Tesla loses employees to a new robotics startup

Tesla has lost at least ten of its long-term, experienced engineers to a new robotics startup called Sunday Robotics. 

Sunday Robotics recently unveiled its product called Memo, along with a team consisting of engineers who previously worked on various Tesla AI products. 

Tesla loses employees to a new robotics startup  

A new robotics startup called Sunday Robotics has hired several important Tesla engineers who worked on the company’s self-driving and robot programs. The company publicly announced its product for the first time on November 19, 2025, and presented a team that consisted of many former Tesla workers.

The startup now has at least 10 former Tesla employees, including people who worked on Tesla’s Optimus humanoid robot and Autopilot self-driving system, according to Business Insider. 

One of the workers, named Perry Jia worked on Tesla’s Autopilot and Optimus programs for almost six years before leaving in the summer to join Sunday. Nadeesha Amarasinghe served as an engineering lead for AI infrastructure at Tesla and helped with both Optimus and Autopilot during his more than seven years at the company.

Nishant Desai spent almost five years on Tesla’s machine learning team working on Autopilot and Full Self-Driving before joining Sunday. Jason Peterson, who worked as a talent recruiter for Tesla’s Optimus and robotaxi programs, also moved to the startup. The company now has around 50 people on staff in total.

Sunday Robotics was founded in 2024 by Tony Zhao and Cheng Chi. Both graduated from Stanford University with PhDs in computer science and robotics. Zhao previously worked at DeepMind, Tesla, and GoogleX. Zhao was an intern on Tesla’s Autopilot team in 2022, and Chi previously worked as an engineering intern at Apple and as a robotics research intern at the Toyota Research Institute. 

Sunday Robotics’ different approach 

Sunday Robotics unveiled its home robot called Memo on November 19. The robot uses a wheeled platform with a body that can move up and down, instead of legs like Tesla’s Optimus. The company says the design makes the robot better at handling objects with its hands.

Sunday Robotics reported that it trained its robot on 10 million behavioral episodes collected with a $200 Skill Capture Glove that hundreds of regular people wear to record themselves doing chores in their own homes. Tesla uses VR teleoperation suits where workers wear motion-capture equipment and copy tasks in a lab for its training.

The glove method allowed Sunday to collect 10 million episodes of real-world data from messy kitchens, different lighting conditions, and cats jumping on counters, which it claims it did at a much lower cost than Tesla’s lab setup. The company calls these people who wear the gloves “Memory Developers.” 

The movement of experienced engineers from Tesla to startups like Sunday Robotics is due to the growing competition in the home robotics industry. Sunday Robotics received early backing from Conviction, a venture capital firm focused on foundational AI companies. The startup claims it received private visits from OpenAI, Stripe, Stanford, and Figma.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk has said that solving autonomous driving will determine Tesla’s long-term value. He has also emphasized the Optimus humanoid robot project, saying the company wants to eventually ship millions of units that can do tasks from factory work to personal care. However, the loss of key engineers to competitors could affect those plans, along with his almost trillion-dollar pay package, which is mostly tethered to robotics growth.

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