To-do lists tell you what to do. Motion tells you when.
It started with a timer the founders built for themselves.
Harry Qi, Ethan Yu and Omid Rooholfada went through six prototypes before anything stuck, from a prediction market to an intercity carpool service. What finally worked was something they had built for themselves: a simple countdown timer to fight online distractions.
It kept users better than everything before it, and it was the product they brought to Y Combinator's Winter 2020 batch. Then they kept pulling on the same thread. If software could protect an hour of focus, it could plan the whole day.
That idea became Motion's AI planner, backed by a $13 million Series A in 2022. Today it schedules tasks, projects and meetings for teams, and replans the moment something changes.
Every to-do list has the same flaw: it never asks when.
Tasks, projects and meetings live in different apps, so people spend the morning deciding what to work on and the afternoon reacting to whatever changed.
01
Bring the work together
Tasks, projects, meetings and docs live in one place, and AI can build a whole project from a short description.
02
Let AI plan the day
Motion weighs priorities, deadlines, blockers and working hours against the calendar, then time-blocks the work.
03
Replan automatically
When a meeting moves or a task runs long, Motion reshuffles the plan so the most important work still gets done.
1M+
People and teams use Motion
10,000+
Business customers as of September 2025
$550M
Valuation after its September 2025 funding round
Figures from usemotion.com and Motion's September 2025 funding announcement.
An hour that ran long, in the best way.
In January 2025, we met with Nathanael Bennett of Motion for a strategy session on how to keep validating a new SaaS idea, grounded in Yianni's own wins and failures as a founder.
“Working with Yianni was an exceptional experience. Our hour-long conversation felt like it stretched to an hour and a half—in the best way possible—because of how engaging and insightful he was. Yianni's advice was authentic, grounded in his own successes and failures as a startup founder, and incredibly actionable. He provided a wealth of clear guidance on how I can continue validating my SaaS idea, offering thoughtful, real-world strategies that immediately resonated with me.”
— Nathanael Bennett, Motion
Next projects.
(More work)
