Motion

Overview

Motion is an AI work-management platform built around a single idea: you should not decide when to do your work. Founded in 2019 by Harry Qi, Omid Rooholfada and Ethan Yu, and a Y Combinator W20 alum, the San Francisco company combines a calendar, a task manager and a project manager into one tool whose auto-scheduler continuously assigns every task a specific time slot — then silently replans the whole day when a meeting runs long, a deadline moves or a new priority lands.

That scheduler is the product’s real differentiator. Most task apps hand you a list and leave the hard part — fitting it into finite hours — to you. Motion’s engine reads task duration, deadline, priority and dependencies against your live calendar and produces an executable plan, surfacing conflicts as “this deadline is not achievable” rather than letting them quietly slip. On Business plans the same logic extends across a team, so capacity planning reflects who actually has open hours rather than who looks free in a spreadsheet.

Around that core, Motion has expanded into an agentic suite: AI project management that decomposes a brief into scheduled tasks, a meeting assistant that records and summarizes calls, and AI docs and notes. The company raised $60M across Series B, C and C2 at a $550M post-money valuation in September 2025 — $75M total — and reports serving over 100,000 customers.

Motion is not a cheap or gentle tool. There is no free tier, and the advertised $19 and $29 figures are annual-billing prices; monthly costs more. AI features are metered in credits on top of the seat fee, so a heavy month is not fully predictable in advance. The learning curve is real: the scheduler only produces sensible plans once you estimate durations honestly, and users who under-estimate everything get a plan that quietly breaks. Teams wanting deep issue tracking or engineering workflows will still find Linear or Jira stronger. But for people whose core problem is over-commitment rather than task capture, few tools address it as directly.

Key Benefits

• Decisions made for you: The auto-scheduler removes daily triage — you maintain the task list and the calendar maintains itself.
• Honest deadline signals: Because scheduling is capacity-aware, Motion tells you a commitment is impossible before you miss it, not after.
• Consolidation: Calendar, tasks, projects, notes and meeting notes in one place removes several subscriptions and the syncing between them.
• Team-level capacity: Business plans balance workload against real availability, making delivery dates defensible.
• Continuous replanning: Disruptions cascade automatically through the rest of the week instead of requiring manual rework.

Use Cases

1. Over-booked individual contributors — Automatically time-blocks deep work around a meeting-heavy calendar and reshuffles it when the day goes sideways.
2. Agency and client project delivery — Plans multiple concurrent client projects against team capacity, with Gantt and timeline views for stakeholder reporting.
3. Founder and executive scheduling — Combines booking links, meeting notes and task planning so administrative overhead does not consume the calendar.
4. Small-team workload balancing — Managers see who is genuinely at capacity before assigning work, reducing silent overload and missed dates.