Humanoid maker Sunday reaches $1.15 billion valuation to build household robots | TechCrunch

Robotics company Sunday has raised a new funding round that has valued the company at unicorn status, meaning over $1 billion, it announced on Thursday.

Sunday says it has raised a $165 million a $1.15 billion valuation in a Series B round led by Coatue Management. Other investors in the round include Tiger Global, Benchmark, and Bain Capital Ventures.

The company emerged from stealth late last year and already has 1,000 people on its waitlist, Bloomberg reports.

Sunday, founded by Tony Zhao and Cheng Chi, is on a quest to build a household humanoid called Memo that helps with tasks like laundry and clearing the table.

Experts have been trying for decades to build a robot like this — a type of Rosie from “The Jetsons” — but have come up short time and again, in large part because of a lack of training data to teach robots how to reliably grasp objects of differing weights, textures and fragility (think: towels versus wine glasses). As AI technology continues to advance, a new slew of robotic technologies is hitting the market, hoping to once again bring the humanoid helper to life.