Household robots have long been showcased in controlled demos, but very few have successfully operated inside real homes. Robotics startup Sunday wants to change that by building autonomous robots designed to handle everyday chores.
The Mountain View–based company has raised $165 million in a Series B funding round, valuing the startup at $1.15 billion.
The round was led by Coatue, with participation from Bain Capital Ventures, Fidelity Management & Research Company, Tiger Global, Benchmark, Conviction, and Xtal Ventures, among others.
The funding will support the launch of Sunday’s Beta program, which will deploy robots in homes later this year. The company plans to use these early deployments to collect feedback, improve the system, and prepare for wider adoption.
Thousands of people have already applied for the Beta program since the startup came out of stealth last year.
“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.”
Building robots that learn from real-world data
Sunday was founded by Tony Zhao and Cheng Chi, researchers known for their work in robotics AI, including projects such as ALOHA and diffusion-based learning systems that allow robots to learn by observing humans.
Sunday’s technology focuses on solving one of robotics’ biggest challenges: training robots to operate in unpredictable environments such as homes.
The company has built a full-stack system covering hardware, software, and data collection. One key tool is its Skill Capture Glove, which records human movements to train robotic models more quickly.
This system helps Sunday gather large amounts of real-world data and rapidly improve its AI models. According to the company, its recent robotics demo achieved major improvements in 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 on 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.”
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 fleet of robots.
- 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.
The company has grown to more than 70 engineers and researchers, many of whom come from organisations such as Stanford, Tesla, DeepMind, Waymo, Meta, OpenAI, and Apple.
“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.”
