By the time Harry Qi was 23 years old, he had achieved the kind of financial success that most people will never attain: making about $1 million a year.
He was working as “a quant” in his first job out of college. That’s hedge-fund speak for a stock-trading analyst at a statistical-model driven “quant” fund. But, like many people who spend their energies pursuing ever more money, he felt empty.
“At some point you just want to make a much bigger impact on this world,” Qi, now 29, tells TechCrunch.
So in 2019, he and his high school buddy, Omid Rooholfada, along with Ethan Yu (Qi’s friend from college — also working at a hedge fund) built an AI calendaring and task management app and applied to Y Combinator. They were accepted into the Winter 2020 batch and promptly quit their jobs to go be founders. Motion has since added a fourth co-founder, early employee Chander Ramesh.
Over the next six years, they steadily grew Motion’s mostly professional consumer customer base until, in May, they launched an integrated AI agent bundle for small and mid-sized businesses.
They saw usage of their agent bundle explode. In four months, that segment of their business alone grew to over 10,000 B2B customers, and $10 million in ARR, Qi tells TechCrunch.
Their growth led to a five-times oversubscribed $38 million Series C round, led by Stacey Bishop at Scale Venture Partners, and a fast preemptive C2 round at a $550 million post-money valuation.
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The startup has raised $75 million to date from investors like HOF Capital, 468 Capital, and SignalFire with participation from Valor Equity Partners, Fellows Fund, Leonis Capital, and some other big names, like the Altman brothers’ fund Apollo Projects. Y Combinator has invested in every round as well, Qi says.
The company is doing so well that Ashutosh Desai, Qi’s executive coach from his YC days, and a YC advisor, joined as a full-timer as well.
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