1X

Most robotics startups chase the factory floor because it is predictable and the buyer has a budget. 1X went the other way and pointed its flagship robot, NEO, straight at the messiest environment there is: your home, with your kids and pets in it. That is the whole bet, and it shapes everything from the soft knit body to the price tag.

The company started in 2014 in Norway as Halodi Robotics, founded by Bernt Oyvind Bornich, and has since moved its center of gravity to California with engineering in San Carlos and manufacturing in Hayward. It shipped a wheeled industrial humanoid called EVE first, then pivoted hard to the home with NEO, which is now taking $200 deposits ahead of US deliveries in 2026. The catch is that early NEO leans on remote human experts to handle chores it cannot yet do alone, so the promise of full autonomy is still a promise.

1X builds general-purpose humanoid robots and the AI that runs them. NEO is a 5-foot-6, 66-pound robot designed to walk around a house, pick up chores, answer questions, and stay soft enough that bumping into it does not hurt. Under the hood it runs Redwood, the company's own generalist AI model, on an Nvidia Jetson Thor compute stack 1X brands as the NEO Cortex.

What makes NEO unusual is the hardware philosophy. Instead of rigid metal joints, 1X uses tendon-driven actuators built on its proprietary Revo1 motor, wraps the whole body in a 3D lattice polymer for cushioning, and covers the joints so there are no pinch points. It is quieter than a refrigerator and the suit comes off for the wash. This is a robot engineered to be lived with, not just deployed.

The pitch is simple even if the engineering is not: household work eats time nobody wants to spend, and a capable home robot could hand that time back. NEO is aimed at the boring, repetitive stuff, tidying, putting away dishes, laundry, opening the door, plus a conversational layer so it doubles as a voice assistant that can actually walk over and do something.

1X is candid that day-one NEO handles a narrow set of tasks autonomously and calls in a remote 1X Expert for anything harder, using those sessions to teach the robot. The honest read is that the time-savings pitch is real for a few chores now and aspirational for the rest, with the robot's usefulness growing as its AI does.

NEO's first customers are consumers willing to be beta testers for a first-generation home robot, the kind of buyer who bought an early EV or a first-gen VR headset and expected some rough edges. 1X gates them through a private early-access program rather than shipping to anyone with a credit card.

The second audience is enterprise, and it is arriving fast. Through its Charter Partner program and a December 2025 deal with investor EQT, 1X is lining up industrial deployments across manufacturing, warehousing, and logistics. That two-track strategy, homes and factories from the same platform, is the company's hedge against the home market taking longer than hoped.

1X's lineup traces its own history. EVE, the wheeled industrial humanoid, proved the company could deploy robots in real customer facilities. NEO, the bipedal home robot, is where the company is placing its future, now in its Gamma iteration and heading into homes.

Underneath both sit the pieces that make 1X vertically integrated: the Revo1 tendon-drive motor it designed in-house, and Redwood, the AI model that lets NEO learn and repeat tasks. Owning the motor, the body, and the brain is the moat 1X is trying to build.

1X sells NEO two ways. You can own one outright for $20,000 with a three-year warranty and priority delivery, or subscribe at $499 a month, which bundles the service and, over four years, actually costs more than buying but keeps you on the latest hardware. Either path starts with a fully refundable $200 deposit, and US deliveries are slated for 2026.

The subscription is the interesting part: it turns a robot into recurring revenue and, paired with paid remote Expert sessions, hints at a services business layered on top of the hardware. The enterprise side runs on volume commitments instead, like the EQT arrangement covering up to 10,000 units over several years.

1X is in one of the most crowded and best-funded races in tech, up against Tesla's Optimus, Figure, and a wave of Chinese makers like Unitree whose R1 starts around $5,900. 1X cannot win on price against that, and it is not trying to.

Its wedge is being the humanoid actually designed for the home: soft body, safe joints, quiet operation, and a real consumer go-to-market instead of a factory-only pitch. The bet is that owning the full stack, the Revo1 motor, the NEO hardware, and the Redwood AI model, produces a safer, more capable home robot than rivals bolting parts together. Whether that edge holds once autonomy has to stand on its own is the open question.

Reaction to NEO splits hard. Fans on Hacker News praise the mechanical design, especially the pulley-driven hands, and argue $499 a month is reasonable next to what weekly housekeeping costs, calling it a possible iPhone moment for the home.

The skeptics hit two nerves. First, teleoperation: early NEO relies on remote human operators, which critics frame bluntly as hidden human labor and worry will be offshored to low-wage workers. Second, privacy: a camera-and-microphone robot roaming your house, sometimes piloted by a stranger, raises obvious questions about what gets recorded and who watches. Add a 4-hour battery and tasks that reportedly take much longer than a person would, and the recurring verdict is promising hardware with a big autonomy gap still to close.

1X has raised roughly $136M in disclosed venture funding. The OpenAI Startup Fund led its $23.5M Series A2 in 2023, and EQT Ventures led a $100M Series B in January 2024 alongside Samsung NEXT and others, giving the company both an AI heavyweight and a European buyout giant on its cap table.

The bigger number is still forming: reports in September 2025 had 1X seeking around $1 billion at a valuation of at least $10 billion, a leap that would only make sense if investors believe home humanoids are about to be real. Treat the $10B figure as reported ambition, not a closed round.

1X has done the hard part few home-robot companies attempt: built a safe, soft, mass-manufacturable humanoid and lined up both consumer pre-orders and a large enterprise pipeline. The hardware and the go-to-market are further along than most rivals.

The risk is concentrated in one place. Today NEO depends on remote human operators for much of what it does, and the whole thesis, the $499 subscription, the $10B ambition, the time-back promise, only pays off if Redwood and the World Model close the autonomy gap faster than skeptics expect. If they do, 1X could define the category. If they lag, it is an expensive robot that still needs a human on the other end.

1X's culture comes through plainly in its own job posts: it wants builders who move fast, own their work end to end, and, in the company's phrasing, treat time like the one thing you cannot get back. Leadership frames the moment as the hard problems being behind them and the hard work of shipping at scale ahead.

The work itself is heavily hands-on and mostly on-site, split across San Carlos engineering, Hayward manufacturing, and the company's research arm, 1X Labs, which recruits deep specialists in actuation, materials, controls, and biomechanics with an explicit rule that research only counts if it ships. This is an in-person hardware company for people who want to touch the robot, not a remote-first software shop.

Disclosed pay skews to engineering, where salaried bands run from roughly $72,000 for early-career compliance work up to $300,000 for senior research and staff roles, all in US dollars. A handful of operations, G&A, and hourly technician roles fill out the rest, with hourly rates in the $25 to $50 range.

The consistent thread across postings is equity on top of base, so the salary bands are only part of the package. For a pre-IPO robotics company chasing a large valuation, that equity is a real part of the pitch.

Because NEO lives inside people's homes, 1X's privacy posture is not boilerplate, it is central to the product. Its privacy policy, last updated in October 2025, covers the usual account, payment, and device data, uses third-party payment processors, and leans on legitimate-interest and consent bases for marketing.

The company also builds security into NEO itself: job posts describe secure-boot chains, code-signing, attestation, and hardened cloud services so a robot in someone's house can be trusted by its owner. What the public pages do not spell out is a formal registered legal entity or a compliance-cert list, so those remain unconfirmed here.

The story reporters keep returning to is the pivot: a robot pitched for the home now being lined up for factories and warehouses. In December 2025, 1X and investor EQT announced plans to deploy up to 10,000 NEO units across EQT's 300-plus portfolio companies through 2030, one of the largest commercial commitments the young humanoid industry has seen.

Around it sits the consumer launch, with pre-orders opened in October 2025 and deliveries promised for 2026, and the reported billion-dollar fundraise. Together they read as a company trying to prove demand on two fronts at once.