1X Technologies builds general-purpose humanoid robots designed to live and work in people's homes. Its flagship NEO is a soft, bipedal home robot that handles everyday chores, evolved from the company's earlier EVE industrial robot.
Notable milestones from 1X Technologies’s journey — funding rounds, launches, and other moments worth knowing.
1X's production hand gives NEO 22 fully actuated degrees of freedom across the fingers and palm plus three at the wrist, with force-controlled tendon drives and tactile sensing for pressure, location and slip. Hundreds had already come off its in-house line at launch, which 1X says can produce 10,000 hands in 2026.
1X opened a lab dedicated to embodied pretraining — building robot behavior into the base model from video, human egocentric data, simulation, teleoperation and on-policy NEO runs, rather than treating robotics as a fine-tuning problem. The bet is that real-world robot data, not a generic foundation model, is what makes NEO more capable after deployment.
1X says NEO pre-orders filled a 10,000-unit first year in five days, then opened a 58,000 sq ft factory in Hayward to build more of the robot in-house. The plant brings motors, tendons, hands, batteries and assembly under one roof, the kind of vertical integration 1X is betting on to drive down cost and raise reliability as it scales home humanoids.
1X moved from R&D to product, taking $200 deposits for NEO at $20,000 outright or $499 a month, with US deliveries slated for 2026. Early units lean on human-in-the-loop teleoperation to handle the chores autonomy can't yet.
1X showed NEO powered by NVIDIA's GR00T N1 humanoid foundation model during Jensen Huang's GTC keynote, tying its home robot to the industry's emerging robotics-AI stack.
SourceThe next iteration brought a quieter, more manufacturable design — a knit bodysuit, a natural balancing gait, and on-board AI for chores and conversation — as 1X started testing NEO inside real homes.
1X revealed NEO Beta, a bipedal home humanoid wrapped in a soft knit suit with tendon-driven joints meant to be safe around people — a deliberate break from the heavy industrial machines its rivals were building.
SourceSweden's EQT Ventures led a $100M round — with Samsung NEXT, Tiger Global and the OpenAI Startup Fund returning — taking total funding past $135M to push NEO from prototype toward production.
EQT VenturesThe OpenAI Startup Fund led 1X's $23.5M round — one of OpenAI's earliest hardware investments — with Tiger Global and Norwegian backers joining as the company pivoted from industrial machines toward general-purpose humanoids.
Roboticist Bernt Børnich started the company in Moss, Norway, building industrial humanoids and its own ultra-light Revo1 servo motor — the foundation it would later rename 1X and aim squarely at the home.
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