At least 10 of Tesla’s long-tenured, experienced engineers have recently departed for a new robotics startup called Sunday Robotics, four sources familiar with the talent flow told TechCrunch. Startup Sunday Robotics just lifted the lid on Memo, its latest product, and a crack team that includes former engineers who worked on several Tesla AI products.
A new robotics startup, Sunday Robotics, has hired a handful of key Tesla engineers who were part of the company’s self-driving and robotics program. The company publicly unveiled its product for the first time on Nov. 19, 2025, and displayed a team composed of several former Tesla employees.
The startup now boasts at least 10 former Tesla employees, including some who worked on Tesla’s Optimus humanoid robot and its Autopilot self-driving system, Business Insider reported.
One of those workers, Perry Jia, had worked on Tesla’s Autopilot and Optimus programs for nearly six years before leaving in the summer to join Sunday. Nadeesha Amarasinghe was an engineering lead in AI infrastructure at Tesla and worked on both Optimus and Autopilot during his seven-plus years there.
Before Sunday, Nishant Desai worked on Autopilot and Full Self-Driving at Tesla for almost 5 years on the company’s machine learning team. Jason Peterson, a talent scout for Tesla’s Optimus and robotaxi programs, also transferred to the startup. Recently, the company’s staff expanded to about 50 people in total.
Sunday Robotics was founded in 2024 by Tony Zhao and Cheng Chi. Both got their PhDs in computer science and robotics from Stanford University. Zhao was a former employee of DeepMind, Tesla and GoogleX. In 2022, Zhao was an intern on Tesla’s Autopilot team, and Chi had worked as an engineering intern at Apple and as a robotics research intern at the Toyota Research Institute.
Robotics startup different approach
Sunday Robotics has pulled back the curtain on Memo, its in-home robot announced on November 19. Unlike Tesla’s Optimus, which has legs, the robot uses a wheeled base with a body that moves up and down. The design, the company says, leaves the robot better able to manipulate objects with its hands.
Sunday Robotics programmed its robot using data from 10 million behavioural episodes recorded with a $200 Skill Capture Glove that hundreds of random individuals put on to record themselves doing chores around their homes. For its training, Tesla employs VR teleoperation suits, which workers wear while performing tasks in a lab using motion-capture gear.
By using the glove, Sunday was able to collect 10 million episodes of real-world data, including messy kitchens, various lighting conditions , and cats leaping on counters, far faster and at a much lower cost than Tesla’s lab setup. The people who wear the gloves, the company terms “Memory Developers.”
Experienced engineers at Sunday Robotics have written software, built hardware, and developed robots to take on daily chores and otherwise contribute to the home robotics revolution sweeping across the industry. Sunday Robotics got early support from Conviction, a venture capital firm that invests in base-layer AI companies. The startup says it was visited privately by OpenAI, Stripe, Stanford, and Figma.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk has said that solving the problem of autonomous driving will determine Tesla’s long-term value. He has also focused on the team working on the humanoid robot Optimus, telling Wired that Righthand’s goal is to ship someday millions of devices that are great for everything from factory work to personal care. But the departure of top engineers to rival companies could throw those plans off course, as might his nearly trillion-dollar pay package, which is largely tied to growth in robotics.
