The humanoid home robot company — NEO brings a robot into your house for $20K
HQ: Palo Alto, CA, United States (founded in Norway) | Founded: 2015 | Employees: ~150 (2026, est.) | Stage: Late Stage VC (seeking ~$1B round at $10B+ valuation) | Website: https://www.1x.tech
1X Technologies was founded in 2015 in Norway as Halodi Robotics by Bernt Øyvind Børnich, a roboticist who believed general-purpose robots could coexist with humans — starting in the home. The company (renamed 1X, based in Palo Alto with a Norwegian heritage) built Eve, a wheeled android robot deployed for security and logistics duties, and spent years developing its signature 'soft robotics' approach: torque-controlled, compliant actuators that make robots safe around people rather than dangerously powerful.\n\n1X's breakthrough moment came in March 2023 when OpenAI's Startup Fund led its Series A2 — OpenAI's first robotics investment — putting 1X at the center of the humanoid-robot wave that exploded through 2024-2026 alongside Figure, Tesla Optimus, and Boston Dynamics. In January 2024 it raised a $100M Series B led by EQT Ventures with Samsung NEXT and Nistad Group. The company's flagship is NEO, unveiled as the first purpose-built home humanoid: lightweight, safe, and designed for chores and assistance, priced at $20,000 or $499/month with a $200 deposit — the first published consumer pricing in the category.\n\nIn 2026, 1X launched NEO into Early Access customer homes and began scaling deployments, with CEO Børnich telling TechCrunch the company plans to deploy several thousand units in homes. The company has been raising a large round — targeting ~$1B at a $10B+ valuation (more than 12x its previous valuation), per The Information — and positions each deployed NEO as a data-collection node for its embodied AI models. With its safety-first design, consumer focus, and OpenAI pedigree, 1X is the leading challenger in the race to put a humanoid in the home.
1X is the most consumer-focused of the humanoid-robot leaders: while Figure and Tesla chase factories and warehouses, 1X is selling NEO into people's homes — with real published pricing ($20K or $499/month), a safety-first design (soft, compliant actuation), and Early Access home deployments in 2026. Its thesis is distinctive: homes are the ultimate training ground for embodied AI, and every deployed NEO feeds data back into the model. The bull case is first-mover consumer positioning, an OpenAI-backed pedigree, and a path to thousands of home deployments; the bear case is that home humanoids are years from proven economics, competitors (Figure at $39B, Tesla Optimus) are vastly better capitalized, and consumer safety/liability risk is severe.
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