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Motion assembles your day automatically each morning – and claims a 137% productivity lift. The unsexy unlock that $63M says is real.
ENTRY ANGLES
Specialized AI planning tools for specific work types rather than general-purpose solutions · AI productivity coaches for daily effectiveness · Domain-specific AI task schedulers that recognize work-specific patterns
VERTICALS
CAPABILITIES
AI pattern recognition for domain-specific work, Daily habit formation and engagement mechanics, Planning and task execution algorithms
Motion uses AI to build your daily schedule automatically. According to the startup, this makes Motion users 137% more productive than they were before.
The core function: each morning, Motion assembles your day. You don't plan manually – you open Motion and see what needs to happen, or Motion just tells you, notifying you what to work on right now and for how long.
The inputs are all the tasks in your Motion list – added by you, by colleagues, or automatically via integrations. Motion analyzes priority, urgency, deadlines, estimated time, dependencies, and other parameters to construct the optimal sequence for the day.
Motion can also break a large task into a series of smaller subtasks, slotting each one into the schedule in the right order.
Deadline alerts don't fire when it's already too late. Motion projects forward – if a task is running behind or taking longer than expected, it warns you weeks before the deadline, while there's still time to act.
The same logic applies when adding new tasks. If you propose a deadline that isn't realistic given your current workload, Motion flags it immediately and suggests either negotiating a different deadline or reprioritizing something else to make room.
Meeting scheduling follows the same model. Motion looks at open slots in the context of existing commitments and can cap the number of meetings per day to protect focus time.
For teams, Motion coordinates across projects and people. It builds a mosaic of all tasks and subtasks in the right sequence for every team member, optimizing the whole to minimize total project completion time. Team plans report that this cuts project time by up to 30% – time otherwise lost to manual planning and the inefficiency of non-optimal sequencing.
The full team schedule is visible to everyone – so every member knows what others are working on and why. That transparency reduces miscommunication and unnecessary status check-ins.
Team leads can see real workload distribution at a glance: who has slack, who is overloaded. A free slot can be filled with something useful; an overloaded member needs a priority call, or you risk burnout and missed deadlines.
Personal Motion: $34/month. Team version: $20/user/month.
Motion now has around one million users across personal and team plans.
Motion went through Y Combinator in spring 2020 and raised $13M in 2022 – [noted here](/review/vshir-ili-vglub) in January of that year during the raise. In 2023, it raised another $13.9M. The current round adds $36.5M more.
For Motion to schedule your work, you need a complete list of tasks to feed it. Maintaining that list accurately takes effort – every item needs to exist, be described clearly enough for Motion to assess priority and urgency, and none can be forgotten.
Hoop, [recently covered here](/review/dva-kriterija-dlja-proryvnogo-startapa), is building a bot that sits in on video meetings and monitors Slack channels to automatically add action items to a task list. Currently the user still chooses which tasks to prioritize and schedules manually – but Hoop is in alpha, so that may evolve. Already raised $5M.
The other critical layer is follow-through. Planning what to do is only valuable if you actually do it. A second problem is staying on the planned task instead of drifting to easier or less important work.
Rize, [covered here](/review/mnogo-ili-jeffektivno) in February, built an "AI coach" that monitors which apps are active during working hours and helps users stay focused on their current priorities – or prompts them to take breaks to avoid burning out. Two years in the making, raised only $500K because the founder has been self-funded so far.
ProperPlan, [covered here](/review/ubej-biznes-trenera) late last year, also does automated planning but went after a different market: solopreneurs and small businesses who need help building long-term business plans broken down into daily task lists. Early stage – raised £300K.
There's something deeper in Motion's approach worth unpacking. Their scheduling algorithm is internally called the "happiness algorithm" – which is not just about maximizing tasks per hour.
The actual goal is to make people feel better about their work while increasing their output. Users should feel that a) they're working on the things that actually matter, b) they're on top of their commitments, and c) they can relax after work knowing nothing slipped through the cracks.
Motion says no other planning tool uses this kind of model. And it points to an interesting product extension. For people who are seriously overworked, most of their anxiety is about work – "I'm not making progress," "I can't keep up," "I don't know what to prioritize," "I'm going to miss the deadline." Bad planning causes stress; stress tanks performance; worse performance creates worse planning; the cycle tightens until you hit burnout and exhaustion.
Sometimes the stress is manufactured. Sometimes it reflects a genuine overload. Either way, these are two sides of the same coin – they directly affect each other.
Which suggests: to make someone genuinely feel better, you have to work both angles. Help them plan so that important things actually get done and nothing falls through the cracks. And at the same time, reassure them that it's under control, discourage unnecessary anxiety, help them focus when it's time to work and decompress when it's time to rest.
"Make busy people happy again" – that's a mission statement for an app that combines an AI scheduler treating the cause with an AI wellbeing tool treating the effects. Though whether chaotic planning causes the stress or stressed-out people plan chaotically is a chicken-and-egg question – in practice, they're one tangled knot.
AI task schedulers, AI productivity coaches, and related AI tools for daily effectiveness look like a large and sustained trend. Different products will approach the problem from different angles for different audiences.
What makes this category attractive: a) the addressable market is enormous and b) the best tools become daily habits. The apps that win here become part of millions of people's lives – which is a compelling reason to invest in them and to build them now.
The general direction: AI tools for planning and executing daily activity – professional, personal, or both.
Most of the initial activity will concentrate on general-purpose tools. As that space fills up, there will be a wave of specialized tools for specific types of work and specific user categories.
There may be an advantage in going specialized early – smaller competitive field, clearer product focus. What types of work and which audiences are ready for specialized AI planning tools now? What are the domain-specific patterns those tools would need to recognize and apply?