Sunday becomes a unicorn with $165M Series B
Sunday, a Mountain View-based robotics startup building autonomous household robots, has raised $165 million in a Series B round at a $1.15 billion valuation, the company said. The financing was led by Coatue and included participation from Bain Capital Ventures, Fidelity Management & Research Company, Tiger Global, Benchmark, Conviction, and Xtal Ventures, among others.
From demos to deployments
The new capital will fund the launch of Sunday’s Beta program, which is expected to begin deploying robots into homes later this year. The company said it plans to use early customer deployments to gather feedback, improve reliability, and prepare for broader adoption. Sunday added that thousands of people have applied since it emerged from 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. He argued that data remains the key constraint in home robotics and said the company has built a pipeline designed to convert real-home complexity into scalable autonomy.
Training robots on real-world household data
Founded by Tony Zhao and Cheng Chi, Sunday is positioning its advantage around a full-stack approach spanning hardware, software, and data collection. A central component is its Skill Capture Glove, which records human movements to accelerate the training of robotic models. The company says this helps it collect large volumes of “in-the-wild” data and iterate faster than rivals reliant on controlled environments.
Investor thesis: a data flywheel
Coatue co-founder Thomas Laffont said the firm backed Sunday based on the team’s execution speed and ability to translate academic robotics research into a product that can ship at scale. Bain Capital Ventures partner Aaref Hilaly added that consumers ultimately want a complete, reliable system rather than isolated hardware or software.
Sunday said it has grown to more than 70 engineers and researchers, with talent drawn from organizations including Stanford, Tesla, DeepMind, Waymo, Meta, OpenAI, and Apple.
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