Y Combinator-Supported Movement increases fresh $ 38 million to build the Microsoft Office of AI agents | Techcrunch

By the time Harry Qi was 23 years old, he had achieved the kind of financial success that most people will never achieve: earn about $ 1 million a year.

He worked as “a quantis” in his first job outside the university. That is Hedge -Fonds Speaking for a stock trading analyst in a “quant” fund -driven model. But just like many people who spend their energies pursue more and more money, he felt empty.

“At a certain point you just want to have a much greater impact on this world,” says Qi, now 29, to Techcrunch.

So in 2019 he and his secondary school buddy, Omid Rooholfada, together with Ethan Yu (Qi’s friend of the university – also working on a hedge fund) an AI -agenda and task management app and applied to Y Combinator. They were accepted in the Batch Winter 2020 and immediately stopped their jobs to become founders. Motion has since added a fourth co-founder, early employee Chaander Ramesh.

In the next six years they steadily grew the mainly professional customer base of Motion Consumer until they launched an integrated AI agent bundle for small and medium-sized companies in May.

They saw the use of their agent bundle explode. In four months that segment of their company alone grew more than 10,000 B2B customers and $ 10 million to ARR, Qi tells Techcrunch.

Their growth led to a five times exceeded $ 38 million Series C-round, led by Stacey Bishop at Scale Venture Partners, and a rapid preventive C2 round at a $ 550 million post-money appreciation.

The startup has so far collected $ 75 million from investors such as Hof Capital, 468 Capital and Signalfire with the participation of Valor Equity Partners, Fellows Fund, Leonis Capital and some other big names, such as the Apollo projects of Altman Brothers. Y Combinator has also invested in every round, says Qi.

The company is doing so well that Ashutosh Desai, the executive coach of Qi from his YC days, and a YC adviser, was also connected if a full-timer was connected.

Motion is specifically aimed at small medium -sized companies that have no budgets for Bazillion dollars to write and train their own agents.

The attraction is that all agent functions (each with a different human name) are integrated with the others. So far, the suite contains an “executive assistant” for automating planning, notes, e -mail answers; a seller; customer support representative; And a blog and social media post marketing assistant.

The agents also integrate with hundreds of other typical SMB tools such as Slack, Google Apps, Teams, Salesforce, etc. Movement costs via use: a basic set of credits, plus extra credits if necessary, depending on the number of use of agents. Prices range from $ 29 per month for 1 chair, 1,000 credits and limited agent functions, up to $ 600 for 25 seats and all agents, 250,000 credits. Then custom prices from there.

Qi looks at movement such as building the agent equivalent of Microsoft Office. “There is a chance here to build the next Microsoft,” he said. “You actually have to build all applications.” This is in contrast to buying Point AI products and a sales representative, a customer service bot, a blog-writing that do not work together.

Despite the admitted ‘stress’, he remains as a founder building in the rapidly changing field of AI, he says he would not go back to his old life. He is based on SMS friends with many of his customers and every day one of them tells him how movement makes their lives easier, increases their productivity or income.

“If I answer a very honest answer, financially, it was still a bad decision. I would probably take somewhere between three and ten million a year at the moment,” he also jokes, while noting that his now income from the middle class, in the early stage of the early stages is still comfortable. But he also dreams of building a sustainable company, such as a Microsoft.

“Was this the right path?” He nods and thinks of his customers. “What you get out of bed is just knowing that you actually built something useful.”