Why We Invested in Motion: The Agentic Work Suite for Everyone

The User Interview That Started It All

Our relationship with Motion started as a serendipitous human story rather than a polished pitch meeting. In 2021 the world was still in lockdown and everyone was juggling countless video calls. A mutual acquaintance had mentioned a young founder named Harry Qi who was building a smarter way to stay on top of work. We tried Motion and immediately loved the product thinking behind it. We emailed, messaged on LinkedIn, even asked friends for an intro, but heard nothing back. As we later learned, they were hyper focused and spending most of their time talking to users.

A few weeks later, Harry sent out a "request for a user interview" email with his personal Motion scheduling link. Since we've been early users of Motion, we booked a slot and thought it was also a great way to also tell Harry about Leonis Capital.  Harry showed up on Zoom, hoodie and all, with a Motion V1 that aimed to make work feel less chaotic. Instead of giving us a hard sell, he peppered us with questions about how we worked and what frustrated us. We shared feedback, offered some ideas and, almost as an aside, mentioned that Leonis invests in product‑obsessed founders. That humble, curiosity‑driven conversation marked the beginning of our partnership.

Soon after, we met Harry in person over lunch in San Francisco and learned about the three‑person team: Harry and his co‑founders, Omid Rooholfada and Ethan Yu. They had left lucrative quant and hedge‑fund careers to build Motion, coding from a tiny apartment and dreaming big.

For us, the decision to back Motion came from these personal interactions as much as technical due diligence that followed later.

From Prototype to Category‑Defining Agent Platform

What impressed us most about Motion was the way the team used a simple scheduling prototype as a listening tool. They weren’t trying to build yet another work productivity app; they were using the earliest version of the product to start conversations with real users, to understand where the bottlenecks in modern work truly existed. Over the next four years the company evolved far beyond their initial scheduling product.

Today, Motion is the first end‑to‑end agentic work suite, combining project management, document collaboration, spreadsheets, knowledge management and business intelligence with AI agents. These agents aren’t bolted onto a third‑party tool; they are native to the platform, with capabilities like scheduling meetings, drafting proposals, writing blog posts, and updating CRM records, while integrating with platforms such as Slack, Google Workspace, Microsoft Teams, and Salesforce. Harry and his co-founders believed SMBs would only embrace AI if it were delivered this way: a simple, all-in-one platform built from the ground up, where agents and applications are unified rather than retrofitted onto legacy systems.

That evolution has been matched by execution. Today, Motion serves over 100,000 customers and has scaled to mid-eight-figure ARR, with B2B ARR growing 3× year-over-year. The launch of AI Employees—pre-trained agents that handle project management, sales outreach, and marketing—alone generated $10 million in new ARR within four months. Customers report tangible gains: CEOs say Motion frees them from email and task-tracking so they can focus on strategy, while sales reps spend less time updating records and more time closing deals.

Why the Agentic Model Matters

At Leonis, our conviction in Motion comes from more than product execution, it comes from the architecture. Most AI tools fail because they are bolted onto legacy systems, leaving agents without the context or data access to act reliably. Motion rejected that model and built an integrated suite from day one.

This matters for three reasons central to our thesis:

1. Compounding Context: Each module—tasks, docs, sheets, calendar—adds nodes to a shared knowledge graph, making every agent smarter and harder to displace.

2. Unified Experience: Applications are designed to work together, so agents can move seamlessly across tasks without brittle integrations.

3. SMB Accessibility: By delivering enterprise-grade intelligence in a unified product, Motion unlocks AI adoption for the millions of small businesses left behind by point solutions.

For us, this is why Motion is more than another productivity app. It is a new computing model: AI agents embedded at the foundation of work. That design choice is the reason we believe Motion’s platform will compound in value over time.

Why We Invested

We’ve partnered with Motion since the early days, and our conviction has only grown. The latest $60M fundraise, which brings the company to a $550M valuation, reflects the market’s recognition of what we saw years ago: a team building the first true agentic work suite.

During our early diligence, it became clear that Motion’s goal was not to be another productivity tool. Harry spoke about building the Microsoft Office of AI agents. Competing with giants like Microsoft, Monday.com or ClickUp might sound audacious for a three‑person team, but we have seen this playbook before.

We've continuously backed product‑obsessed founders attacking large, underserved markets. Our early investment in MaintainX, which scaled into a multi-billion-dollar company by reimagining industrial maintenance, showed us how fast new platforms can rise when they deliver real value.  The same opportunity exists in business productivity: millions of SMBs need modern software but can’t justify enterprise‑grade solutions.

What’s Next and Why We’re Excited

Today, Motion is a lean team of around 65 people.They are hiring across engineering, product and AI research to expand the agentic suite and build new applications that further blur the line between human and AI work. The company’s vision is to enable a single human to manage hundreds of AI employees, each handling routine tasks so the human can focus on creative, strategic work.

At Leonis, we believe that contextual understanding and intelligence will define the next era of business software. We see Motion as a pioneering example of how integrated AI agents can democratize productivity tools for the millions of everyday businesses that keep our economy running. We’re honored to support Harry, Omid, Ethan and the entire Motion team on this journey.

An Invitation

If you are an engineer, product leader or founder inspired by this vision, Motion is hiring! And if you’re a founder tackling large but overlooked markets with deep technology and customer focus, we would love to hear from you!