product

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.

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 

Palo Alto, CA, October 28, 2025 – 1X is proud to announce the launch of NEO, the world’s first consumer-ready humanoid robot designed to transform life at home. NEO automates everyday chores and offers personalized assistance so people can spend more time on the things that matter.

With intuitive, user-friendly features and a revolutionary hardware platform, NEO is the safest, most affordable, and most capable humanoid on earth. NEO brings the science-fiction idea of robots from the movie screen into reality — creating space for us to enjoy our time at home, instead of coming home just to do more work.

"Humanoids were long a thing of sci-fi... then they were a thing of research, but today — with the launch of NEO — humanoid robots become a product. Something that you and me can reach out and touch. NEO closes the gap between our imaginations and the world we live in, to the point where we can actually ask a humanoid robot for help, and help is granted."

- Bernt Børnich, CEO and Founder, 1X

The Chores feature allows owners to give NEO a list of tasks to complete around the home, schedule a time for when they want them completed, and come back to a cleaner space every day. NEO can also handle chores in real time while you relax or work nearby. With the click of a button or a simple verbal command, NEO transforms into a personal housekeeper; tackling tasks like folding laundry, organizing shelves, and tidying spaces. For any chore that NEO doesn't yet know, owners can schedule a 1X Expert to guide it through unknown tasks — helping NEO learn while getting the job done.


NEO is built to engage naturally while providing help and utility through conversation. With a built-in large language model (LLM), NEO gives owners instant access to knowledge and personalized assistance without relying on devices with screens.

Its Audio Intelligence allows NEO to recognize when it is being addressed, ensuring it listens and responds only when appropriate. Visual Intelligence adds contextual awareness — letting NEO use what it sees to enhance interactions, like recognizing ingredients on a kitchen counter and suggesting dishes to make. Memory enables continuity across conversations, allowing NEO to recall past context and adapt its responses over time. From scheduling appointments and setting reminders for birthdays to keeping grocery lists and tracking progress in language lessons, not only does NEO free up time, but also valuable mental space.

NEO Operates Autonomously and Learns New Skills Over Time

The core of the NEO experience is driven by AI. Each NEO will be able to have conversations, and navigate around the home to provide help where needed. NEO will arrive to early owners with the ability to handle basic tasks, and with continued use, learn and develop new skills. From the first day, NEO performs functions like opening doors for guests, fetching items, and turning off the lights at night — and grows in abilities with every software update. Leveraging 1X’s AI model, which is trained on real-world data, NEO is able to adapt to the world’s most diverse environment: the home.

At the core of the NEO experience is a revolutionary hardware platform that succeeds 1X’s prior models (NEO Gamma and NEO Beta). NEO is built with 1X’s patented Tendon Drive that uses the highest-torque density motors on earth to drive its tendon-based transmissions. This one-of-a-kind actuation system creates gentle movements that make NEO uniquely safe and compliant around people.

NEO represents a generational leap in humanoid hardware with the addition of Human Level Dexterity (22 DoF Hands) and a head-to-toe soft body made of custom 3D lattice polymer structures. At just 66 pounds (29.94 kg), NEO is capable of lifting over 150 pounds (68 kg) and carrying 55 pounds (24.95kg), and has a noise level of 22dB — making it more silent than a modern day refrigerator. Additionally, NEO possesses built-in communication with WiFi, Bluetooth, and 5G as well as a three-stage speaker in the pelvis and chest area, giving owners a built-in mobile home entertainment system.

NEO is approachable and comfortable to be around. NEO’s essentialist design aims to complement living spaces rather than disrupt them – with organic neutral tones, and a soft knit suit and shoes.

NEO is now available for pre-order, with first orders shipping to consumer homes in 2026.

NEO is now available via 1X’s online store [

] and comes in three distinct colors (Tan, Gray, Dark Brown). Customers interested owning one of the first NEOs can purchase Early Access for $20,000, which includes priority delivery in 2026. There is also a subscription model offering of $499/month which will be shipped at a later date.

1X will start delivering NEOs primarily in the U.S in 2026 and expand to other markets starting in 2027.

To the community that supports us and the team here at 1X that works tirelessly to build a better future, we can’t thank you enough. Another special thanks to Eli Russell Linnetz for capturing NEO for this campaign.

NEO Home Robot | Order Today

NEO Gamma is the next generation of home humanoids designed and engineered by 1X Technologies. The Gamma series includes improvements across NEO’s hardware and AI, featuring a new design that is deeply considerate of life at home.


NEO Gamma's new design features Emotive Ear Rings to improve the communication and has a minimalist design aesthetic that fits into the home.




NEO can now walk with a natural human gait and arm swings, squat down to pick things up from the ground and sit in chairs.




1X trained a visual manipulation model capable of picking up a large variety of objects in different scenarios, including environments not seen during training.

NEO Gamma’s design opens the door to start internal home testing—a first step in creating fully autonomous humanoids.

“There is a not-so-distant future where we all have our own robot helper at home, like Rosey the Robot or Baymax. But for humanoid robots to truly integrate into everyday life, they must be developed alongside humans, not in isolation.

The home provides real-world context and the diversity of data needed for humanoids to grow in intelligence and autonomy. It also teaches them the nuances of human life—how to open the door for the elderly, move carefully around pets, or adapt to the unpredictability of the surrounding world. Robots confined to industrial space or lab development miss out on this critical understanding.

With NEO Gamma, every engineering and design decision was made with one goal in mind: getting NEO into customers’ homes as quickly as possible… We’re close. We can’t wait to share more soon.”

NEO Gamma introduces a number of AI advancements, enhancing both autonomy and safe teleoperation in the home.




NEO now walks with a natural human gait and arm swings, squat down to pick things up from the ground and sit in chairs, all while maintaining balance. These dynamic control skills – running at 100Hz – are learned using Reinforcement Learning from human motion capture data. This range of motion allows NEO Gamma to experience household scenarios and tasks that would be otherwise inaccessible to other robot form factors.




1X trained a visual manipulation model capable of picking up a large variety of objects in different scenarios, including environments not seen during training. NEO Gamma leverages neural networks trained to predict teleoperated actions directly from raw sensor data.


NEO Gamma is designed to be approachable, with all new features created to integrate seamlessly into people’s everyday lives. NEO’s new look aims to complement living spaces rather than disrupt them.




NEO Gamma’s Ear Rings provide real-time visual feedback for a more intuitive and interactive experience.




3D printed from durable and soft nylon using a Japanese Shimaseki machine, the suit utilizes a unique whole-garment seamless knitting process that allows the fabric to conform to NEO without impeding performance.




With safety as the top priority, NEO Gamma features 1X’s Tendon Drive for joint actuation, encased in soft covers to enhance passive safety.

NEO Gamma features significant hardware upgrades, making it quieter, more reliable, and well suited to deliver a consumer product experience.




NEO Gamma boasts a 10x increase in hardware reliability and a 10 dB decrease in noise, bringing NEO’s operating levels down to the level of a refrigerator.




NEO Gamma features four microphones (front, back, left, and right) with beamforming and echo cancellation, ensuring crystal-clear audio capture and A three-speaker system—one in the chest for AI voice interactions and two outward-facing speakers in the pelvis for bass, 360-degree sound effects, and music.

Media Inquiries: press@1x.tech

Introducing NEO Gamma

San Francisco Bay, CA, and Moss, Norway — August 30, 2024 — 1X, a pioneer in humanoid robotics, unveils NEO Beta, a prototype of its bipedal humanoid designed for home use.

NEO Beta represents a significant advancement in robotics, moving beyond traditional, stiff robots to humanoids with bio-inspired designs that can safely work among people. The NEO Beta launch marks a major milestone for 1X as the company transitions from conceptual development to bringing humanoid robots into consumer households. In the video released, we show how NEO is safe to work among people. NEO has been designed to be produced at scale in the company’s factory in Moss, Norway.

“Our priority is safety,” said Bernt Børnich, CEO at 1X. “Safety is the cornerstone that allows us to confidently introduce NEO Beta into homes, where it will gather essential feedback and demonstrate its capabilities in real-world settings. This year, we are deploying a limited number of NEO units in selected homes for research and development purposes. Doing so means we are taking another step toward achieving our mission.”

1X’s mission is to create an abundant supply of physical labor through safe, intelligent humanoids that work alongside people. To achieve this goal, 1X humanoids must be exposed to diverse environments to become fully capable of performing a wide range of tasks.

1X is a leader in humanoid robotics, creating general-purpose robots for the home as a first step in solving physical intelligence. With a focus on safety, 1X is at the forefront of the next wave of robotics, delivering products that are accessible and practical for consumers' households. 1X’s mission is to create an abundant supply of physical labor through safe, intelligent humanoids that work alongside people.

1X Unveils NEO Beta, A Humanoid Robot for the Home

MOSS; NORWAY: 1X is currently developing its own production facility, actuator manufacturing, and robot assembly facility in Moss, Norway, right next to our campus and engineering team. This decision is more than just a matter of convenience—it's a commitment to keep building a vertically integrated company where every component of EVE and NEO is designed and produced in-house.

“The close proximity of both the actuator manufacturing, robot assembly, and testing site offers great advantages, especially for our team of creative engineers, brimming with fresh, yet untested ideas. Being adjacent to the manufacturing and assembly process allows them to quickly understand the practical aspects of transforming their creative concepts into feasible, efficient-to-manufacture products, says VP of Manufacturing Operations & Engineering, Csaba Hartmann.

The manufacturing team consists of diverse professionals, including specialized manufacturing engineers and mechanical designers, process engineers, automation experts, quality engineers, supply chain experts, safety officers, and others. Each member plays a role in designing, trialing, and rolling out our large-scale manufacturing initiatives, contributing to enhancing scalability, rapid iterations, and safety at every stage of the manufacturing and assembly process.

“Enabling teams that work side by side with each other and thus can easily get and act on feedback, is crucial for us to evolve and improve our products rapidly”, says Hartmann.

All 1X androids are designed with a safety-first mindset, featuring gearless motors and a soft exterior. Our commitment to safety extends beyond design, incorporating measures throughout the assembly process to ensure products are built to specs: thorough testing, quality control, and precise assembly processes.

We’re adopting quality control measures inspired by the automotive industry. We conduct thorough Design Failure Mode and Effects Analysis (DFMEA) on each assembly component to proactively identify and mitigate potential safety risks.

“Our quality team interprets the results of the DFMEA and PFMEA and then defines the rigorous checks for the assembly process to ensure no safety aspect is overlooked,” says Hartmann.

The assembly process includes rigorous checks of critical quality parameters to ensure no safety aspect is overlooked. Precision in the use of testing and assembly tools is emphasized to maintain high standards of accuracy. All components, especially motors, undergo extensive testing at multiple stages of assembly to validate their performance and reliability.

"At 1X, we prioritize scalable, cost-efficient manufacturing by integrating engineering expertise and rigorous quality control. Our approach leverages advanced technologies and carefully selected materials to enhance production efficiency. Committed to scalability, we ensure every process is optimized for cost-effectiveness and growth", says 1X CEO Bernt Børnich.

If you find this work interesting, we’d like to call attention to a few roles that we are hiring for to accelerate our mission toward creating an abundant supply of labor via safe intelligent androids:

 across mechanical, electrical, and software disciplines. Follow 

 for more updates, and join us in living in the future.

Scaling NEO Production: 1X builds in-house manufacturing facility

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Experience NEO

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.

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