Household Robotics Startup Sunday Reaches Unicorn Status With 165 Million Dollar Series B to Ship Home Robots by Thanksgiving
Sunday raised $165 million at a $1.15 billion valuation to deploy its household robot Memo to homes by Thanksgiving 2026, using a novel low-cost data capture approach.
Overview
Sunday, a household robotics startup co-founded by Tony Zhao and Cheng Chi, has raised $165 million in a Series B round at a $1.15 billion valuation, crossing into unicorn territory. The round was led by Coatue Management, with participation from Bain Capital Ventures, Fidelity Management & Research Company, Tiger Global, Benchmark, Conviction, and Xtal Ventures. The company plans to begin shipping its wheeled household robot, Memo, to beta participants by Thanksgiving 2026.
What We Know
Sunday emerged from stealth in November 2025 and has moved quickly toward commercialization. Memo is a wheeled robot designed to handle routine domestic tasks including clearing tables, loading dishwashers, folding laundry, and operating espresso machines. The robot uses a custom dual-gripper system for handling fragile objects, powered by the company’s ACT-1 foundation model.
A central element of Sunday’s approach is the Skill Capture Glove, a wearable device that costs approximately $200 and allows humans to record training data for household tasks without a robot present. This contrasts sharply with the teleoperation rigs used by many competitors, which cost approximately $20,000 per unit. Using this system, Sunday has collected tens of millions of movement episodes from more than 500 homes, and plans to increase in-the-wild data collection fivefold by the end of 2026.
The company demonstrated its progress by completing a 33-step table-to-dishwasher cycle in just three months of development, a benchmark the company describes as industry-leading.
Sunday has doubled its headcount from 35 to over 70 employees, drawing talent from Tesla’s Autopilot and Optimus teams. The company has received more than 10,000 job applications in three months and plans to triple its engineering team and quadruple its research staff in 2026.
Coatue co-founder Thomas Laffont, who is joining Sunday’s board, stated that “Sunday’s velocity is the best signal we have that they will be the first to ship truly helpful, autonomous home robots at scale”.
What We Don’t Know
Sunday has not disclosed a target price for Memo or the terms under which beta participants will receive units. The scope of the beta program remains undefined publicly, though the company has reported thousands of applications for access. It is also unclear how Memo will perform in the diversity of real-world home environments compared to controlled demonstrations.
The broader household robotics market remains unproven at scale. CEO Tony Zhao has signaled a deliberate shift away from public demonstrations, stating that Sunday raised $165 million “to stop doing demos”, but the gap between demo-ready prototypes and reliable consumer products has historically been wide in the robotics industry.
Analysis
Sunday’s data collection strategy may prove to be its most significant differentiator. By deploying low-cost Skill Capture Gloves into hundreds of homes, the company is building a training dataset that captures the messy reality of domestic environments rather than the controlled conditions of a laboratory. This approach sidesteps what the company calls the “data deadlock” that has slowed other humanoid robotics efforts, where the high cost of teleoperation hardware limits the volume and diversity of training data.
The Thanksgiving 2026 deployment target is ambitious. Household robotics companies have historically struggled with the transition from demonstration to deployment, and the complexity of unstructured home environments presents challenges that industrial robotics has largely avoided. Whether Sunday’s data-first philosophy and rapid engineering pace can compress this timeline will be a meaningful test for the broader household robotics sector.