Some startups grind for years before their shot. Motion just bent time. The San Francisco company went from YC Winter 2020 as an AI calendar app to a $550 million valuation with $75 million raised, and a $60 million bundle across Series B, C, and C2 announced this week. That kind of velocity doesn’t come from luck. It comes from founders who saw the productivity arms race brewing and decided small and midsize businesses deserved more than spreadsheets taped to Slack channels.
Harry Qi, once running numbers as a hedge fund analyst, now runs Motion as CEO with the precision of someone who has seen how inefficiency eats margins alive. Omid Rooholfada, the CTO, turned architecture into orchestration, building AI “employees” that don’t just automate tasks but actually collaborate across sales, support, and project management. Add in Ethan Yu as Chief Product Officer, and you’ve got a founding trio designing not tools but teammates. This isn’t another AI plug-in bolted onto existing software. These agents are embedded, native, and already cutting project delivery times by 30 percent. That is impact, not hype.
Scale Venture Partners saw it too, leading a $38 million Series C that was oversubscribed five times over. Stacey Bishop now takes a board seat, bringing her SaaS playbook to the table. The insider crew, HOF Capital, 468 Capital, SignalFire, doubled down, while new backers like Valor Equity Partners, Fellows Fund, and Leonis Capital piled in alongside a roster of unicorn founders. Even Y Combinator stayed in the mix, proving that sometimes early believers become long-term partners.
The results justify the faith. Motion didn’t just triple revenue year over year, it vaulted its AI Employees product from zero to eight-figure ARR in three months. Ten thousand businesses are already running their daily operations on it, while 100,000 customers worldwide keep the platform humming. Marketing agencies, IT shops, construction firms, industries that live and die on deadlines, are banking time back thanks to Motion’s agents. For every executive drowning in meetings, the AI Project Manager and Executive Assistant agents aren’t novelties. They’re lifelines.
And this is just the start. The new funding fuels an aggressive roadmap: finance and HR agents this fall, a low-code builder in Q1 2026, and connectors into Shopify and Amazon later that year. Motion is scaling the team by more than a hundred hires to meet demand, while tightening integrations with Microsoft, Google, Slack, Salesforce, and the rest of the SMB toolkit. With SOC2 Type II and GDPR compliance, it is enterprise-ready even as it sharpens its SMB edge.
The $20 billion SMB productivity market is crowded with bolt-ons and shallow features. Motion’s play is different: a native AI workforce that doesn’t just schedule your meetings, it closes loops, hands off work, and makes sure the right things actually get done. That is why this isn’t just another funding announcement, it is the start of a category shift.
