# Harry Qi

> Harry Qi is the co-founder and CEO of Motion (usemotion.com), an AI-native productivity company building an 'agentic work suite' of AI employees that schedule calendars, run sales and support, and manage projects for knowledge workers and small businesses. At 23 he walked away from a roughly $1-million-a-year quant trading job at Optiver to start the company in 2019 with two friends, took it through Y Combinator's Winter 2020 batch after a Demo Day where 150 investors said no, and rebuilt it into an AI platform that grew from $0 to more than $10M ARR in its B2B agent bundle within months of a May 2025 launch. In September 2025 Motion raised a 5x-oversubscribed $38M Series C at a $550M post-money valuation.

- **Role:** Co-Founder & CEO at Motion
- **Organizations:** Motion, Optiver, Y Combinator
- **Nationality:** American
- **Education:** Mathematics and Computer Science, Dartmouth College
- **Known for:** Co-founded and scaled Motion to over 10,000 paying business customers and 100,000+ users worldwide, Grew Motion's B2B AI agent bundle from $0 to more than $10M ARR within roughly four months of launch, Raised a 5x-oversubscribed $38M Series C at a $550M post-money valuation (September 2025)

## Career timeline

- **2016** — Trading intern at Optiver
- **2017** — Quantitative trader at Optiver, reportedly earning ~$1M/year by age 23
- **2019** — Left Optiver and founded Motion with Omid Rooholfada and Ethan Yu
- **2020** — Motion accepted into Y Combinator's Winter 2020 batch; rejected by ~150 investors at Demo Day
- **2020** — Raised $1.5M seed at a $10M valuation (HOF Capital, SignalFire, Y Combinator)
- **2022** — Raised a $13M Series A
- **2025** — Launched 'AI Employees' agentic suite in May
- **2025** — B2B agent bundle grew from $0 to $10M+ ARR within months
- **2025** — Raised a 5x-oversubscribed $38M Series C at a $550M post-money valuation in September

## Achievements

- Co-founded and scaled Motion to over 10,000 paying business customers and 100,000+ users worldwide
- Grew Motion's B2B AI agent bundle from $0 to more than $10M ARR within roughly four months of launch
- Raised a 5x-oversubscribed $38M Series C at a $550M post-money valuation (September 2025)
- Built a business with 140%+ net revenue retention and 90%+ gross margins growing ~300% year over year
- Took Motion from a dozen pivots and 8 failed MVPs to durable product-market fit

## Latest updates

- **2025-09** — Motion raised a 5x-oversubscribed $38M Series C led by Scale Venture Partners at a $550M post-money valuation.
- **2025-05** — Launched the 'AI Employees' agentic work suite, which scaled from $0 to over $10M ARR within months.

## Links

- Website: https://usemotion.com
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/harryqi
- Twitter/X: https://x.com/harryqi666
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j1hVoqmn0RA

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Profile page: https://yespress.io/harry-qi
Published by YesPress — https://yespress.io
Last updated: 2026-06-12