Sunday Robotics

Sunday was founded in 2023 by Tony Zhao and Cheng Chi to develop autonomous robots that perform routine household tasks in real homes.⁠[1][2]

Zhao serves as chief executive and Chi as chief technology officer. The two started the company in a garage, working around the clock with 3D printers to develop the robot’s hardware and appearance.⁠[3]

Sunday describes its founders’ research—ALOHA, Diffusion Policy and the UMI gripper—as the technical foundation of the company. Cheng Chi earned a B.S. in computer science from the University of MichiganUniversity of MichiganThe University of Michigan is a university founded in Detroit in 1817 that moved to Ann Arbor, Michigan, in 1837; it is governed by a statewide-elected Board of Regents and also has campuses in Dearborn and Flint.Open the full entry and a Ph.D. in computer science from Columbia UniversityColumbia UniversityColumbia University, formally Columbia University in the City of New York, is a private research university in New York City and a member of the Ivy League. Founded in 1754 by royal charter from King George II as King's College, it is the oldest institution of higher education in New York State and the fifth oldest in the United States. It was renamed Columbia College in 1784 and adopted the university name and moved to Manhattan's Morningside Heights in 1896. It has 17 schools and four affiliated colleges, with 35,978 students enrolled in fall 2025. Legal scholar Jennifer L. Mnookin became president on July 1, 2026.Open the full entry, where he was advised by Shuran Song; he invented Diffusion Policy.⁠[4]

In December 2024, Memo had only one arm and learned its first task: arranging shoes. In October 2025, Memo learned to fold piles of socks, handle glassware and pull a shot of espresso.⁠[5]

The company said it took more than a year to engineer its core infrastructure: the Skill Capture Glove, Skill Transform and the Memo robot.⁠[6]

On November 19, 2025, Sunday publicly unveiled its home robot Memo. Rather than walking on legs, Memo moves on a wheeled platform and changes its height by sliding up and down a central column; it has two arms, a cartoonish face and a red baseball cap. In an open-plan kitchen in Mountain View, California, Memo demonstrated making espresso and clearing glasses from a table into a dishwasher, including grasping two glasses in one hand.⁠[7]

Tony Zhao described the company’s approach: “We think the way to make a home robot is to be full-stack, and to vertically integrate.”⁠[7]

At its debut Sunday announced $35 million in funding from Benchmark and Conviction. Eric Vishria, a general partner at Benchmark, said: “The promise of AI robotics isn’t doing a backflip or dancing demos, but robots that work in messy, real-world situations.” Sarah GuoSarah GuoSarah Guo is a venture capitalist, founder and managing partner of Conviction, an early-stage investment firm focused on artificial intelligence, and previously a partner at Greylock.Open the full entry, founder and managing partner of Conviction, said the Sunday team could “uniquely do hardware–AI co-design, and deliver a full-stack product.”⁠[3][7]

The same day, Sunday opened applications for its Founding Family Beta program, from which it planned to select 50 households to become early adopters of Memo in late 2026.⁠[3]

On November 19, 2025, Sunday released ACT-1, its in-house robot foundation model, which it said was trained without a single trajectory of teleoperation data. The training data comes from people wearing the Skill Capture Glove, which shares the exact geometry and sensor layout of Memo’s hand; a process called Skill Transform then converts the glove’s kinematic and visual data into equivalent robot data, with a success rate the company puts at 90%.⁠[6]

In the Table-to-Dishwasher task, ACT-1 autonomously picks up wine glasses, ceramic plates and metal utensils from a dining table, loads them into a dishwasher, dumps food waste and operates the dishwasher, performing 33 unique and 68 total dexterous interactions with 21 objects while navigating more than 130 feet. Sunday also deployed ACT-1 in several AirbnbAirbnbAirbnb is a travel platform for booking stays, experiences, and services, co-founded by Brian Chesky, Joe Gebbia, and Nathan Blecharczyk and headquartered in San Francisco, United States; its Class A common stock trades on Nasdaq under the symbol ABNB. The business began with hosting guests in the founders’ home in 2007, then joined YC’s Winter 2009 batch, and gradually expanded into local experiences, services, and boutique hotels.Open the full entry homes to clear tables and load dishwashers; because the model is conditioned on 3D maps of its environment during training, it can navigate floor plans it has not seen.⁠[6]

On March 12, 2026, Sunday announced a $165 million Series B at a $1.15 billion valuation. The round was led by Coatue, with Coatue’s Thomas LaffontThomas LaffontThomas Laffont is a co-founder of Coatue and its Chief Investment Officer for private investments.Open the full entry joining Sunday’s board; Bain Capital Ventures, Fidelity Management & Research Company, Tiger Global Management, Benchmark, Conviction and Xtal Ventures were among the other participants.⁠[8][1]

The round brought Sunday’s total funding to $200 million. As of March 2026, 1,000 people were on Memo’s waitlist.⁠[1][2]

Tony Zhao said: “We raised our Series B to stop giving demos. Now, we’re focusing entirely on deployment, with beta deliveries starting in just months.”⁠[1]

Sunday said it had grown Engineering by 3x, Research by 4x and Data Operations by 5x to prepare for deployment, with its beta program rolling out to users in fall 2026. In its press release that day, Sunday described itself as a Mountain View–based AI robotics startup.⁠[8][9]

On July 17, 2026, Sunday published a preview of ACT-2, reporting 99.1% zero-shot success on laundry folding across diverse unseen environments. The company said it had found that a single fine-tuning example can teach its pretrained model a new behavior that generalizes; ACT-2 is pretrained on sensorized human data gathered with Sunday’s proprietary collection hardware, curation system and processing pipeline.⁠[10]

Instead of teleoperating robots in customers’ homes, Sunday recruits data contributors it calls Memory Developers, who wear the Skill Capture Glove while doing household chores in their own homes. The company says it has shipped thousands of gloves to contributors across the country and that all data undergoes task-specific rating and multiple rounds of quality assurance before training.⁠[11]

Sunday pays remote workers to do household chores wearing gloves that resemble Memo’s hands; Tony Zhao said the gloves cost roughly $400 a pair. By November 2025 the company had used them to build a dataset of about 10 million household routines captured in more than 500 homes.⁠[7][3]

Memo is 1.7 meters tall and weighs 170 pounds, with a horizontal reach of 0.8 meters and a vertical reach of 2.1 meters. Each arm has seven degrees of freedom and each hand four, plus one in the torso and four in the lower body. Its maximum navigation speed is 1 meter per second, and its battery runs for four hours and charges in one hour.⁠[11]

Memo uses compliant control, so people can push its limbs during manipulation without meeting stiff resistance, and it is passively stable, so it will not drop or fall over if power is cut in any configuration.⁠[11]

Sunday says building a single Memo by hand today costs about $20,000, that large-scale manufacturing should cut costs by at least 50%, and that retail pricing will be announced closer to launch. The 2026 beta program is free and invite-only, with each of the first 50 members receiving a 3D-printed Mini Memo; the company anticipates starting to ship Memo at scale in 2027–2028.⁠[12]

Sunday says Tony Zhao leads a team of more than 140 engineers, designers and researchers in Silicon Valley. As of November 2026, the non-remote positions listed on the company’s careers page were all located in Redwood City, California.⁠[4][13]

Sunday Robotics: Official website: https://www.sunday.ai/ (opens in a new window).⁠[5]

X: Public account: https://x.com/sundayrobotics (opens in a new window).⁠[5]

YouTubeYouTubeYouTube is Google’s video-sharing and creator platform, founded in 2005 by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim and acquired by Google in 2006. Built around video uploading, viewing, and creator earnings, the platform has developed Shorts, YouTube Music, Premium, YouTube TV, and products for children, and is headquartered in San Bruno, California, United States.Open the full entry: Public channel: https://www.youtube.com/@SundayRobotics (opens in a new window).⁠[5]