When Harry Chi turned 23, he already had financial success that many people don’t experience even after years of work: about $1 million per year. He worked as a quantitative analyst at a hedge fund, where decisions were based on statistical models. But even such a start didn’t spare him from inner burnout and the desire to have a significantly greater impact on the world.
“At some point you just want to make a much bigger impact on this world.”
The Start of Motion and the YC Journey
In 2019 Chi joined forces with classmate Omid Ruoholfada and Ethan Yu, who also worked at a hedge fund, to create an AI-powered calendar and task-management app. They applied to Y Combinator and were accepted into the Winter 2020 batch, after which they immediately left their jobs to become founders of Motion. A fourth cofounder, Chander Ramesh, later joined the team.
Over six years, Motion gradually built up a client base among professional users, mostly in the business segment. In May they unveiled an integrated AI agents package for small and medium-sized businesses.
Demand for the agent package surged: in four months the number of B2B clients surpassed ten thousand, and ARR reached $10 million.
Motion’s growth led to a Series C round of $38 million led by Stacey Bishop of Scale Venture Partners and to a rapid pre-emptive round C2 with a post-money valuation of around $550 million.
To date the company has raised over $75 million from investors, including HOF Capital, 468 Capital and SignalFire, with participation from Valor Equity Partners, Fellows Fund, Leonis Capital and other notable players, including Apollo Projects run by the Altman brothers. Y Combinator also invested in every round, Chi notes.
Motion has grown so dynamically that Ashutosh Desai, Chi’s former coach during his YC days and a YC advisor, joined the company as a full-time employee.
The company targets small and medium-sized businesses that don’t have large budgets to develop their own agents from scratch.
Motion’s strength is the integration of all agent functions into a single system with different roles. Today the package includes an executive assistant to automate scheduling, notes, and replying to emails; a sales agent; a customer-support representative; and a blog-writing and social-media-post assistant.
Agents integrate with hundreds of other SMB tools, such as Slack, Google Apps, Teams, Salesforce and others. Motion operates on a pay-as-you-go model: a base package with credits plus additional credits as needed depending on the number of agents. Prices range from $29 per month for one license with 1,000 credits to $600 for 25 licenses and full access to all agents with 250,000 credits. Further pricing terms are individual.
“There is an opportunity here to build the next Microsoft.”
“I wouldn’t go back to my previous life,” Chi admits, despite the constant stress in the fast-changing AI industry. He maintains close relationships with numerous clients, and every day one of them tells him how Motion makes their life easier, boosts productivity or revenue.
“If I’m honest, financially speaking, it would have been a bad decision. I’d probably be earning somewhere between 3 and 10 million a year right now.”
Nevertheless, Chi dreams of building a durable company with long-term value – similar to Microsoft – and believes that Motion can support people and businesses in their daily work with AI agents. His vision is for every user to have powerful assistants at hand that operate in harmony within a single system.
“What gets you out of bed in the morning is simply knowing that you’ve really created something useful.”