Y Combinator-backed startup Motion has announced that it has raised $38 million in new funding to build what it calls the new “Microsoft Office” for AI agents. This milestone comes as the company reaches a $550 million post-money valuation, reflecting its rapid growth.
One of the company’s founders, Harry Qi, had already achieved significant financial success at just 23 years old, earning $1 million annually. However, he confessed that merely making money left him with a sense of emptiness, expressing instead his desire to “make a bigger impact on the world.”
In 2019, Qi teamed up with his high school friend Omid Rooholfada and college classmate Ethan Yu to develop an AI-powered calendar and task management app, which they submitted to Y Combinator. After being accepted into the Winter 2020 batch, all three quit their lucrative jobs to launch Motion. Later, early team member Chander Ramesh joined as the fourth co-founder.
Over six years, Motion steadily expanded its customer base, focusing primarily on professional consumers. However, in May this year, the company entered a new phase of rapid growth after launching its integrated AI agent package for small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs). In just four months, this line of business alone reached over 10,000 B2B customers and generated more than $10 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR).
This success enabled Motion to close its $38 million Series C round, led by Scale Venture Partners, with investor demand exceeding five times the initial target. Shortly after, the company also completed a C2 round, bringing its valuation to $550 million post-money.
To date, Motion has raised a total of $75 million from investors such as HOF Capital, 468 Capital, SignalFire, Valor Equity Partners, Fellows Fund, Leonis Capital, and Apollo Projects, the fund backed by the Altman brothers.
Motion’s SMB solution consists of a suite of integrated AI agents with different functionalities, including an executive assistant (for scheduling, note-taking, and email replies), a sales representative, a customer support agent, and a marketing assistant. These agents are compatible with hundreds of other business tools, such as Slack, Google Apps, Teams, and Salesforce.
Harry Qi envisions Motion as the “agent version of Microsoft Office.” He emphasizes the importance of combining various functionalities into one unified system. Instead of buying separate AI products (e.g., one sales bot, one customer service bot, etc.), Motion allows businesses to have them all working together seamlessly.
Although Qi admits he now earns less than he did in finance, he considers the daily feedback from customers—telling him that Motion makes their lives easier—far more rewarding. For him, the true prize is not financial gain but the moral satisfaction of creating something genuinely useful.
