Agentic artificial intelligence startup Motion has raised $38 million in a Series C funding round. The round was led by Scale Venture Partners and saw participation from existing investors HOF Capital, 468 Capital, SignalFire and Y Combinator, and new investors Valor Equity Partners, Fellows Fund, Leonis Capital and more than a dozen angel investors.
Motion was founded in 2019 by its current CEO Henry Qi, who used to be a hedge fund analyst. The company started out by building an AI-powered calendar, and task management application, and it got its big break when it was accepted into Y Combinator’s Winter 2020 batch.
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The company grew its customer base over six years, and debuted a suite of AI agents in May. The AI agents have been designed to perform very specific tasks that can help to automate business processes at small and midsized businesses. This suite gained immediate popularity, and in four months’ time, the company was able to grow its business-to-business customer base to more than 10,000, while its annual recurring revenue soared to more than $10 million.
Motion’s appeal comes from the fact that it’s 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 and email replies, a sales rep, a 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. Prices range from $29 per month for one seat, 1,000 credits and limited agent functions to $600 for 25 seats and all agents, 250,000 credits. Then custom pricing from there.
“There’s an opportunity here to build the next Microsoft. 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,” Qi, who founded Motion at the age of 23, told TechCrunch.
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 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.”
Motion plans to use its latest funding 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.