By the time Harry Qi was 23 years old, he had achieved a level of financial success most people never attain, earning about one million dollars a year. He was working as a quant, which is hedge fund terminology for a stock-trading analyst at a statistical-model driven quantitative fund. Despite this success, he felt empty, realizing that pursuing ever more money was not fulfilling.
He wanted to make a much bigger impact on the world. So in 2019, Qi and his high school friend, Omid Rooholfada, along with Ethan Yu, a college friend also working at a hedge fund, built an AI calendaring and task management app. They applied to Y Combinator and were accepted into the Winter 2020 batch. They promptly quit their jobs to become founders. The company, Motion, later added a fourth co-founder, early employee Chander Ramesh.
Over the next six years, they steadily grew Motion’s customer base, which consisted mostly of professional consumers. Then in May, they launched an integrated AI agent bundle designed for small and mid-sized businesses. The usage of their agent bundle exploded. Within just four months, that segment of the business alone grew to over 10,000 B2B customers and reached ten million dollars in annual recurring revenue.
This rapid growth led to a five-times oversubscribed Series C funding round of 38 million dollars, led by Stacey Bishop at Scale Venture Partners. It was quickly followed by a preemptive C2 round that valued the company at 550 million dollars post-money. To date, the startup has raised 75 million dollars from investors including HOF Capital, 468 Capital, and SignalFire, with participation from Valor Equity Partners, Fellows Fund, Leonis Capital, and other notable names like the Altman brothers’ fund, Apollo Projects. Y Combinator has invested in every round.
The company is performing so well that Ashutosh Desai, Qi’s executive coach from his Y Combinator days and a YC advisor, joined as a full-time employee. Motion is specifically designed for small to mid-sized businesses that do not have massive budgets to custom write and train their own AI agents. Its key appeal is that all agentic functions, each with a different human name, are fully integrated with each other.
The current suite includes an executive assistant for automating scheduling, note taking, and email replies; a sales rep; a customer support rep; and a marketing assistant for writing blog and social media posts. These agents also integrate with hundreds of other typical SMB tools like Slack, Google Apps, Teams, and Salesforce.
Motion charges based on usage, offering a base set of credits with additional credits available as needed. Pricing depends on the number of agents used and ranges from 29 dollars per month for one seat and 1,000 credits with limited agent functions, to 600 dollars for 25 seats and all agents with 250,000 credits. Custom pricing is available beyond that.
Qi views Motion as building the agentic equivalent of Microsoft Office. He sees an opportunity to build the next Microsoft, stating that you basically have to build all the applications. This integrated approach contrasts with buying individual point AI products that do not work together.
Despite the admitted stress of being a founder in the fast-changing field of AI, Qi says he would not go back to his old life. He is on a texting basis with many customers who regularly tell him how Motion makes their lives easier, increases their productivity, or boosts their revenue.
He jokes that, financially speaking, leaving his quant job was probably a bad decision, as he would likely be earning between three and ten million dollars a year right now. He notes that his current middle-class, early-stage founder income is still comfortable. But his real dream is to build an enduring company like Microsoft. When asked if this was the right path, he nods, thinking of his customers, and says that what gets you out of bed is knowing you actually built something useful.