Motion

In late 2018, Harry Qi was a quantitative trader at Optiver, earning over $1 million a year, and spending more mental energy managing his calendar than analyzing markets. That frustration — the scheduling hell of double-booked meetings, forgotten tasks, and endless email chains — led him to walk away from finance and build something that would solve it for everyone.

The Idea That Started in a San Francisco Apartment

Qi recruited co-founders Omid Rooholfada and Ethan Yu, both from quantitative and engineering backgrounds with the same pain point: brilliant people wasting hours on coordination instead of actual work. In 60 days of brutal 7 AM to 2 AM coding sessions, they built the core of what would become Motion and got into Y Combinator's Winter 2020 batch. The pitch was disarmingly simple — what if software could plan your day the way a great executive assistant would?

Motion's core innovation is its scheduling algorithm. Unlike traditional calendar apps that merely display events, Motion analyzes over 1,000 parameters — deadlines, task durations, priorities, dependencies, working preferences, and meeting patterns — and automatically constructs an optimal daily schedule. When a meeting runs long or a priority shifts, Motion instantly replans everything. Users stop asking "what should I do next?" and start actually doing it.

From Calendar Tool to Agentic Work Suite

The company's trajectory accelerated sharply in 2025. After raising a $13 million Series A in 2022 led by SignalFire — with angel backing from Sam Altman, Michael Seibel, and Cyrus Mistry (a founding Google Calendar product lead) — Motion expanded well beyond scheduling. The launch of AI Employees in mid-2025 marked a pivotal shift: users could now hire virtual AI agents that draft emails, generate documents, manage workflows, and execute tasks autonomously inside the platform. Revenue jumped from $2M ARR in late 2024 to over $50M ARR by August 2025 — a growth rate that made the company one of the fastest-growing AI productivity platforms in the world.

• 1M+ users across individuals and teams globally
• 100,000+ business customers as of September 2025
• $550M valuation following a $38M Series C led by Scale Venture Partners
• Ranked #1 fastest-growing product by Amplitude's Product Report

Over 80% of Motion's ARR comes from SMBs and mid-market customers — businesses that need AI productivity without armies of consultants. The platform integrates Google Calendar, Outlook, and iCloud, and positions itself as the command center for teams running on both human and AI employees. With 67 employees generating eight-figure ARR, Motion's revenue per headcount stands among the most efficient in B2B SaaS.