Sunday Reaches Unicorn Status With $165M Series B to Deploy Household Robots by Thanksgiving
Mountain View startup Sunday has raised $165 million at a $1.15 billion valuation to bring its Memo household robot from demos to real-world deployment, with beta units heading to 50 homes by late 2026.
Sunday, a Mountain View startup building a general-purpose household robot, has closed a $165 million Series B round at a $1.15 billion valuation, crossing the unicorn threshold less than five months after emerging from stealth. Coatue Management led the round, with participation from Bain Capital Ventures, Fidelity Management & Research Company, Tiger Global, Benchmark, Conviction, and Xtal Ventures. Coatue co-founder Thomas Laffont is joining Sunday’s board.
The company plans to use the capital to shift from controlled demonstrations to real-world deployment of its robot, Memo, with the first beta units scheduled to reach households by Thanksgiving 2026.
From Research Papers to a Billion-Dollar Company
Sunday was founded in 2025 by Tony Zhao and Cheng Chi, two robotics researchers who met on X after publishing landmark papers one month apart. Zhao serves as CEO and Chi as CTO. Before Sunday, both were known for foundational work on ALOHA and diffusion-based learning systems for robotic manipulation.
The company emerged from stealth in late 2025 with $35 million in earlier funding and has since grown to more than 70 engineers and researchers, drawing talent from Stanford, Tesla, DeepMind, Waymo, Meta, OpenAI, and Apple.
The Memo Robot
Memo is designed as a utility-first household robot for repetitive domestic tasks including clearing tables, loading dishwashers, handling laundry, and simple food preparation. Rather than pursuing a fully humanoid form factor, Sunday opted for a wheeled base with a telescoping spine that can extend to 2.1 meters. The robot features a soft silicone-like shell designed for safe operation around people and furniture.
Sunday is targeting a price point under $10,000 for Memo, which would place it significantly below the cost of industrial humanoid robots from competitors like Figure, Apptronik, and Tesla’s Optimus, though in a different market segment focused on consumer rather than industrial applications.
The Data Advantage
Sunday’s core technical differentiator is its Skill Capture Glove, a low-cost device priced at approximately $400 that records human movements during household tasks. The company has built a distributed network of what it calls “Memory Developers” — people who wear the gloves while performing chores in their own homes. This approach has generated tens of millions of movement episodes from more than 500 households, creating a training dataset that captures the unpredictable variety of real domestic environments.
“Data has always been the biggest bottleneck in robotics,” Zhao said. “We built the only pipeline that turns the complexity of real-world homes into autonomous intelligence at scale.”
The vertically integrated data pipeline — spanning hardware design, glove manufacturing, and data capture — allowed Sunday to achieve what it describes as industry-leading manipulation capabilities within three months of beginning model training.
The Path to Deployment
Sunday’s deployment plan proceeds in two stages. First, the company will run a “Founding Family” beta program in late 2026, placing 50 uniquely numbered Memo units in selected households to test reliability, safety, and service workflows in uncontrolled environments. The broader commercial launch is targeted for Thanksgiving 2026, and the company says it has already received thousands of applications for the beta program.
“We raised our Series B to stop giving demos,” Zhao said. “Now, we’re focusing entirely on deployment.”
A Crowded but Growing Market
Sunday enters a household robotics market that research firm GMI Projects values at $17.5 billion in 2026, with projections reaching $85 billion by 2035. The segment has historically been dominated by single-task devices like iRobot’s Roomba vacuum, but a wave of well-funded startups is now pursuing general-purpose machines capable of multiple household tasks.
The company’s competitors span a wide range of approaches. Tesla continues to develop its Optimus humanoid, while Apptronik — which recently raised nearly $1 billion at a $5 billion valuation — is building a humanoid robot with NASA heritage for industrial applications. In the consumer segment specifically, Sunday’s bet on a non-humanoid form factor and a data-driven training pipeline represents a distinct approach that prioritizes near-term household utility over longer-term humanoid ambitions.
With the Series B secured, Sunday plans to increase its data operations fivefold while preparing Memo for the transition from laboratory prototype to a product that must operate safely and reliably in the most unpredictable environment in robotics: the family home.