Sunday, a Mountain View–based AI robotics startup building autonomous home robots, announced it has raised an oversubscribed $165 million Series B funding round at a $1.15 billion valuation. The round was led by Coatue, with participation from Bain Capital Ventures, Fidelity Management & Research Company, Tiger Global, Benchmark, Conviction, and Xtal Ventures. Coatue co-founder Thomas Laffont is also joining the company’s board of directors.
The new capital will support Sunday’s transition from robotics demonstrations to real-world deployment of its home robot system, known as Memo. The company plans to launch a beta program later in 2026 that will place its autonomous robots inside households to perform time-intensive chores and gather real-world operational data.
Sunday is focused on solving one of robotics’ biggest technical challenges: enabling robots to perform autonomous object manipulation in the complex and unpredictable environments found in real homes. The company believes its vertically integrated system — spanning hardware design, manufacturing, and proprietary training data collection — will enable faster improvements in robot capabilities.
A central component of Sunday’s approach is its proprietary Skill Capture Glove, which records human movements to generate training data for robotic systems. This technology allows the company to rapidly collect large datasets and train AI models that can replicate human actions in real-world scenarios.
According to the company, this vertically integrated model enables a fast “model iteration loop,” moving from data collection to training and evaluation more quickly than traditional robotics development cycles. Sunday says its most recent demo achieved major improvements in capability within just three months.
The Series B funding will also support the upcoming beta rollout of Memo robots into homes, which the company sees as a key step toward scaling deployment to thousands of households. Sunday says it has already received thousands of applications from people interested in participating in the beta program.
Since emerging from stealth in November, the company has rapidly expanded its team and data collection efforts. Sunday said it has tripled the size of its engineering team, quadrupled its research staff and is on track to increase its real-world data collection fivefold by the end of the year.
Sunday was founded by Tony Zhao and Cheng Chi, robotics researchers known for their work on projects such as ALOHA, transformer adaptation for robotics and diffusion policy — techniques that enable robots to learn tasks by observing human behavior. The company now employs more than 70 engineers and researchers, with experience from organizations including Stanford, Tesla, DeepMind, Waymo, Meta, OpenAI and Apple.
KEY QUOTES:
“We raised our Series B to stop giving demos. Now, we’re focusing entirely on deployment, with Beta deliveries starting in just months. Data has always been the biggest bottleneck in robotics. We built the only pipeline that turns the complexity of real-world homes into autonomous intelligence at scale.”
Tony Zhao, CEO and Co-Founder of Sunday
“At Coatue, we look for founders who can maintain a very high velocity of excellence as they scale. Tony fits that profile. His work at Stanford established him as one of the robotics industry’s leading researchers. His work at Sunday shows a rare ability to translate that research into a shipping product. Sunday’s velocity is the best signal we have that they will be the first to ship truly helpful, autonomous home robots at scale.”
Thomas Laffont, Co-Founder of Coatue
“Consumers don’t want hardware or software — they want a complete system that addresses their needs. Sunday’s integrated approach moves past one-time, teleoperated demos and into a world where robots reliably serve humans every day. At BCV, we believe this full-stack view is the only way to achieve the decades-long dream of a helpful robot in every home.”
Aaref Hilaly, Partner at Bain Capital Ventures
