At age 23, Harry Qi had already achieved the kind of financial success most people never reach in their lifetime: an annual income of approximately $1 million.

At the time, he had just graduated from college and landed his first job as a quantitative analyst, or "quant." In the hedge fund industry, this term refers to professionals who analyze stock trading in quantitative funds driven by statistical models. But like many who chase ever-higher incomes, he felt an inner emptiness.

"At some point, you want to make a bigger impact on the world," said the now 29-year-old Qi in an interview with TechCrunch.

So in 2019, he teamed up with high school friend Omid Rooholfada and college friend Ethan Yu (who was also working at a hedge fund at the time) to develop an AI-powered scheduling and task management app, which they submitted to startup accelerator Y Combinator. They were accepted into the Winter 2020 batch, immediately quit their jobs, and officially launched their entrepreneurial journey. Motion later brought on early employee Chander Ramesh as a fourth co-founder.

Over the next six years, they steadily expanded Motion's user base, primarily targeting prosumer customers. Then in May of this year, they launched an integrated AI agent bundle for small and medium-sized businesses.

Qi revealed to TechCrunch that usage of this agent suite has grown explosively: in just four months, this business segment has reached over 10,000 B2B customers with $10 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR).

The strong growth momentum enabled them to complete a $38 million Series C funding round led by Stacey Bishop of Scale Venture Partners, which was oversubscribed by 5x, followed quickly by a Series C2 round with preferential subscription rights, bringing the post-money valuation to $550 million.

Qi stated that the startup has raised $75 million in total from numerous investors, including HOF Capital, 468 Capital, SignalFire, as well as Valor Equity Partners, Fellows Fund, Leonis Capital, and the notable Apollo Projects (Altman Brothers Fund). Y Combinator has participated in every funding round.

The company's development is going so well that even Ashutosh Desai, who was Qi's executive coach during his time at Y Combinator and also serves as a Y Combinator advisor, has joined Motion full-time.

Motion is clearly positioned to serve small and medium-sized businesses that don't have massive budgets to customize and train their own AI agents.

The core appeal lies in the fact that all agent functions (each with its own personalized name) are integrated with each other. Currently, the suite includes the following modules: an "Executive Assistant" that handles scheduling automation, note-taking, and email replies; a sales representative agent; a customer support representative agent; and a marketing assistant agent for writing blog posts and social media content.

These agents are also integrated with hundreds of tools commonly used by SMBs, such as Slack, Google Apps, Teams, and Salesforce. Motion uses a usage-based billing model: users receive a base allocation of credits, and if they need to use more agent functions, they can purchase additional credits based on usage. The pricing plans are tiered: the lowest tier costs $29 per month and includes 1 account, 1,000 credits, and limited agent functionality; the highest tier costs $600 per month and includes 25 accounts, all agent functions, and 250,000 credits; custom pricing is available for needs beyond the base tiers.

In Qi's view, Motion's goal is to become the "Microsoft Office of AI agents." "There's an opportunity right now to build the next Microsoft," he said. "Essentially, you need to build a complete application ecosystem." This contrasts sharply with purchasing single-function AI products (like one sales agent, one customer service bot, one blog writing tool) that often can't work together.

While acknowledging the enormous "pressure" of starting a business in the rapidly changing AI field, he says he wouldn't want to return to his old life. Today, he has become friends with many customers who can message him anytime, and every day clients tell him how Motion has made their work easier, more efficient, or helped them increase revenue.

"If I'm being honest from a financial perspective, the choice wasn't actually wise. I could probably be making between $3 million and $10 million annually now (if I had stayed in hedge funds)," he jokes, while also mentioning that as an early-stage founder, his current income is middle-class but comfortable. However, his dream is to build a company with lasting impact like Microsoft.

"Was this the right path?" Looking at customer feedback, he nods affirmatively. "What gets you up and motivated every day is knowing you've really built something useful."