MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif., March 12, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — Sunday, the company building helpful 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 Thomas Laffont joining the board. The team also welcomes Bain Capital Ventures, Fidelity Management & Research Company, Tiger Global, Benchmark, Conviction, Xtal Ventures, and others. With this capital, Sunday moves to focus entirely on real-world deployment of its robot, Memo.
The robotics industry has long been defined by impressive demos. But deploying autonomous object manipulation in a real-world home environment has never been achieved. Sunday plans to break that cycle with their upcoming Beta taking on time-intensive household chores.
The Sunday Flywheel: Solving General Autonomy
Sunday is uniquely positioned to solve general autonomy through the industry’s fastest model iteration loop. By owning the full stack, from hardware design and manufacturing to the proprietary Skill Capture Glove, Sunday moves from data collection to model training and evaluation at record speeds. This vertical integration enabled Sunday’s most recent demo to achieve industry-leading capabilities in just three months.
“At Coatue, we look for founders who can maintain a very high velocity of excellence as they scale. Tony [Sunday’s CEO] fits that profile,” said Thomas Laffont, co-founder of Coatue. “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.”
Data Moat
Sunday’s competitive edge lies in a data flywheel that solves the most persistent bottleneck in robotics: high-quality data.
- Proprietary Advantage: The fastest model iteration loop creates a massive influx of data from both the Skill Capture Glove (tens of millions of movement episodes) and its growing robot fleet.
- Strategic Integration: While Sunday benefits from advancements in public datasets, such as world models and Vision-Language Models (VLMs), it is this unique, “in-the-wild” proprietary data that enables Sunday to deploy autonomous robots in complex environments before others.
2026 Beta
Sunday’s Series B funding will directly enable the deployment of autonomous robots to people’s homes this year. The upcoming Beta will serve as a critical opportunity for Sunday to understand user needs and refine Memo before scaling to thousands of households.
“We raised our Series B to stop giving demos. Now, we’re focusing entirely on deployment, with Beta deliveries starting in just months,” said Tony Zhao, CEO of Sunday. “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.”
“Consumers don’t want hardware or software — they want a complete system that addresses their needs,” said Aaref Hilaly, Partner at Bain Capital Ventures. “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.”
Since emerging from stealth last November, Sunday has seen strong demand, receiving thousands of applications for its upcoming Beta program. To meet this challenge, the company has rapidly scaled its staffing. Sunday has already 3x’d their engineering team, 4x’d research, and is on track to 5x their “in-the-wild” data collection by the end of this year.
Sunday is currently hiring across all functions as it scales its Beta. Interested candidates can learn more at Sunday.ai/careers
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About Sunday
Sunday is a Mountain View–based AI robotics startup founded by Tony Zhao and Cheng Chi. Zhao and Chi’s research includes ALOHA, transformer adaptation for robotics, and diffusion policy—their breakthroughs enabled robots to finally learn by watching humans. The team has grown to more than 70 engineers and researchers and brings experience from Stanford, Tesla, DeepMind, Waymo, Meta, OpenAI, and Apple.
Media contact: media@sunday.ai
A video accompanying this announcement is available at: https://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/e19da309-9c9c-4532-939e-79cdb13c99e7
