When we started Motion, our sole purpose was to make ourselves and our users more productive. We were frustrated that, despite impressive advances in software and AI in the last decade, productivity tools still require massive overhead and manual coordination. We set out to solve this problem in a way that “just works.”
Two and a half years, hundreds of product iterations, and thousands of user interviews later, our conviction in this mission is stronger than ever. Knowledge workers still spend 58% of their day coordinating work instead of doing work. With Motion’s resource planning automation, every company can dramatically increase their productivity.
Motion automatically plans what each team member should work on every day based on their team’s projects and calendars. For each project or task, you can tell Motion how long it will take, its priority, the deadline, and other helpful information. Motion then automatically adjusts each team member’s calendar and task priorities into an optimal schedule. Whenever things don’t go according to plan (which they never do), Motion automatically re-prioritizes everyone’s tasks and calendars so everything gets done, helping destress teammates by offloading all the cognitive processing surrounding what to do next; instead you get to stay in a hyper-productive flow state.
Today, we’re proud to announce that we have raised $13 million in Series A to continue our mission of doubling the world’s productivity.
SignalFire led the round, with participation from 468 Capital and angel investors like Sam Altman, Michael Seibel, and Cyrus Mistry (early Google Calendar product lead). We’re excited to partner with these phenomenal investors as we work toward a future where tools automate coordination so teams can get more done.
What’s next?
We’ll use the money to continue investing in product & engineering. Our top priority is improving our task planning automation algorithm. We believe the prioritization algorithm (the way in which Motion plans your tasks) is the real differentiation that no one else has nailed yet.
Solving scheduling is a difficult engineering problem. There are so many variables to account for when personalizing a schedule to each user, and this must be done while satisfying performance and efficiency constraints. Solutions today like Monday and Clickup ask users to do this manually. It’s easy for a team to dump all their tasks (which they’ll never finish) into an app. It’s difficult to figure out a great execution plan.
Improving Motion also means improving everything around the algorithm that makes it useful, including the product, design, and infrastructure that allow people to use Motion. So we are aggressively hiring exceptional engineers who want to help double the world’s productivity with us. If that sounds like you, please apply!
Over time, Motion will automate more and more of our days. Motion will help manage and automate everything from top-level OKRs to individual projects and tasks, to daily planning, calendaring, meeting scheduling, and coordination. Currently, companies use half a dozen different tools to manage all of that manually and it is very cumbersome to integrate them. Motion will integrate all of this functionality into one comprehensive view that is constantly re-prioritizing automatically as needed.
We believe that fundamentally magnifying human output without increasing input (e.g. time) is a trillion-dollar market with billions of users.
Thank you!
We want to give a huge thank you to all of our users who make Motion possible. We’re grateful first and foremost that you’ve given Motion a shot and trusted us to help you manage your time. But we’re also grateful for all the feedback you’ve given us that allows us to improve. It’s extremely important for us to have a tight feedback loop between product development and user input in order to iterate rapidly.
Thank you for being part of this journey with us. We’re more fired up than ever to double the world’s productivity.
