Motion, a Y Combinator–backed startup, has secured $38 million in fresh funding to turn its integrated suite of AI agents into something akin to a Microsoft Office for small and midsize businesses. The round, led by Scale Venture Partners’ Stacey Bishop, values the company at roughly $550 million post-money and brings total funding to $75 million, with participation from HOF Capital, 468 Capital, SignalFire, Valor Equity Partners, Fellows Fund, Leonis Capital, Apollo Projects, and continued support from Y Combinator.
The pitch is simple but ambitious: instead of buying disconnected AI point tools for sales, support, scheduling, and marketing, Motion bundles interoperable agents that share context, hand off work, and plug into the software stack SMBs already use.
What Motion is building
Motion started as an AI-powered calendar and task manager after joining Y Combinator’s Winter 2020 batch. It has since evolved into a coordinated “agentic” platform that includes an executive assistant for scheduling, notes, and email; a sales representative; a customer support agent; and a marketing assistant that drafts blog and social posts. Each agent can operate independently but is designed to collaborate with others, reducing the manual glue work teams often perform across tools.
The suite integrates with everyday SMB systems—Slack, Google Workspace, Microsoft Teams, and Salesforce among them—so agents can read and write data where work already happens. Motion charges on a usage model: a base allocation of credits with tiered pricing from $29 per month for a single seat with limited functions to $600 for 25 seats with access to all agents and 250,000 credits, plus overages as needed.
Co-founders Harry Qi (CEO), Omid Rooholfada, Ethan Yu, and Chander Ramesh are explicit about the analogy: productivity went mainstream through bundled apps that worked together. They believe AI will follow the same trajectory—shifting from fragmented pilots to a cohesive, general-purpose agent suite.
Why an ‘Office’ for agents matters
Point solutions are easy to start and hard to scale. Companies quickly discover that a chatbot in support, a copy tool in marketing, and a call summarizer for sales don’t share context or policy. Data silos, inconsistent prompts, and duplicative integration work inflate costs and erode trust.
A bundled agent suite can orchestrate end-to-end workflows: a support agent escalates a high-value ticket to sales with full context; the sales agent schedules a follow-up through the assistant; the marketing agent updates FAQs when patterns emerge. That handoff is what many vendors talk about but few deliver at scale, because it requires shared memory, role-specific guardrails, and reliable actions across APIs.
The timing aligns with a broader market shift. McKinsey estimates generative AI could add up to $4.4 trillion in annual economic value, but the bulk of realized gains so far come from clear, repetitive processes. For resource-constrained SMBs, a suite that reduces integration overhead and shortens time-to-value is compelling—especially with consumption pricing that behaves more like cloud than traditional SaaS.
Inside the round and the strategy
Motion says the $38 million Series C was 5x oversubscribed, with a preemptive C2 add-on following the close. The company has drawn a mix of early- and growth-stage backers and kept YC in every round. An intriguing signal: Ashutosh Desai, a longtime YC adviser and executive coach to Qi, joined the company full-time—often a sign of tight founder-operator alignment and hands-on scaling.
The capital will go toward deepening the agent suite, expanding integrations, and hardening the controls enterprises increasingly demand—observability, policy management, and audit trails for AI actions. That last piece is critical: a powerful agent is only as valuable as its ability to be measured, governed, and corrected.
Competitive landscape and differentiation
Motion enters a crowded arena. Microsoft is weaving Copilot deeper into 365 and Teams. Google is pushing agentic features across Workspace and Vertex AI. Salesforce is advancing Agentforce to knit together CRM workflows. Newer entrants are tackling specialized agents for software development, research, or revenue operations.
Motion’s wedge is the SMB segment: companies that need real automation but cannot fund bespoke agent deployments or sustain heavy prompt engineering. Its credits-based pricing and prebuilt playbooks aim to compress deployment from months to days. If Motion can prove reliable cross-agent orchestration—less hallucination, better tool use, cleaner handoffs—it can defend its bundle against incumbent suites and niche point tools alike.
What to watch next
Three signals will show whether Motion’s “Office for agents” thesis holds: activation (how many customers deploy multiple agents within the first month), retention (do teams expand seats and workloads over time), and accuracy (measurable reductions in manual rework as agents coordinate tasks). Expect Motion to roll out verticalized templates—think agency, professional services, or IT help desk—where workflows are repeatable and value is easy to quantify.
Qi, a former quant who once walked away from a seven-figure salary, frames it simply: building a durable company requires making AI genuinely useful, not just novel. With new capital, a maturing product, and a clear bet on bundling, Motion now has to prove that an integrated stack of agents can become daily software—much like the productivity suites that reshaped office work before it.