Company

Six months ago, we launched the preorder campaign for NEO The Home Robot.

NEO became one of the most talked about products on earth and shattered records for product launches. But most importantly, it created a community of early customers that trust us to deliver the world's first home humanoid to their doorstep.

It wasn’t just overwhelming, it was (and still is) deeply emotional for us. Some of the team here at 1X have been working on this dream for more than ten years with nothing but passion and deep conviction that the world needs helpful robots and that other people would love NEO as much as we do. After spending years being called crazy, it can be easy to doubt your conviction.

But on October 28th, we launched NEO to the world and booked out our entire production capacity for the next year in just 5 days (10,000 NEOs). With that, our mission became clearer than ever, and we’ve had our heads down for the last few months taking the right steps to deliver on our promise.

With that said, the biggest question we get to date is: “Where is my NEO?”

Our team has been doing their best to answer all of your emails and inquiries on X, but we figured it would be best to just answer directly.

First, it’s important to set a bit of context around the preorder and its position in the broader plan to bring NEO to homes everywhere.

 We have a product we are really excited about that we wanted to share with the world (and it’s already better than marketed. Breakthroughs like 

 and more to come will unlock even more exciting AI functionality than previously anticipated).

 We needed to figure out who wants a NEO, where they are in the world and how many people want a NEO to inform production planning and market entry plans.

 Since launching, we’ve been able to connect with dozens of early customers and learn about their needs– helping us hone in the feature-set we’re delivering.

So back to the question of “Where is my NEO”

In short, it’s coming. Some of you will get your NEO this year, some will get them later. We promised the first NEOs would ship in 2026, and we’re keeping that promise. We are working around the clock to get it to you, but want to make sure that what we ship does justice to the humanoid space (this product has been built on the shoulders of giants) and the trust you’ve placed in us.

There is a lot that goes into creating the first ever humanoid consumer product experience and we aren’t hiding from it. You have to take everything you’ve built, test it aggressively, iterate on it endlessly, and package it up to ship to customers that paid good money for a life-changing experience. There is a lot of trust in that exchange and we don’t take that lightly. The road ahead includes everything from scaling up manufacturing, expanding our internal home testing program (more 1X employees need NEOs!), and continuing to iterate on the product experience until it’s ready for the general audience. Starting today– we are going to be giving you more frequent updates on all fronts.

We have been making tremendous progress towards our milestones and today I couldn’t be more excited to take you inside our NEO Factory right here in Hayward, California, where we are producing more NEO’s than ever.

At 1X, we don’t just order parts from suppliers, assemble them, and call that manufacturing.

The NEO Factory in Hayward, California is America’s first vertically integrated high-volume humanoid robot factory. Spanning 58,000 sq ft and already employing 200+ team members, the NEO Factory has commenced full-scale production of NEO.

We design and manufacture NEO’s critical components in-house — including motors, batteries, structures, transmission systems, soft goods, sensors and more. From cutting metal parts to fully automated motor manufacturing lines that form copper coils, we maintain maximum control of our supply chain. This approach sets us apart from competitors that rely on foreign suppliers for critical subsystems–enabling not only faster iteration, but higher safety standards, efficient scaling, and resilience to geopolitical events that can impact supply chains.

With the NEO Factory in Hayward now online and our San Carlos facility coming online later this year, 1X has the capacity to produce up to 10,000 NEOs per year, with planned increases in automation expected to scale production toward 100,000+ units annually by the end of 2027.

Scaling NEO production was always part of the plan. But after the response to our preorder, we had to accelerate everything. With speed in our DNA, we stood up the NEO Factory in Hayward, California in just three months.

In the short time since receiving our final permits in January, we’ve hired more than 200 employees and have become fully operational.

Most people think humanoids are a robotics problem. They’re wrong. It’s a manufacturing problem. Production makes prototypes look easy.

So we built the machine that builds the machines:

Manufacturing Lines, Automations and Processes

 to create parts from scratch for New Product Introduction and mass manufacturing.

 at the core of all factory operations–built in-house to streamline NEO production. Instead of relying on fragmented tooling, it brings every stage of production into a single system that operates in real time.

designed to break things fast and surface failures–. 20M+ cycles and counting.

 lines to produce and test new builds in limited quantities before being introduced on the main line.

is where we assemble NEO’s joints and body parts for mass production.

 is where robots are fully assembled and stand for the first time before putting on covers and suits.

 is where semi-trucks pull up to the warehouse doors to drop off parts and materials.

Nearly every component of NEO is designed and built from scratch at 1X using manufacturing processes and automations that we’ve been developing since founding the company in 2014.

Even for the parts we don’t produce in-house at the NEO Factory, we work directly inside our suppliers’ facilities to design, develop, and enforce our own quality standards. This level of true vertical integration allows us to deliver the lowest-cost hardware, iterate at an industry-leading pace, and protect our supply chain from geopolitical risks.

Today, we’re excited to take you inside the process, from raw materials to finished robots walking off the line.

Since the start of production in Hayward, our team has manufactured 17,000 motors.

We’ve been perfecting the Revo2 motor– the heart of NEO’s tendon-driven actuation system– since 2015, beginning in Moss, Norway. Producing motors in-house allows us to push the physical limits of torque-to-weight density.

Our motor manufacturing starts with a spool of copper and ends with a fully assembled tendon-driven actuator. Every step is automated by machines designed and built by 1X engineers– from winding our own copper coils to fabricating stators from electric steel. The result is the world’s highest-performance, lowest cost electric motor for humanoid robotics.

Our state-of-the-art motor electronics remove the traditional constraints of motor design, allowing us to design net new motors with dramatically higher torque density.

By controlling every layer– from electric steel selection to manufacturing methods, software, and custom electronics– we can extract maximum performance from the Revo2 motors. This level of vertical integration, engineered from first principles, is what enables us to co-develop components that work together at a level simply not possible when relying on off-the-shelf parts.

NEO’s tendons are the result of more than a decade of innovation in materials science and advanced manufacturing processes. They are engineered to handle heavy payloads while delivering safe, energy-efficient, and remarkably quiet movement– all with industry-leading durability and silent operation.

Every tendon is produced using our proprietary process, which begins with careful material selection, followed by precision braiding and specialized post-processing. This ensures each tendon is perfectly prepared for integration into NEO’s Tendon Drive assembly.

We manufacture NEO’s 22 DoF hand (more on those soon) on our dedicated production line.

Every hand begins with material selection for tendons and rigorous in-house testing. From there, we assemble the full tendon system, integrate our custom electronics, and install the 1X Motors to drive each degree of freedom.

The structural components– fingers, palms, wrists, and forearms– are manufactured directly on the line. Finally, we mold the soft “flesh” and outer gloves using our proprietary polymers, seamlessly integrating an advanced tactile sensing stack throughout.

This end-to-end in-house process gives us complete control over quality, performance, and iteration speed for one of the most important and complex parts of NEO.

The 1X Battery Pack is manufactured with aerospace-grade cells, allowing us to achieve performance and safety levels that are simply not possible with off-the-shelf batteries.

Our proprietary Battery Management System (BMS) samples at 100 Hz, which is roughly 100 times faster than typical commercial packs. This enables real-time monitoring of battery state of health and highly accurate predictions of future performance, state of charge, and state of function. The result is a safer, longer-lasting battery with exceptional fast-charging capability.

We designed the entire battery manufacturing line for high-volume automation using low-cost, highly reliable components. It can complete a weld every 500 milliseconds, giving us the capacity to produce 10,000 batteries per year. A key innovation to 1X Battery Pack production includes innovative side-cooling on both the top and bottom of the battery pack. This approach delivers superior thermal management while supporting rapid, scalable production.

The outcome is a battery that combines industry-leading safety, reliability, fast-charging, and longevity at the lowest possible cost.

Every NEO rolling off the production line comes equipped with the latest 

 embedded in the NEO Cortex. This integration enables powerful real-time AI inference directly on the robot for safety-critical functions, perception, reasoning, and decision-making—without heavy cloud computing.

NEO Cortex, AKA NEO’s brain, tightly integrates on-board compute with custom sensors including dual 8.85MP 90Hz stereo fisheye cameras, beam-forming microphones for directional audio, IMUs and more. Each component is mounted on a custom racking engineered and built in-house, paired with a thermal management system that keeps powerful hardware running efficiently and whisper-quiet.

The first NEO took 1 year to go from CAD to walking its first steps. The latest version, produced in our Hayward Facility, went from CAD to walking in just 1 month.

This acceleration is powered by our NPI line co-located near the Machine Park, where hardware design and manufacturing engineers can go from CAD release to physical parts in as little as a few hours. These rapid prototypes allow us to test new designs, identify issues, and implement solutions at an unprecedented pace– all before new designs are released to mass production.

At the NEO Factory in Hayward, California, we designed the assembly line around continuous flow rather than traditional departments. The entire system eliminates dead zones and queues, favoring single-piece flow wherever possible and batching only where physics demands it.

Each station receives pre-kitted modules, removing the need for searching and guesswork. Functionality is added through progressive bring-up, with in-line verification at every critical step. This ensures issues are caught and resolved immediately, rather than at the end of line.

The line is further strengthened by intelligent tooling that enforces correctness by design: if the part fits, it’s right. Cycle times are tightly balanced across stations to prevent hidden bottlenecks, while proprietary tendon joint conditioning eliminates early-life failures before final integration. Every build is fully digitally traceable down to the individual component and torque value.

The result is a tightly controlled process where quality and throughput scale together.

As we scale robot production, automation is critical to delivering both the volume and uncompromising quality our targets demand. We prioritize highly repeatable processes with minimal variation— tasks where consistency, reliability, or cycle time matter most. Whether that means holding micron-level tolerances or executing uniform process steps at scale, automation eliminates human-induced error and ensures every unit meets the same standard.

Over the past decade, we’ve developed proprietary assembly automations that now handle critical steps across the build —from precise stator insertion into the housing to controlled soldering. Each system is engineered specifically for its task, optimizing alignment, force application, thermal conditions, or motion profiles as needed. Looking ahead, our production lines will integrate a hybrid approach: proven industrial automation for speed and repeatability, combined with humanoid robots for greater flexibility. This combination will let us scale output, adapt quickly to design changes, and continuously improve efficiency, consistency, and overall factory throughput.

Today, our robots have already started to help around the factory. They are actively collecting real-world data and using the 1X World Model to learn practical tasks– from stocking parts for our assembly technicians to performing basic warehousing and logistics operations.

In the coming months, they will take on broader roles such as facility security and other longer-horizon tasks where reliable, helpful hands are needed most.

Long term, the possibilities are near limitless. We are incredibly excited to share regular updates as NEO evolves from factory assistant to a true general-purpose robot– one that will eventually handle everything from household chores to building robots, supporting chip fabs, powering data centers, and more.

The NEO Factory in Hayward, California is live and fully operational. The facility is staffed by a team of over 200 employees and is currently ramping toward an initial production capacity of 10,000 NEOs annually. With automation updates already underway and the new San Carlos factory coming online, we are on track to reach 100,000 units per year by the end of 2027. While the current NEOs coming off the line are being prioritized for our internal team to accelerate development and testing in homes, we are working around the clock to deliver NEO to your doorstep starting in 2026.

Home humanoids are a generational technology... As NEO’s AI capabilities continue to improve, as manufacturing scales, and as we deliver more NEO’s, we will unlock a new era of abundance. We’re not just building a new product, we’re laying the foundation for a fundamentally better future.

We truly can’t wait to get you your NEO. Thank you for being a part of this journey.

NEO Factory | Building Your NEO

We’re excited to announce Amy Lentz as our new SVP of People at 1X.

She joins 1X after a distinguished career spanning the Obama White House, Teach For America, and TOMS, where she most recently led organization-wide transformation as Chief People Officer. She has built her career at the intersection of strategy, operations, and human performance, making the case that people strategy is a true competitive advantage, not a cost center.

“Joining 1X feels like the perfect next chapter. The opportunity to help shape a company that is building advanced humanoids with genuine care for human values, safety, and meaningful coexistence is incredibly inspiring. I’m excited to bring my experience to a team that treats people strategy as core to long-term success.” - Amy Lentz

Amy has advised ambitious leadership teams across tech, including Perplexity AI, and has built an audience of over one million professionals through her platform Hack Your HR, where she turns executive behavior into practical, actionable frameworks. Her core thesis, that emotional regulation is your corporate superpower, reflects the kind of thinking that will help 1X continue building a world-class organization.

“Amy’s leadership is exactly what we need as we scale. She brings deep expertise, a sharp strategic mindset, and an unwavering belief that investing in people is how great companies win. At 1X, our people are everything, and Amy’s arrival is a powerful testament to how seriously we take our team as we work to bring NEO to the world.” - Bernt Børnich

Welcoming Amy Lentz as SVP of People

1X is excited to announce that Mohi Khansari has been appointed Head of Robot Learning, expanding his role after more than a year as Distinguished AI Engineer at the company.

Mohi is a veteran roboticist with over two decades of experience in robot learning & autonomy and control. He has been the chief architect behind Redwood AI, 1X’s in-house vision-language transformer powering end-to-end mobile manipulation in NEO, and his work has been central to advancing NEO’s real-world perception, learning, and manipulation capabilities.

Prior to 1X, Mohi was a founding member and lead of the imitation learning effort at Everyday Robots, a Google X moonshot focused on bringing embodied AI into human environments. He later served as a key technical lead at Cruise, advancing the intersection of motion planning and deep robot learning for large-scale autonomous systems.

Mohi holds a PhD in Robotics from École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) and completed a postdoctoral appointment at the Stanford AI Lab, where his research focused on robot learning and control.

“Joining 1X has been an incredible opportunity to move humanoid robotics beyond 'impressive research demos' and into technology that delivers real value for people. 1X’s humanoid robot, NEO, is the kind of platform this moment has been waiting for—engineered for safe, capable interaction around people, with the strength and dexterity to do useful work. I’m excited to lead Robot Learning at 1X, and build the intelligence that enables NEO to help people in their daily lives with my team.” -Mohi Khansari

As Head of Robot Learning, Mohi will lead efforts to advance learning systems that bridge research and deployment, accelerating 1X’s mission to deliver safe, general-purpose humanoid robots.

“Mohi is one of those rare builders who has contributed key academic innovations in the field and can still ship. He’s spent twenty years turning learning and control into working robots—not papers, not prototypes, but real capability. Putting him in this role strengthens the bridge between our research ambition and what NEO can do in the world.” - Bernt Børnich, Founder & CEO.

1X Appoints Mohi Khansari as Head of Robot Learning

We're excited to announce Vikram Kothari as our new VP of Operations.

He joins the 1X team after over eight years at SpaceX leading Dragon, Starship, Raptor, and Launch Avionics supply chain orgs. Preceding his time at SpaceX he was a Director at Microsoft, where he also led hardware supply chain for almost a decade.

“Joining 1X Technologies has been an inspiring step for me. The company’s commitment to building safe, privacy-first humanoids that are designed to coexist meaningfully with humans sets it apart in the robotics space. The team’s depth of talent and shared sense of purpose create an environment that’s both ambitious and grounded. I’m excited to contribute to a mission that places human values at the center of innovation." -Vikram Kothari.

Vikram's tenure at SpaceX streamlined operations and powered historic milestones, including the development of Starship and Starlink’s global expansion-- his expertise in scaling complex supply chains will serve as an even greater accelerant to 1X’s mission to deploy humanoids into homes.

“Vikram joining the team is a game-changer. Manufacturing has yet to find its heroes—but as we bring NEO into the world, Vik’s impact on the re-industrialization of America and the future of humanoids will be a defining part of the story.” -Bernt Bornich

Welcoming Vikram Kothari as VP of Operations

We're excited to announce our new HQ in Palo Alto, California.

The 80,000 sq. foot facility will seat 400 people, with employees from the company's previous offices migrating to the new space over the course of summer 2025.

Our leadership is confident that by positioning the team at the global center of AI and robotics, 1X will be able to attract top talent and foster even closer collaboration with our partners and investors.

As we grow, consolidating our Sunnyvale [CA] and Moss [Norway] team under one roof will accelerate our speed to ramping production and getting NEO into homes near you.

Join us on our mission to create an abundance of labor in the world.

Opening our new HQ in Palo Alto

This move comes as we prepare for large-scale deployment of NEO, your friendly home humanoid. With the aim of having hundreds of NEO’s arrive in homes across the United States in 2025, followed by rapid expansion– Mustally will be instrumental in enabling our growth along the way.

“I am excited to welcome Mustally to the Executive Team at 1X,” said Bernt Børnich, CEO of 1X Technologies. “He will play a key role in helping us accelerate our growth plans from our global HQ in Palo Alto, California.”

Mustally brings a strong track record of leadership across Fortune 500 companies and high-growth startups. He has built finance organizations from the ground up, raised over $50 billion in capital through public and private markets, and led transformative commercial partnerships and M&A initiatives. Prior to joining 1X, Mustally served as Managing Director, Global Treasurer, and Head of Financial Services at Lucid Group, and held senior finance roles at Herc Holdings, Hyundai Capital, and National Grid, following a career in investment banking and management consulting.

“I’m thrilled to join the 1X team, which is well positioned to lead the physical AI and robotics sector,” said Mustally Hussain. “My focus will be on driving financial discipline and strategic growth as 1X scales its manufacturing and commercialization footprint in the U.S., followed by global expansion.”

Welcoming Mustally Hussain as CFO

San Francisco, CA, and Moss, Norway — July 22, 2024

 — 1X, an AI robotics company, is pleased to announce the appointments of three strategic hires. Jorge Milburn joins 1X as VP of Sales and Dar Sleeper as VP of Product and Design. These hires come as 1X prepares to bring its bipedal humanoid robot, NEO, to market, delivering on its mission to create an abundance of labor through safe, intelligent humanoids.

Backed by OpenAI, 1X has revolutionized humanoid robotics with NEO, a lightweight and soft bipedal robot capable of performing tasks through voice commands and natural language. To further progress on our mission, we are appointing new hires.

 joins 1X as VP of Sales, bringing nearly 10 years of go-to-market experience at Tesla. He recently served as Global Head of Growth. He played a pivotal role in building the Supercharger network and led Tesla’s car business in EMEA, successfully introducing the Model 3 to Europe and establishing a Global Growth team. Originally from Uruguay, Jorge holds an MA in Economics. His responsibilities at Tesla included sales leadership, business planning, demand and supply optimization, delivery operations, and business analytics.


 joins as VP of Product and Design to build lead demand and brand in the Bay Area. Most recently, a product manager at Tesla, Dar, played a key role in launching the campaign for Cybertruck and created lead demand for electric vehicles.

"I am thrilled to welcome Jorge and Dar," said Bernt Øivind Børnich, CEO of 1X. "Their expertise will be crucial as we prepare to bring NEO to market and enhance our products' design and user experience."


1X is a US-Norwegian AI robotics company specializing in developing robots with humanlike capabilities. With commercial deployments of the wheeled humanoid EVE and the ongoing production of their next product, a bipedal humanoid robot NEO, 1X builds their own models for embodied AI making robots capable of task manipulation and generalization. Our mission is to push the boundaries of AI and robotics to create a global abundance of labor through safe, intelligent humanoids.

1X Strengthens Leadership Team with New Hires

1X will be attending the NVIDIA GTC Conference on March 18th. Our involvement signifies 1X's dedication to advancing in the field of Embodied AI, showcasing our latest developments, and engaging with the global AI community.

The NVIDIA GTC Conference is renowned for being a pivotal event that gathers innovators, researchers, and industry leaders worldwide to explore the latest advancements in AI, machine learning, and related technologies. Attendees can look forward to a program full of insightful talks, dynamic workshops, and demonstrations.

For more information about the conference or to register:


We look forward to connecting with professionals to share our passion for AI and robotics at the event. See you at NVIDIA GTC.

1X Attends NVIDIA GTC

1X, an AI and robotics company producing androids to benefit society and meet the world’s labor demand, is pleased to announce it has raised $100 million in Series B funding with participation from EQT Ventures and other notable global investors.
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The company intends to utilize the new capital to bring to market its second generation android NEO. Designed as a bipedal humanoid, NEO is tailored for everyday home assistance, offering versatile support for a wide range of domestic tasks in the consumer market. The funds will also support 1X’s existing enterprise clients in logistics and guarding. With 1X offering an android safe to work among people and a new approach to embodied learning for data collection, the company stands at the forefront of AI robotics.

“We are thrilled that these leading investors are supporting 1X’s mission of safely deploying Androids with Smart Behavior into new markets. Our next milestone will be scaling our data collection strategy for Embodied AI and offering NEO to consumers,” says Bernt Øivind Børnich, CEO of 1X.

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After successfully completing a Series A funding round led by OpenAI and Tiger Global in March 2023, 1X has now raised over $125 million in less than 12 months. This funding will support their mission to produce safe and advanced androids at a commercial scale, aiming to meet global labor demands and build an abundant society. As part of the round, 1X also facilitated a significant secondary transaction in which existing investor Sandwater increased its stake with the third largest contribution to the round. Other secondary participants included new investor Samsung NEXT, and existing investors Skagerak Capital and the Nistad group.

“From Leonardo da Vinci, to today’s sci-fi, humans have dreamt of humanoid robots for more than 500 years. It’s a privilege to witness the enabling technologies form in front of our eyes, in real-time. The impact of androids joining our human workforce, on our terms will be transformative (to say the least). We’re convinced 1X with their NEO androids will play a crucial role in the pioneering steps towards the first forays of our technological and human future,” says Ted Persson, Partner, EQT Ventures.

Series B: 1X Secures $100M Funding

As part of an extensive rebranding initiative in 2023, Halodi Robotics unveils our new name.

The name 1X alludes to the company’s growth and vision for the future and reflects the team’s unique competencies in robotics.

CEO Bernt Øivind Børnich expanded on that vision, saying, “Our androids will eventually work among people, one by one. And unlike other androids that have to slow down to be functional, 1X’s models work at 1x speed. We’re excited to embark on this new chapter, and we look forward to continuing to provide industry-leading products and services under our new brand.”

As 1X reaches many more milestones along with the name change, Børnich cites 2023 as an “important point in the evolution of 1X.” He continues, “We face this next phase of growth with excitement.”

With the goal to develop androids on a safe and capable platform, the company has deployed EVE, the first commercial android, at scale in the United States this year with a manufacturing capacity goal of 140 robots from Norway and Dallas, Texas.

Announcing rebranding: From Halodi Robotics to 1X

Humanoid robotics company 1X Technologies announces Series A2 fundraise led by OpenAI to pursue producing androids at commercial scale.

NORWAY, March 23rd, 2023. 1X, previously named Halodi Robotics, a manufacturer and inventor of androids, announced today the successful close of its Series A2 funding round, raising $23.5 million. This round was led by the OpenAI Startup Fund, with participation from Tiger Global and a consortium of Norway-based investors, including Sandwater, Alliance Ventures, and Skagerak Capital.

“1X is at the forefront of augmenting labor through the use of safe, advanced technologies in robotics,” said Brad Lightcap, OpenAI’s COO and manager of the OpenAI Startup Fund. “The OpenAI Startup Fund believes in the approach and impact that 1X can have on the future of work.”

Tiger Global partner Griffin Schroeder also expressed enthusiasm for 1X’s mission: “We believe 1X’s androids are revolutionizing the field of robotics and are excited to be investing alongside OpenAI to support their continued growth.”

The company intends to use the funds to increase the efforts of building its upcoming bipedal android model NEO, as well as scale manufacturing of its first commercially available android EVE in Norway and North America.

“1X is thrilled to have OpenAI lead this round because we’re aligned in our missions: thoughtfully integrating emerging technology into people’s daily lives. With the support of our investors, we will continue to make significant strides in the field of robotics and augment the global labor market,” says Bernt Øyvind Børnich, CEO and founder of 1X Technologies.

Børnich highlights the necessity of having androids deployed in the real world.

“Deploying our wheeled android EVE at an unprecedented commercial scale gives us a unique understanding of the challenges and opportunities the robotics community has yet to address. If androids are going to work in our world, they need to experience our world.”

Torkel Engeness, partner at Sandwater, sees tremendous value in 1X’s vision and next-generation model.“We are excited to support 1X as they launch their bipedal android NEO, while scaling their first-generation android EVE in Norway and North America. 1X is providing value now, and the potential for their androids looks limitless.”
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– TORKEL ENGENESS, PARTNER, SANDWATER

“Demographic changes will cause a labor shortage, and androids could help fill the gap. Goldman Sachs predicts a 150 BUSD market potential in 2035. Solving the right use cases is key to success, and we believe 1X Technologies is constructing a winning alliance.”
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– ARNE TONNING, PARTNER, ALLIANCE VENTURE

“1X now deploys Androids in North America before entering the global market while maintaining a “safety first” mindset, making product design and development even more challenging. It is exciting for Skagerak to support 1X with their disruptive technology now that they enter this ambitious commercialization phase.”
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– ESPEN KJELLSEN, PARTNER, SKAGERAK CAPITAL

1X Raises $23.5M in Series A2 Funding led by OpenAI

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Experience NEO

Training humanoid robots requires a large amount of infrastructure behind the scenes — simulation environments, large-scale model training, and powerful onboard compute to handle real-time inference.

At 1X, we use several parts of NVIDIA’s robotics platform throughout our development pipeline, from generating simulated training data to running models directly onboard our robots. With GTC underway this week, it’s a good moment to share a bit more about how these tools fit into our stack.

NVIDIA Isaac Sim and Isaac Lab: Simulation and robot learning

Before a robot learns a new capability in the real world, it often practices thousands or even millions of times in simulation. This allows us to explore new behaviors and generate training data before deploying models on physical robots.

, open-source frameworks for robot simulation and learning, to generate photorealistic environments where our robots can train and evaluate tasks. By training our world models in these physics-based simulation environments, we can run task executions, measure whether a model successfully completes them, and generate additional training data to improve performance.

large numbers of GPU simulations in parallel

 in the cloud. We use this to train reinforcement learning controllers for locomotion and other foundational robot capabilities. Running these simulations at scale exposes the models to far more scenarios than would be possible with physical robots alone.

Cloud Computing: Training models in the cloud

Training embodied AI models requires significant computation.

We use NVIDIA Blackwell HGX B200 GPUs to train our proprietary robot foundation models across both simulated and real-world robot data. These models learn to connect perception with action — interpreting visual scenes and translating them into physical behavior.

Access to large GPU clusters allows us to iterate quickly during both mid-training and post-training stages as we improve robustness and generalization across environments.

NVIDIA Jetson Thor: Running models onboard the robot

Once models are trained, they need to run directly on the robot with minimal latency. Real-world interaction requires fast perception and decision-making while operating within strict power and size constraints– 

 is the only product on the market that is built to support NEO’s requirements for onboard compute.

Thor allows us to run large neural networks locally on the robot itself, supporting real-time perception, reasoning, and control with optimized inference performance.

Running multimodal AI models directly onboard 

 allows the system to respond quickly to its environment while minimizing reliance on external computers.

Vision is one of the primary ways humanoid robots understand the world around them.

As part of our perception stack, we use NVIDIA

Argus to process camera data and support low-latency visual inference. This helps maintain a tight perception-to-action loop when the robot is navigating environments or interacting with objects.

Together, these tools support the full lifecycle of robot learning — from simulation, to large-scale training, to real-world deployment.

Combining this infrastructure with our robotics and AI systems allows us to move efficiently from simulated learning to physical capability as we continue developing NEO and advancing our humanoid robotics platform.

Developing NEO’s AI Using NVIDIA’s  Robotics Platform 

Home robots need common sense behavior and a deep understanding of the physical world.

Many robot foundation models today are vision-language-action models (VLAs), which take a pretrained VLM and add an output head to predict robot actions (

). VLMs benefit from internet-scale knowledge, but are trained on objectives that emphasize visual and semantic understanding over prediction of physical dynamics. Tens of thousands of hours of costly robot data are needed to teach a model how to solve tasks considered simple for a human. Additionally, auxiliary objectives are often used to further coax spatial reasoning of physical interactions (

In this blog, we introduce our video-pretrained world model, 1XWM, integrated into NEO as a robot policy. While VLAs directly predict action trajectories from static image-language input, our world-model based policy derives robot actions from text-conditioned video generation. By leveraging the world dynamics inherent in internet-scale video, our world model generalizes to novel objects, motions, and tasks without pre-training on large-scale robot data or any related teleoperated demonstrations. This represents a shift towards a new regime: allowing robot intelligence to benefit from the scaling of video pretraining, enabled by a hardware stack designed for high fidelity transfer from human embodiment.

Internet video implicitly encodes the structural priors of reality: how people and objects move, where forces are applied, and the implicit constraints of interaction. Accurate translation of video into action comes from more than just a model—it benefits from an embodiment that is kinematically and dynamically congruent with the human form.

The hardware as a first-class citizen in the AI stack closes the human-robot translation gap. By combining embodiment with human-like compliance, interaction dynamics—friction, inertia, and contact behavior—often match human motion closely enough for the model’s learned priors to remain in distribution. What the model can visualize, NEO usually can do.

Today, frontier text-to-video models like 

 generate strikingly realistic videos. However, zero-shot generations from these models are not grounded in robot embodiments and often fall short along key axes required for control:

: Is the rollout consistent with the robot’s camera intrinsics and egocentric viewpoint? Does it preserve depth and the precise spatial relationships required for manipulation?

: Does the robot in the rollout move in ways feasible for the embodiment, respecting morphology, joint limits, velocities, and actuation constraints?

: Does the rollout avoid physically impossible outcomes (e.g. object teleportation) which would not translate to real-world success?

. To bring video knowledge to world model form, we utilize a two-stage grounding process enabled by our integrated stack, following existing works like 

 A text-conditioned diffusion model trained on web-scale video, mid-trained on egocentric human data, and fine-tuned on NEO-specific sensorimotor logs. It predicts the high-fidelity evolution of a scene with strong visual, spatial, and physical accuracy.

 We bridge pixels to actuators by training an IDM to predict the exact action sequence required to transition between the model's generated frames. We use the IDM’s metrics and rejection sampling to enforce kinematic correctness of generations.

At inference time, the system receives a text prompt and a starting frame. The WM rolls out the intended future, the IDM extracts the necessary trajectory, and the robot executes the sequence in the real world.

At test-time, we send a prompt from our frontend to the model inference server, which will then execute the action on-robot.

The 1XWM backbone is built upon a 14B generative video model. To adapt this model to NEO’s embodiment, we use a multi-stage training strategy:

 We train on 900 hours of egocentric human video to align the model with first-person manipulation tasks. At this stage, the model captures general manipulation behaviors but struggles to generate videos of NEO performing tasks.

 We then fine-tune on 70 hours of robot data, which adapts the model to NEO’s visual appearance and kinematics.

 show that the prompt adherence of visual foundation models can be significantly improved by training on descriptive visual captions. However, many egocentric datasets contain only brief task descriptions. To address this, we prompt a VLM to generate more detailed captions to use for training through a 

To select the best 1XWM backbone checkpoint, we use an evaluation metric that compares the 

 distance between the ground truth future action sequence and the actions from our trained IDM run on the generated video. This helps filter for generations that not only look good visually but also yield accurate actions.

Similarly to DreamGen, we use a two-image IDM predictor with a sliding window of W=8 frames for efficient training and inference. However, we use a 

 backbone with a separate flow matching head instead of a single diffusion transformer. Frames at times t and t+W are passed through the depth backbone and the embeddings are used as conditioning for the flow matching head. The IDM is trained on 400 hours of unfiltered robot data including random play data and motions that don’t correspond to any meaningful task. This allows us to faithfully track NEO’s motions anywhere.

At test-time, given the starting frame and a text prompt instructing NEO on what to do, 1XWM rolls out future video frames. We then extract the corresponding robot action trajectory with the IDM, and execute it directly on the robot. To ensure smooth trajectories, the IDM’s outputs are timewise averaged across a batch of initial noise values and sliding windows.

Caption: Our NEO post-training dataset contains primarily high quality pick-and-place data (98.5%), filtered for table top manipulation with hands in view. By leveraging the web-scale pretraining of the base video model, 1XWM can generalize to a wide range of unseen objects, environments, and tasks.

We first seek to understand: what are the limits on task generalization beyond what NEO has already seen and done? How closely does generated video align with real-world execution?

manipulate unseen objects with interesting affordances

perform entirely novel tasks requiring new motions

We observe that 1XWM generated videos generally align well with real-world execution. Generated and post-factual video can look very similar viewed side-by-side, showing 1XWM has strong spatial, kinematic, and physical understanding.

Grasping

New Behaviors


Next, we try tasks requiring two-handed coordination and human interaction—abilities not included in our training dataset. This suggests that such knowledge comes from video pre-training and ego human mid-training. Because NEO’s embodiment is so similar to humans, the affordances learned in human video data translate directly.

Two-Handed

Human Interaction


Sometimes, generations tend to be overly optimistic about task completion and depth understanding. Generated rollouts can look visually plausible while subtly violating real-world constraints (e.g. object consistency, depth, geometry, contact). Our post-training recipe significantly reduces these errors, but monocular pretraining can still lead to weak 3D grounding, where the real robot undershoots or overshoots even when the generated video “succeeds.” This opens future work to integrate depth or stereo for better spatial grounding. 

Beyond anecdotal examples, we show real-world results measuring the performance of 1XWM on in-distribution (ID) and out of distribution (OOD) tasks, running 30 times each. 1XWM succeeds with stable success rates across diverse action primitives, although some dextrous tasks remain challenging (e.g. pouring, drawing).

Can we connect video quality and task success?

If so, we can measure and improve video quality using visual metrics and estimate the likelihood of real-world success. 

Sometimes it is visually obvious whether a generated rollout is likely to succeed. For example, prompting 1XWM with “pull tissue” can occasionally generate videos of NEO picking up the tissue box instead. We’ve generally found close to 0% success rate when executing bad generations. 

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