Summary
Tony Zhao is the co-founder and CEO of Sunday Robotics, a Mountain View startup building Memo, an autonomous home robot for household chores. Before co-founding Sunday, Zhao was a Stanford PhD student whose research produced ALOHA and ACT (Action Chunking with Transformers), two open-source imitation-learning systems that became foundational tools across the robot-manipulation research community. He dropped out of his PhD program in 2024 to start Sunday with Cheng Chi, and led the company to a $1.15 billion valuation within roughly 15 months of founding.
Career
Zhao studied electrical engineering and computer sciences at UC Berkeley from 2017 to 2021, graduating with highest honors and a 3.99 GPA while completing seven PhD-level courses in machine learning, robotics, and control theory under advisors Sergey Levine and Dan Klein. He then joined Stanford’s computer science PhD program in September 2021, advised by Chelsea Finn at the IRIS Lab, and received a Stanford Robotics Fellowship for the 2022–23 academic year. During this period he also worked in research and internship roles at Google DeepMind and as a machine learning scientist at Tesla.
In 2023, Zhao published ALOHA (A Low-cost Open-source Hardware system for bimanual teleoperation) alongside ACT (Action Chunking with Transformers), presented at the Robotics: Science and Systems (RSS) conference. ALOHA demonstrated that a roughly $20,000 dual-arm robot system—an order of magnitude cheaper than prior industrial research platforms—could learn precise manipulation tasks such as threading zip ties, juggling ping-pong balls, and assembling chains from just minutes of human demonstration data. ACT, the accompanying imitation-learning algorithm, predicted short sequences (“chunks”) of actions rather than individual timesteps, making it substantially easier to learn complex manipulation behaviors from limited demonstrations. Both the hardware design and code were open-sourced and have since become widely used reference platforms in the robot-learning research community, including integration into Hugging Face’s LeRobot framework.
In 2024, Zhao extended this work with Mobile ALOHA, presented at the Conference on Robot Learning (CoRL), which added mobility to the bimanual manipulation platform and demonstrated household-style tasks including sautéing shrimp, cleaning wine spills, and calling elevators using whole-body teleoperation.
Later in 2024, Zhao left his Stanford PhD program to co-found Sunday Robotics with Cheng Chi, whom he had connected with after noticing their research papers had been published around the same time. The two began prototyping in Chi’s apartment, and by the end of 2024 had grown their team to roughly eight people. Zhao has said the company’s seed funding was led by Sarah Guo at Conviction, with Eric Vishria at Benchmark leading the subsequent Series A, alongside a group of angel investors including Figma CEO Dylan Field, former OpenAI and Instagram executive Kevin Weil, Hugo Barra, David Singleton, Nothing founder Carl Pei, Mike Vernal, and John Lilly.
As CEO, Zhao has led Sunday through its public emergence from stealth in November 2025, the launch of its Memo home robot, and the company’s rapid rise to unicorn status in March 2026 following a $165 million Series B led by Coatue Management at a $1.15 billion valuation. He has spoken publicly about the company’s technical philosophy—including its decision to build a wheeled rather than bipedal robot and its reliance on a distributed network of human demonstrators wearing Sunday’s proprietary Skill Capture Glove rather than in-home teleoperation—in venues including the No Priors podcast with Sarah Guo.
Source Notes
This profile draws on Tony Zhao’s LinkedIn profile, his own public posts announcing Sunday’s funding rounds, coverage from yespress.io and sudoremove.com summarizing his academic and professional timeline, and the No Priors podcast interview with Sunday Robotics’ co-founders. His academic publication record (ALOHA, ACT, Mobile ALOHA) is corroborated by Stanford IRIS Lab publications and widely cited in robotics research literature.