The History of 1X Technologies

01Founding

1X's founder, Bernt Øivind Børnich, has said he decided by age 11 that he wanted to build humanoid robots, later studying robotics and nano-electronics at the University of Oslo. He founded Halodi Robotics in Moss, Norway, in May 2014 with co-founders Phuong Nguyen (then-CTO, a robotics PhD from the University of Ulsan) and machinist Jørgen Sundell, after board member Pål Løken approached the technical team looking to back a robotics venture.

Halodi's early years weren't spent building humanoids directly — the company first developed its own actuator technology, the Revo1, a cable-driven differential transmission paired with low-friction motors that rejected the costly high-ratio harmonic gears used elsewhere in the field. That actuator work underpinned Halodi's first product, EVE, a wheeled humanoid that began commercial deployment around 2020 — including a 2020 partnership with Everon by ADT to deploy 150–250 EVE units for overnight security guarding of US commercial buildings, 1X's earliest real commercial traction.

02The pivot toward the home

The company rebranded from Halodi Robotics to 1X Technologies, officially announced July 3, 2023, with Børnich framing the new name around a design philosophy: "unlike other androids that have to slow down to be functional, 1X's models work at 1x speed." Some secondary accounts place the underlying strategic pivot toward home robotics earlier, around 2022–early 2023, ahead of that formal announcement.

OpenAI's venture arm led a $23.5 million Series A2 in March 2023, at a $210 million post-money valuation — one of OpenAI's earliest bets on humanoid robotics, alongside Figure. A $100 million Series B followed in January 2024, led by EQT Ventures with Samsung NEXT and the OpenAI Startup Fund again participating; CEO Børnich called it the company's first chance to offer its team a financial payout for their work. By September 2025, 1X was reportedly in talks for a round of up to $1 billion at a valuation of at least $10 billion — nearly 48 times its Series A2 valuation less than two and a half years earlier — though as of this writing no source confirms that round has formally closed, and no valuation has been publicly disclosed for the intervening Series B.

03The product line

1X's product line moved in two distinct phases. EVE, the wheeled commercial humanoid, was 1X's revenue-generating product through the early 2020s, deployed for security and logistics work. The home-robotics pivot began in earnest with NEO Beta, unveiled in August 2024 — a legged, 165cm, 30kg humanoid with a soft, cushioned exterior. NEO Gamma followed in February 2025, with 1X claiming a 10x hardware-reliability improvement and a 10-decibel noise reduction versus Beta, alongside a new in-house conversational model.

Preorders for the consumer version, simply named NEO, opened October 28, 2025, priced at $20,000 outright or $499 a month on a six-month-minimum subscription, with a $200 refundable deposit to join the queue. NEO weighs about 30kg, can lift 70kg and carry 25kg, and runs at 22 decibels of operating noise. 1X said the preorder queue sold out its entire first year of planned production — roughly 10,000 units, described as about $200 million in committed revenue — within five days.

04"A mixture of autonomy and teleoperation"

1X has been unusually direct, for the industry, about how much of NEO's current capability runs through a human operator rather than autonomous AI. Børnich has said plainly that "much of the work will be done by teleoperators in the beginning," and reporting on a Wall Street Journal test run found that none of the tasks NEO performed for the reporter were done autonomously. In a November 2025 interview, Børnich described NEO's operation as "a mixture of autonomy and teleoperation," citing internal figures of roughly 90-plus percent success in autonomous door-opening and about 80% for autonomously fetching objects — while defending human-assisted operation itself as potentially safer than hiring an outside cleaner, pointing to operator vetting, real-time manager oversight, audit trails, and anonymized interfaces that keep operators from seeing a resident's face or knowing which home they're controlling a robot in.

1X has also built in privacy controls specifically for this model: user-defined "no-go zones" that block a robot (and its operator) from certain rooms at the software level, default face-blurring in the operator's video feed, a visible light-ring indicator when a human has taken control, and local storage that lets an owner delete footage before it's uploaded. Even so, NEO's October 2025 launch drew sharp privacy criticism from multiple outlets, and one privacy lawyer quoted in coverage noted that data collected "ranges from the mundane... to the very personal" — real-time video of a home's layout and its occupants, including children — while critics have separately argued that face-blurring alone doesn't guarantee anonymity, since voice, behavior, and household patterns can still identify residents.

05A US factory and scaling

1X consolidated its previously split Sunnyvale, California and Moss, Norway teams into a new 80,000-square-foot Palo Alto headquarters, announced in July 2025. It followed that with a dedicated NEO factory in Hayward, California — a 58,000-square-foot facility built out in roughly three months, beginning full-scale production on April 30, 2026, with initial capacity of 10,000 units a year and a stated target of 100,000 units a year by the end of 2027, backed by a larger facility planned for San Carlos, California. As of a report published the day the Hayward line opened, robots coming off it were still being routed to internal testing and validation rather than customer homes — actual deliveries against the sold-out preorder queue had not yet begun.

1X's headcount has grown quickly alongside that buildout — from roughly 388 employees at the end of 2024 to about 654 a year later, and past 1,000 by mid-2026 on one third-party tracker's count, with more than 200 of those specifically staffing the new Hayward factory.

06A Western alternative, positioned against Chinese rivals

1X's push has increasingly taken on a geopolitical framing. In June 2026, after the US House Select Committee on China publicly warned that Chinese humanoid maker Unitree posed a national-security concern — tied to a proposed bill, the GUARD Act, that would restrict "adversary-built" robotics — 1X accelerated the release of a NEO developer platform, with Børnich framing it explicitly as filling a gap for Western developers: "The West having a proper humanoid development platform is too important for the future of humanity for us to gate-keep."

That framing puts 1X in a three-way race with distinctly different playbooks: Figure AI, backed by a $39 billion valuation, has been an outspoken critic of teleoperation-reliant demos and positions itself as autonomy-first; Tesla's Optimus remains further from market, with no confirmed commercial-sales date as of mid-2026; and 1X has instead leaned into transparency about its own reliance on human operators as a selling point rather than something to hide, betting that an openly hybrid approach can reach paying customers faster than a purely autonomous one.

07FAQ

08Sources