Company

We're excited to announce Bill Nash as our new Chief Financial Officer.


Bill brings extensive financial leadership experience from some of the most technically ambitious and fast-moving companies in autonomy, aerospace, and life sciences. He has a strong track record of building robust finance organizations, forging strategic partnerships, and steering companies through critical growth phases.


Most recently, Bill served as CFO of Ursa Major, where he supported the development of advanced solid rocket motors and propulsion systems for defense and space applications. Prior to that, he was CFO at Cruise, a pioneer in autonomous vehicles, where he played a key role in substantial capital raises, strategic partnerships, and large-scale operational expansion. Bill holds an MBA from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, an M.S. in Electrical Engineering from Georgia Tech, and a B.S. from the United States Naval Academy.

I’ve spent my career helping companies scale breakthrough technologies and it’s rare to find a team building something as ambitious as what 1X is doing with NEO. Bernt’s vision for capable, safe, affordable robots is the kind of mission you don’t pass up. I’m looking forward to working alongside him and the rest of the 1X team as we bring that vision to scale.”

Bill’s combination of financial strategy, technical fluency, and hands-on experience scaling transformative technologies makes him an ideal addition as 1X enters its next phase of growth. His expertise will strengthen our ability to execute at speed while building the financial foundation needed to deliver NEO to customers worldwide.

“We’re very excited to have Bill on board. His leadership in complex, high-stakes industries, from autonomous systems and aerospace to biotech, is precisely what we need as we ramp up manufacturing and expand globally. Bill is a fantastic addition to the team.”

Welcoming Bill Nash as CFO

We're excited to announce Tom Sanocki as our new VP of Engineering. Tom joins the 1X team with a remarkable track record of building and scaling software organizations that have reached millions of people. He has operated across the full spectrum, from $30B+ public companies to seed-stage startups– across graphics, UGC platforms, VR/AR, and consumer products.


He was the first Engineering Director for Avatars at Roblox, led four engineering teams on Meta’s Horizon Worlds, and founded a VR interactive character platform that was acquired by Lytro. Earlier in his career, after earning his Computer Science Engineering degree from Princeton University, he contributed to Bungie’s Destiny 1 and several foundational Pixar films including Finding Nemo, Cars, Brave, and Up.


“The 1X team is solving the hardest problems for a truly general purpose consumer robot and doing it right now. Their commitment to safety and human values is exactly what we need, and I’m excited to join the team as we begin shipping the first humanoid robots to everyday people.”

Tom’s deep experience shipping complex, real-time, user-facing systems at massive scale — from UGC platforms and avatars to immersive VR worlds — will be instrumental as we extend NEO’s capabilities and bring the next generation of humanoid intelligence into the real world. His leadership will also play a key role in bringing 1X’s recently announced developer platform to life, empowering developers and creating a vibrant ecosystem of innovative applications for humanoid robots.


“Tom joining 1X is a milestone for the company. His expertise in graphics, real-time systems, machine learning, and character platforms is world-class, and exactly what we need to accelerate our software roadmap as we move from prototypes to products that leave the factory and land on doorsteps.”

Welcoming Tom Sanocki as VP of Engineering

Today, we're excited to announce that 1X has officially established the 1X World Model Lab

, our new frontier research organization dedicated to accelerating the path to fully autonomous humanoids through large-scale embodied world model pretraining. Also, we’re proud to welcome Sam Sinha– previously a founding research scientist at Luma AI and a leader in scaling multimodal generative video models– as our Founding AI Researcher and Head of World Models.

We put this team together on the heels of major breakthroughs with our 

. These advances enabled NEO to generalize to completely unseen tasks with zero-shot execution. For us, this was when the recipe for fully autonomous humanoids clicked:

The next frontier in AI requires scaling: web-scale media + egocentric human videos + sim + dexterous remote operated robot data + on-policy NEO data → real-world deployment for robot data collection and RL → abundance of data → physical AI

, scaling the fleet to support real world data collection is no longer the bottleneck, so we’re doubling down on increasing the pace of innovation of our world model to unlock fully autonomous humanoids as fast as humanly possible.


“World models will free humanoid robots from the trap of narrow tasks in static environments by unlocking generalization, adaptability, and self-learning. But to reach full autonomy fastest you must own the entire stack — down to pre-training your own video foundation models. That’s why we built the 1X World Model Lab.”

The 1X World Model Lab is a new embodied AI research organization focused on pretraining the foundation models to accelerate the emergence of embodied intelligence.

robotics is not a fine-tuning problem. To build truly general humanoids, we need to pretrain on the most important data from the very beginning.

Embodied intelligence requires models that see the physical world early, not just in post-training. This includes video, ego-centric human experience, interaction data, simulation, robot data collected with remote operation, and on-policy NEO data. Each provides a different signal about how the physical world works and how intelligent agents operate within.

The 1X World Model Lab will focus on large-scale AI pretraining, building frontier world models and reasoning models to enable spatial intelligence.

 These capabilities form the foundation for increasingly general and autonomous humanoid systems.

We believe the only durable moat in embodied AI will be data: the ability to collect, annotate, scale, and train on the right mixture of web-scale, human, simulated, remote operator-generated robot data, and robot-generated data.

1X is uniquely positioned to connect the entire learning loop—from pretraining and robot learning to evaluation, deployment, and the collection of on-policy data from real robots. By closing this loop, the 1X World Model Lab will accelerate the development of increasingly capable foundation models for humanoid robotics.

Welcoming Sam Sinha as Founding Researcher and Head of World Models

Sam brings world-class expertise in scaling large multimodal generative foundation models. At Luma AI, he played a key role in pushing the boundaries of image and video generation, including work on Uni-1. His deep experience in generative AI translates directly into building next-generation world models purpose-built for physical intelligence and humanoid robotics.

“We believe the only durable moat in AI is data — specifically, the ability to collect and learn from the optimal mixture at large scales. Embodied data has been treated as a second-class citizen for too long. Embodied AI is too important to be a fine-tuning problem. Scaling along every imaginable axis in robotics is the only way forward. 1X is uniquely positioned to close the full learning loop from data curation and pretraining, through real-world deployment.”

— Sam Sinha, Founding AI Researcher and Head of World Models

The 1X World Model Lab is building the team that will define the future of embodied AI. We are actively hiring exceptional talent across the three pillars of AI: data, infrastructure and learning.

 your background + proof of excellence and apply for roles on the 1X careers page.



The 1X World Model Lab | Est. 2026

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.

We spend a lot of time talking about NEO, but hands down the best part about 1X are its people. While our content team was down in the factory building a story around the hard work everyone is doing down in Hayward to get you your robots– the stories of the factory were something they couldn’t leave without capturing.

To be clear, 1X is nothing without it’s people and we couldn’t be more grateful for everyone that is on this mission together

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.

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

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

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

 — 1X, an AI robotics company, is pleased to announce the appointments of Dar Sleeper as VP of Product and Design. Dar joins us at an inflection point in our journey 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 this critical new leadership hire.

 joins as VP of Product and Design to build lead demand and brand in the Bay Area. Most recently, a product leader at Tesla, Dar, played a key role in launching Cybertruck and created lead demand for global electric vehicles at a crucial point in Tesla's history.

"I am thrilled to welcome Dar," said Bernt Øivind Børnich, CEO of 1X. "His expertise will be crucial as we prepare to bring NEO to market and enhance our products' design and user experience. Can't wait for the world to see what we'll work on together."


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.

Welcoming Dar Sleeper as VP of Product & Design

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

We’re excited to announce our breakthrough 25 Degree of Freedom (DOF), tendon-driven hands for the NEO humanoid platform– achieving near human-level dexterity, strength, safety, and reliability.

These hands are designed to do something fundamental: remove the hardware ceiling on what humanoid robots can actually do, and make data the only barrier to capabilities. By matching or surpassing human hands across the dimensions that matter, they ensure our AI models are no longer limited by dexterity. NEO can now perform virtually any task a human can do with their hands– with the precision, adaptability, and gentleness required for real-world environments.

This is what we’re shipping: not an end effector, but a true instrument. A hand is how a robot acts on the world, and our new NEO hands are the most capable ever built across nearly every metric.

A humanoid is a computer whose API is its hands

Everything else: the model, the perception stack, the legs– determines how well the machine reaches the world. The hands determine what it can do there, what it can know about what it’s doing, and therefore what anyone building on it can do there. A humanoid with a two-finger gripper exposes three verbs to developers: pick, place, push. Every application anyone writes on that platform is a composition of those three verbs, forever– executed blind. The ceiling isn’t in the software. It’s at the end of the arm.These are the hands that will ship on every NEO. With them, we believe the hardware ceiling on what humanoid robots– and the developers building for them– can do is finally gone. What follows is the full engineering story behind them– the interface spec for acting on the world, the hardware that backs it, and why we believe this is the foundation our customers have been waiting for.

You experience the world through your fingers

Watch a person meet an unfamiliar object and notice how little they look at it. They press it to find hardness. They slide a fingertip to read texture. They heft it for weight, trace the contour for shape, squeeze and release to feel it give. Touch is not a passive channel the way a camera is– it’s an experiment. The hand asks a question with force and reads the answer back through the same joints that asked it. That is how humans come to understand objects, and it is how we learned manipulation in the first place: by probing, millions of times, from the crib onward.

Which means a hand is not an actuator bolted to the end of a perception stack. It is a perception stack. An instrument. And its quality as an instrument is set by the whole machine at once. Writing the question takes precise force control. Reading the answer takes backdrivability and force transparency, so the world’s reaction flows back through the transmission instead of dying in a gearbox. Posing the question takes degrees of freedom and precision. Feeling the fine print takes skin. Catching a fast answer takes bandwidth. And asking millions of times takes robustness, because probing is contact and contact is wear.

Most robot hands are write-only devices. You command a position; the hand goes there; nothing meaningful comes back. The transmission is the reason: at the 100:1 and 200:1 gear ratios common in the field, friction swallows the contact forces before they ever reach the motor. The hand is numb through its own joints, so builders wrap it in external sensors and infer what’s happening at the fingertips — a camera pointed at a hand that can’t feel.

Our NEO hand is read-write. Developed from the ground up by our world-class engineering team, it runs quasi-direct-drive tendons via the 1X Tendon Drive at low gear ratios of approximately 5:1 to 15:1. All 25 degrees of freedom (22 fully actuated DoF in the fingers and palm, plus 3 at the wrist) are natively force-controlled and fully backdrivable. Push on a finger and it yields — and reports exactly how hard you pushed. Force flows out and information flows back through the same physical path. We call this force transparency, and it’s what turns a push into a measurement.


There’s a quieter read running alongside it: proprioception. Because every joint is closed-loop, the hand always knows its own configuration without looking, in the same way you can touch your fingertips together with your eyes shut. Pose plus effort, through the same 25 joints, all the time.


What do 25 force-transparent degrees of freedom actually buy? Not joints for their own sake– a repertoire of grasps and of questions. The allocation matters more than the count: our DoF are distributed the way anatomy distributes them, biased toward a thumb that genuinely opposes. This architecture was chosen as the optimal balance between human-like manipulation capability and practical manufacturing, control, and serviceability.

The result speaks for itself. These new hands match or exceed human performance in fine manipulation. NEO can assemble LEGO structures, pick up individual screws and coins from a wallet, spin and install light bulbs, use a screwdriver, rotate objects in-hand, zip a jacket, sort grapes by color, pour tea from a kettle, catch a squishy ball, plug in a USB-C charger, grab a wine glass, wipe surfaces with a paper towel and spray, and communicate via sign language, and infinitely more.

Fruit Picking

Maintenance

Cleaning

Charging

Gaming

LEGO

Open Bag

Twisting

These 25-DoF hands are IP68 waterproof and food-safe, allowing NEO to wash its own hands like a human. Far from fragile, they deliver powerful, useful strength: Peak torques reach 3.5 Nm at the thumb CMC and 2.6 Nm at the finger MCP joints, with distal flexion forces up to 45N. The wrist delivers 17.75 Nm of torque. This enables strong whole-hand grasps, tool use, lifting and carrying, opening doors, pushing loaded carts, and precision pinch under load, all while retaining full dexterity. With ±0.2 mm positioning accuracy, they work (and perceive) in the small-object regime where most human labor actually happens. Those aren’t demo modes. They’re the natural output of enough independent, force-controlled DoF at human scale.

Lift

Curl

The skin adds the channels. Tactile data is an image– it has dynamic range, resolution, channels, and field of view. Our hands feature rich, high-resolution tactile sensing across the fingertips and surfaces, measuring normal force, contact location, and shear. This enables NEO to detect when objects begin to slip and respond in real time. Visualizations show contact normals, pressure heatmaps during handshakes, and delicate grasping of fragile origami without damage.

Force Sensing

Sheer Sensing


The skin is co-designed with the sensors inside it and the tendons behind it. It is a functional material, not a cosmetic one. Because vision alone is insufficient for many tasks (especially with small, transparent, deformable, or occluded objects), this contact feedback is critical for adaptive, intelligent manipulation.

Fast enough to catch it. Tough enough to keep asking

Perception through action has a clock speed. Feel the slip begin through the shear channel; re-grip through the transparent joints before it finishes.

And a hand that learns by touching everything must survive touching everything. These hands are built for continuous operation and maintain performance after millions of interaction cycles. Reliability was designed into every subsystem and component: tendon routing, bearings, finger structures, electrical cable routing, tactile integration, electronics, and assembly procedures. Components and full finger assemblies have undergone millions of test cycles, drive units have been tested at extreme temperatures, and wrist joints have been proven reliable well beyond 2 million cycles under high loads.


The whole hand is sealed to IP68 with food-safe materials, so it works at the sink and washes itself when dirty. Compliance closes the loop on safety: extremely low gear ratios, combined with the tendon drive and low distal inertia, allow external impacts to safely backdrive the fingers. Slow-motion footage shows the hands yielding when slapped, hit with a hammer, pinched in a closing drawer, or slammed into Styrofoam. A machine that perceives by touching had better be gentle by construction, because the world it needs to touch has people in it.

An API is only as good as its physical layer. The motors live in the forearm, where most of your own grip strength lives– pulling proprietary tendons through the wrist. This is how a lightweight hand produces such high forces while running cool enough for continuous operation.



Our hands are designed as an integral part of the full NEO stack– tightly integrating in-house motors, custom electronics, embedded sensing, proprietary tendon systems, compact transmissions, and hand-specific firmware. This deep vertical integration enables rapid iteration and compounding improvements that modular approaches simply cannot match. Every grasp is an experiment.

Now put the halves together. A hand that perceives by acting turns every task into an experiment: every joint reports force, every fingertip reports contact and shear, every pose is known. Every grasp your policy takes arrives pre-labeled, and every probe returns a measurement. This is the substrate learning-based manipulation has been waiting on, and it’s the same loop children run: act, feel, update, act again.

One more number, and it’s the strategic one: hundreds of these hands have already come off a scalable production line. We manufacture NEO’s 25 DoF hands on our dedicated line using high-yield processes with full end-of-line testing. Every unit is built end-to-end in-house — from tendon materials and 1X Motors to the final soft polymers, skin, and tactile sensing stack. This gives us the capacity to produce 10,000 hands this year.That’s not a manufacturing footnote, it’s the whole strategy. A hand that can’t be built at scale can’t run experiments at scale, and without data at scale there is no embodied AGI.For seventy years, robotics worked around the hand problem. The humanoid bet is the reverse. And it lives or dies at the fingertips. We built the hand for this world. One that’s strong enough to act in it, transparent enough to see it, and durable enough to keep learning from it. Soon it will be your instrument.

“Our goal was never a hand that just looks impressive on paper. These hands are the culmination of intensive engineering focused on making humanoids truly useful. We built them to match or surpass human capability across every dimension that matters. With these hands, NEO crosses a critical threshold. The robot can now do the things humans do with their hands, every day. This is what the industry has been waiting for.”

NEO’s Hands | An API to the Physical World

Training humanoid robots requires a massive amount of infrastructure behind the scenes — high-fidelity simulation environments, large-scale model training, synthetic data generation, and powerful onboard compute for 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 NVIDIA’s new open source collection of physical AI agent tools announced this week at GTC Taipei, we’re excited to share a bit more about how these tools fit into our stack and will further accelerate our workflow.

This is a big step forward for the entire industry, and we’re proud to be one of the robotics companies already leveraging NVIDIA’s agent-ready physical AI stack to develop more capable humanoid robots faster.

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.

Welcoming Bill Nash as CFO

Welcoming Tom Sanocki as VP of Engineering

The 1X World Model Lab | Est. 2026

NEO Factory | Building Your NEO

Welcoming Amy Lentz as SVP of People

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