Sunday raises $165M at $1.15B valuation to put household robots in real homes
What's the deal? Home robotics startup Sunday has raised $165 million in a Series B round at a $1.15 billion valuation. Coatue Management led the round, with Bain Capital Ventures, Fidelity, Tiger Global, Benchmark, ConvictionDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, and Xtal VenturesDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom → also participating. Coatue's Thomas LaffontDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom → is joining the board.
Sunday was founded in 2024 by Tony ZhaoDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom → and Cheng ChiDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, both Stanford-trained roboticists with stints at Google DeepMind and Tesla.
The company makes Memo, a wheeled home robot that can clear tables, do laundry, and load a dishwasher. Sunday emerged from stealth in November 2025 and plans to begin a beta programme placing Memo in real homes later this year.
Why now? Sunday says this is the moment to move from demos to deployment — a pointed signal to an industry long criticised for impressive lab videos that never translate to real-world use.
The company has grown rapidly since stealth: headcount has expanded from 35 to more than 50, with engineering up 3x, research up 4x, and data operations up 5x. Around 1,000 people are already on the waitlist to test Memo.
The new capital will fund that beta rollout and the continued data collection that underpins it.
What could go wrong? Home robotics has a long history of well-funded ambition meeting the harsh reality of unstructured environments. Clearing a table in a controlled lab is a very different challenge from doing so reliably across thousands of different kitchens. Sunday's model depends on collecting proprietary training data at scale — using human operators wearing a custom glove to model the robot's movements — which is slow and costly to replicate.
At just 50-plus employees, the company is also very small for the complexity of its ambitions. Scaling both the hardware and the AI simultaneously, while managing a consumer beta programme, is a significant operational challenge.
The signal: Sunday represents a sharper, more credible pitch for household robotics than most of its predecessors: rather than promising a general-purpose humanoid, it is targeting a narrow set of specific domestic chores and betting that mastering those creates a data moat that compounds over time.
The oversubscribed round — drawing in a notable mix of growth investors, including Tiger Global and Fidelity alongside deep-tech specialists — suggests the market is starting to believe that the "robot in every home" promise may finally be within reach, at least for a carefully scoped version of it.
Sources:
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