Insider Brief
- California–based robotics startup Sunday emerged from stealth backed by $35 million from Benchmark and Conviction to develop Memo, a home robot designed to handle chores such as dishes, laundry and general tidying.
- Memo is trained on roughly 10 million real-world household episodes collected from more than 500 homes using Sunday’s patented Skill Capture Glove, enabling the robot to perform complex, multi-step tasks in unpredictable home environments.
- The robot features a stable rolling base, a soft silicone-clad design and purpose-built residential hardware; Sunday will select 50 households for its Founding Family Beta in late 2026 as it advances toward broader consumer deployment.
Sunday, a California–based robotics startup backed by $35 million from Benchmark and Conviction, emerged from stealth with a home robot designed to take on everyday chores. According to the company, founded by Stanford-trained roboticists Tony Zhao and Cheng Chi, its household robot called Memo is designed to assist families with tasks such as dishes, laundry and general tidying.
Memo is trained on one of the largest real-world datasets assembled for domestic robotics, according to Sunday. Its development draws on roughly 10 million episodes of authentic household routines collected from more than 500 homes using the company’s patented Skill Capture Glove — a wearable system that records how people move, clean and organize. Sunday said this approach enables Memo to operate in unpredictable home settings and complete extended, multi-step activities such as clearing tables, loading dishwashers, folding laundry, organizing household items and preparing simple beverages.
“The problem has always been data. Most home robots start as adaptations of industrial machines, and those trained in labs rarely succeed in unpredictable, real-world environments,” Tony Zhao, co-founder and CEO of Sunday, said in the announcement. “Our Skill Capture Glove changes this by collecting thousands of hours of daily routines from hundreds of families. That practical knowledge lets Memo develop the skills families truly care about. We built Memo to give people back time for what matters, with the safety needs for any family in mind. This is a turning point for home robotics.”
The robot uses a rolling base rather than a bipedal design, prioritizing stability and safety in family environments. A silicone-clad exterior is intended to make the system approachable and suitable for kitchens, living rooms and laundry spaces. Sunday said Memo was purpose-built for residential use rather than adapted from industrial platforms.
Applications for Sunday’s Founding Family Beta open November 19, with 50 households selected to receive individually numbered units in late 2026. Participants will test early capabilities and provide feedback to shape the robot’s development.
Sunday was founded by Zhao and Chi, whose academic work contributed to advances in robot learning, including ALOHA, transformer adaptation for robotics and diffusion policy. The company’s team includes 25 engineers and researchers with backgrounds from Stanford, Tesla, DeepMind, Waymo, Meta and Neuralink. Benchmark, known for early-stage investments in AI and infrastructure startups, is supporting the company’s development.
Image credit: Sunday
