Motion raises $60M at a $550M valuation to redefine the next era of work

Four years ago, we met Harry Qi and his co-founders over coffee in San Francisco. The product itself was still raw, but the team’s conviction was undeniable. They weren’t just chasing a clever feature; their goal was to redefine how millions of people work.

That belief led us to back Motion’s Series A in 2020. Four years later, we’ve doubled down with super-prorata participation in every round, including Motion’s newly announced $60M raise at a $550M valuation across Series B, C, and C2.

From niche tool to category-defining agentic suite

Like many startups, Motion started with a niche focus: An AI-powered calendar and task manager that was a smart wedge into a noisy space. The founders quickly realized they were onto something bigger. Managing tasks solved part of the problem, but what if the platform could take the next step and execute them?

They began expanding Motion into what it is today: a complete agent-native work suite. Beyond calendars, Motion powers project management, docs, sheets, tasks, knowledge management, and business intelligence, designed for seamless human and AI collaboration.

The team’s latest innovation is ‘AI Employees.’ Think of them as out-of-the-box digital teammates that don’t just track work, but complete it. They can draft proposals, update project plans, and respond to client requests, all within the same platform their human teammates use.

We always asked ourselves: “Why should AI tasks live outside the systems where human tasks already run?” By unifying them, we unlock 100 times the value and give SMBs the same leverage that Fortune 500s get from expensive custom AI builds.

Harry Qi

Co-Founder & CEO, Motion

A playbook any founder can learn from

Watching Motion scale has been a masterclass in startup building. For founders, these are the lessons worth underlining:

• Velocity wins. Motion ships with a speed that’s rare even in Silicon Valley. Features move from whiteboard to customer hands in days, not quarters.
• Reinvent to expand. Calendaring was never the endgame. The team continuously reinvented the product until they unlocked a path to building the entire work suite of the agentic era, perhaps what Microsoft Office would look like if it were invented today.
• Stay close to your customer. While big enterprises experiment with armies of AI engineers, Motion stayed focused on SMBs, which are the backbone of the economy. Over 80% of new ARR comes from this segment.

The results speak for themselves: 100,000+ paying customers, ARR tripling year-over-year, and $10M in new ARR from ‘AI Employees’ in just four months.

Built for everyday businesses

AI headlines often center on Big Tech or bleeding-edge AI labs, but Motion’s north star is different: the everyday businesses that keep America running.

That’s what Motion delivers: a platform where human and AI employees sit side by side, running the business together.

The impact is tangible:

• An IT services CEO credits Motion’s AI project manager with cutting delivery time by 30%.
• Marketing agencies report saving hours each week thanks to AI-powered executive assistant agents.
• Customers say Motion is the first platform where “AI feels truly built-in, not bolted on.”

For their customers, Motion is the core operating system for how they work.

In just a few years, a single human will manage hundreds of AI Employees completing thousands of tasks inside the Motion platform. Our vision has always been to help everyday businesses grow by letting AI handle the busywork, so humans can focus on what really matters.

Harry Qi

Co-Founder & CEO, Motion

Why we’re doubling down on this team

We’ve partnered with Motion through its biggest wins and its toughest challenges, and what stands out is how the team shows up in both moments. Four years in, their co-founders are still working shoulder-to-shoulder. They’ve since welcomed seasoned leaders like Luis Carrasco (ex-Microsoft Teams), Antonio Garcia (ex-Salesforce), and Ashutosh Desai (founder of Make School and former Visiting Partner at Y Combinator) to the team, blending startup urgency with enterprise-scale experience. The culture they’ve built is ambitious yet humble, fast, and thoughtful.

This is a team built to win big. Here’s how they describe their recent momentum:

• Growth: B2B ARR growing 3x year-over-year and scaling 20% month-over-month.
• Product-market fit: Over 80% of ARR comes from SMBs and mid-market customers (businesses that need ready-to-use solutions, not armies of consultants).

We’ve continued to lean in because Motion is exactly the kind of team and market opportunity we’re excited to back. At SignalFire, we couldn’t be prouder to have been there since the beginning, and to keep backing Harry and the team at every step forward.

Join the mission - an invitation to builders

Motion is now a 65-person team with the drive of a scrappy startup and the ambition of a category-definer. With this new funding, they’re hiring across engineering, product, and AI research to expand the agentic suite and push the frontier of what’s possible.

For founders, Motion’s story is a reminder to start narrow, move fast, listen obsessively, and never stop reinventing. For builders, it’s an opportunity to help shape the next great work suite for the AI era, which empowers everyday businesses to thrive. 

Explore open roles here.

Read TechCrunch’s coverage of the announcement here.