DeepMind, Tesla Vets Emerge From Stealth With ''Sunday Robotics,'' Backed by Conviction

A new, high-pedigree robotics startup, Sunday Robotics, has emerged from stealth with a coordinated social media teaser pointing to a November 19 launch.

The Mountain View-based company is led by co-founder and CEO Tony Zhao, whose resume includes a Stanford PhD (dropout), DeepMind, Tesla, and GoogleX. The co-founder and CTO is Cheng Chi, with a PhD from Stanford and Columbia.

The company's initial tease—a video of a robotic arm loading an espresso machine—was quote-tweeted by Zhao with a caption that sets an astronomically high bar for the reveal: "Macintosh, iPhone, ChatGPT,".

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1.5 Years in Stealth with VC Backing

While the company's public presence is new, it has been operating in stealth for some time. In a post on X, Zhao referenced a photo from 1.5 years ago, thanking Sarah Guo and Pranav Reddy of the VC firm Conviction for their "first term sheet."

Guo, a prominent investor focused on "Software 3.0," and her firm Conviction are known for making early, high-risk bets on foundational AI companies. Their early backing indicates that Sunday Robotics has been a well-capitalized, serious effort long before its public debut.

Silicon Valley's New "It" Robot

This backing is reinforced by a heavy-hitting list of tech leaders who have already had a private viewing. In a November 6 post, Zhao thanked a long list of high-profile AI and tech leaders for visiting and "shar[ing] in the excitement."

The list of visitors tagged includes Andrej Karpathy (OpenAI/Tesla), Kevin Weil (OpenAI), David Singleton (Stripe), Percy Liang (Stanford), Dylan Field (Figma), Hugo Barra (Oculus/Android), and Sarah Guo (Conviction), among others. This, combined with the "BattleBots"-famed Kyle Miller also being on the team, indicates the company has quietly secured significant buy-in from both the hardware and AI elite.

An Ambitious "Full Stack" Philosophy

Sunday Robotics is positioning itself as a new contender in the field's central philosophical divide, which is currently defined by 1X and Figure.

• 1X Technologies is betting on a "human-in-the-loop" strategy, deploying its NEO robots into homes with an "Expert Mode." CEO Bernt Børnich has called this a "data collection play" necessary to "bootstrap" the AI.
• Figure AI has taken the opposite stance. CEO Brett Adcock has stated his company "will not teleoperate" its robots, instead focusing on solving autonomy first.

Sunday's approach, which CTO Cheng Chi says involves "Owning the whole stack from HW to AI," appears to be a claim to have leapfrogged this debate. Chi has touted the team's ability to achieve "mm level precision beyond actuator limits" as a result of this full-stack control.

The team's claims are aggressive. In one video showing a robot navigating a cat in a dishwasher, Zhao declared, "cat-level intelligence achieved internally," a pointed nod to a benchmark for "common sense" AI recently discussed by Meta's Yann LeCun. Chi reinforced this, stating, "To build generalized intelligence for personal robot you must train on the actual distribution" of "real lived-in homes."

The November 19 reveal is now set to be one of the most closely watched events in robotics this year, testing whether Sunday's product can match the ambitious, paradigm-shifting claims of its founders.