rapid adoption of Motion's AI agents underscores the insatiable demand for SMBs to access the same kind of automation tools being widely adopted by large enterprises, so they can enhance their productivity and improve their operational efficiency. Motion's growth is aided by its competitive pricing, with prices starting at $29 per month per seat, with 1,000 credits and a limited number of agent functions, rising to $600 per month for 25 seats, with 250,000 credits and the full set of agentic capabilities. For businesses that require more seats or credits, Motion can negotiate a custom rate. Stacey Bishop of Scale Venture Partners, who will take a seat on Motion's board of directors, said the company reminds her of HubSpot Inc. during its early days, with its laser focus on building a product for SMBs before turning its attention to bigger pickings. "When I spoke with Motion's customers during due diligence, it was clear that its agentic work suite solves a very real problem," she pointed out. "These businesses want to use AI to run better, but they don't know where to start. Motion makes that leap possible." With today's funding, Motion plans to invest in research and development to expand the capabilities of its agentic suite, double-down on its marketing push and forge strategic partnerships with further integrations in mind.