Silicon Valley’s robotics boom in full effect.
A new breed of startups is raising massive funding rounds to push AI-powered machines into daily life. Venture capital is pouring into companies developing both the brains and bodies of next-gen machines for everything from household assistance to lights-out manufacturing.
Sunday Robotics Secures $165M
Mountain View-based Sunday Robotics just announced it raised $165 million in a Series B round led by the tech-focused investment firm Coatue Management with participation from Tiger Global Management, Benchmark, and Bain Capital Ventures. The funding will go toward accelerating the development and production of its wheeled home robot, Memo. The war chest is pretty substantial for a young robotics firm; it’s more than 1X Technologies had in 2024 as it prepared to launch its NEO humanoid.
Former Google DeepMind engineer Tony Zhao dropped out of a Stanford University doctorate program in 2024 to launch Sunday with fellow Stanford researcher Cheng Chi. The startup is now valued at $1.15 billion.
“We are uniquely positioned to solve autonomy by building the fastest model iteration loop: from data collection, training models, to rigorous evaluations,” Zhao said on X when announcing the funding. “Our last demo only took three months to build, but advances the frontier on generalization, dexterity, and long-horizon tasks.”
Part of the funding will toward paying so-called “memory developers” to perform everyday activities while wearing sensor-equipped gloves that capture hand movements and manipulation data. The contract workers earn between $30 to $60 an hour while recording tasks like folding laundry or loading a dishwasher. The activities generate training data that feeds Memo’s AI robot brain.
Sunday Robotics plans to ship about 50 robots to beta users by late 2026. They’re targeting pricing between $5,000 and $10,000 once production scales. The robots currently cost about $20,000 apiece to build.
Rhoda AI Emerges from Stealth with $450M
In nearby Palo Alto, Rhoda AI just emerged from stealth after raising about $450 million in Series A funding. Its already a unicorn with a valuation of $1.7 billion.
The startup is developing a system called FutureVision, which it describes as a robotics intelligence platform to help machines run reliably in unpredictable environments like factories and warehouses. Rhoda trains its models on hundreds of millions of Internet videos to give its robots an understanding of how objects move and interact in physical reality. Rhoda says the software can plug into existing robotic systems already commonly used in manufacturing and logistics.
The startup was founded by Jagdeep Singh, a serial deep-tech entrepreneur who previously launched QuantumScape and Infinera. The Series A found was led by Premji Invest with participation from Khosla Ventures, Temasek, Mayfield, Capricorn Investment Group, and technology backer John Doerr.
Mind Robotics Valued at $2B
Also in Palo Alto, Mind Robotics just announced it raised $500 million in a Series A found led by Accel and Andreesen Horowitz. Its valuation is already $2 billion.
Spun out of the EV manufacturer Rivian last year, Mind Robotics says it’s building both the hardware and software for industrial robots to automate factory work like component assembly, wiring harness installation, and material handling. The startup is using real manufacturing data collected from Rivian’s production lines to train its machine-learning models.
Y Combinator’s Robotics Picks
Physical AI is also becoming a bigger priority to the Silicon Valley tech startup incubator Y Combinator, which offers $500,000 in seed funding to hundreds of startups a year.
Its Winter 2026 batch includes Origami Robotics, which is based just south of San Francisco. It’s developing a highly flexible robotic hand along with a matching system to collect training data from human hands.
Other robotics-related picks from the incubator’s latest batch include the SF-based firms:
- General Astronautics, which aspires to put autonomous robotic systems for research and manufacturing in space
- Asimov, which is scaling a system for collecting human motion data for training humanoids
- Remy AI, which makes simple robots for fulfilment automation
- RoboDock, which builds robots for electric and autonomous vehicle fleet depot operations
- Noetic, which automates hardware compliance
- Human Archive, whose founders dropped out of Stanford and Berkeley to collect and label massive amounts of multimodal data for robotics and world modeling
- One Robot, which develops world model-based simulation software for robotics labs to train autonomous machines
Noble Machines
In Sunnyvale, Noble Machines just emerged from stealth with its first general-purpose robot worker named Moby.
The startup, formerly known as Under Control Robotics (UCR), says it’s deployed the headless humanoid to an unnamed Fortune 500 customer. Noble Machines was launched in 2024 by former engineers from Apple, SpaceX, NASA, and CalTech. According to the robotics firm, its flagship robot can learn new industrial tasks in just a few hours by watching demonstrations or through natural language instructions.
Standing 170 cm (5 feet 7 inches), Moby boasts a reported 34 degrees of freedom (DoF). It can lift and carry up to 27 kg (60 lbs), which makes it one of today’s strongest robots on two legs.
Despite its strength, Noble Machines says its humanoid consumes an average of 200 W/hour, about the same amount of energy required for a household television. It can operate for 5 to 6 hours per shift, powered by a single NVIDIA Jetson Orin edge computer.
Noble has not publicly disclosed pricing yet.
Foundation’s Robot for Battle
On X, the founder of the SF-based startup Foundation Future Industries pointed out to yours truly that his startup’s flagship Phantom MK1 humanoid robot has a higher lift capacity than Moby at 40 kg (88 lbs) and that the second-generation version can handle double that.
The company has reportedly sent at least two of its industrial humanoids to the Ukrainian military. Read more about that here.