Motion and $60M for AI Agent Suite

Hi everyone,

Motion's impressive $60M raise for their AI suite sparks a lot of excitement about the future of small business tools.

AI transparency is in the spotlight again with Anthropic supporting legislative pushes for clearer policies.

Also, checkout our partners Zipchat and Pacaso

Let's get right into it.

In this issue:

• 🤝 In Partnership: Own part of the next big thing

• 🤿Deep Dive: Motion raises $60M for AI suite

• 🖼️AI Art: Examples of great and trending AI art

• 🤝Supported by: Grow revenue with automated support

• 🤿Deep Dive: Anthropic backs California AI safety bill

• ⚒️Tool Snapshots: Tools for AI, no-code, and productivity

🤝IN PARTNERSHIP WITH PACASO

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Invest While You Still Can

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🤿 DEEP DIVE

Motion Raises $60 Million to Scale an AI Agent Work Suite for SMBs

Intelligence: Motion announced $60 million in new funding across later rounds at a $550 million valuation to expand its agent-native work suite for small and mid-sized businesses and added Scale Venture Partners partner Stacey Bishop to its board.

• Funding totals $60 million across Series B, Series C, and Series C2, bringing the total raised to $75 million, with a latest valuation of $550 million. The $38 million Series C was five times oversubscribed, led by Scale Venture Partners, with insider participation from HOF Capital, 468 Capital, and SignalFire, and continued support from Y Combinator alongside new investors like Valor Equity Partners, Fellows Fund, Leonis Capital, and several unicorn founders.

• Stacey Bishop joins the board, bringing SMB and mid-market experience from HubSpot, Lever, Demandbase, and Bill.com.

• Motion argues SMBs are being left behind on AI as Fortune 500s invest in custom agents, and point solution stacks remain costly and complex. The company pitches an out-of-the-box unified platform that SMBs can adopt without heavy integration work.

• The suite is designed so every app integrates with the others, and agents are core to how they function, including roles like AI SDR, AI Project Manager, and AI Marketer.

• Motion has already built project and knowledge management, documents, sheets, calendars, meeting scheduling, and business intelligence over the past three years.

• Motion’s thesis is that the best agents require native read and write access to a company’s data and workflows, which third-party integrations often cannot deliver. Embedding agents directly enables contextual actions such as one-click access to relevant client and project information.

🖼️ AI ART

Examples of great and trending AI art

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🤿 DEEP DIVE

Anthropic Backs Senator Scott Wiener’s SB 53 on Frontier AI Transparency and Safety

Intelligence: Anthropic endorsed California’s SB 53, a trust-but-verify disclosure regime for powerful AI systems, as a pragmatic alternative to last year’s prescriptive SB 1047 while urging eventual federal leadership.

• SB 53 follows Governor Newsom’s Joint California Policy Working Group recommendations and shifts from mandates in SB 1047 to disclosure-based oversight focused on the most powerful models from large developers, with exemptions for startups.

• Covered firms must publish safety frameworks describing how they assess and mitigate catastrophic risks and release public transparency reports on those assessments before deploying new high-capability models.

• Companies must report critical safety incidents to the state within 15 days, submit confidential summaries of internal catastrophic risk assessments, protect whistleblowers, and face monetary penalties if they fail to meet their stated commitments.

• Anthropic says these rules formalize practices frontier labs already use, citing its Responsible Scaling Policy and system cards, with similar efforts at Google DeepMind, OpenAI, and Microsoft.

• The company argues SB 53 prevents a race to reduce safety and disclosure in competition, creating a level playing field where transparency is required rather than optional.

⚒️ TOOL SNAPSHOTS

Futuristic tools within AI, no-code, and productivity

• 🎬 VidAU - Convert photos into high-converting social media videos instantly. Free option available.

• 🍓 Strawberry - Elevate productivity with AI-assisted browsing and tasks. Free option available.

• 💻 Solid - Build genuine full-stack web apps effortlessly, not prototypes. Free to use.

• 📈 Surf - Your personal AI crypto advisor for insight and execution. Free option available.

• 💬 Vectorize 2.0 - Hosted chatbots, simple integration, smart retrieval & syncing. Free to try.

ℹ️ ABOUT US

The Intelligent Worker helps you to be more productive at work with AI, automation, no-code, and other technologies.

We like real, practical, and tangible use-cases and hate hand-wavy, theoretical, and abstract concepts that don’t drive real-world outcomes.

Our mission is to empower individuals, boost their productivity, and future-proof their careers.

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