1X Technologies

What 1X Technologies is

1X Technologies is a robotics company that builds humanoid robots — machines shaped and sized to move through spaces built for people, and to handle tools and fixtures designed for human hands. Its work runs on two tracks. One is hardware: actuation, the motors and transmissions that move a joint, and the hands at the end of the arms. The other is software: a vision-language model that lets a robot take on tasks without being hand-coded for each one.

Origins

1X dates its own founding to 2014, when chief executive Bernt Oyvind Bornich started the company as Halodi Robotics.^[2] The company's published timeline keeps its engineering milestones in order. In 2018 it dates the tendon-inspired Revo1 servo motor, a design that imitates the way a tendon pulls on a limb rather than driving a joint straight from a rigid gearbox. In 2022 it dates the deployment of wheeled factory humanoids into customer facilities — machines doing work in real industrial sites rather than in demonstrations.^[2]

That sequence matters for reading the company's later announcements: the actuator came first, then industrial customers, then the consumer product.

NEO, the home robot

On 28 October 2025, 1X announced NEO from Palo Alto, California.^[1] NEO is a home robot, aimed at households rather than factory floors. The company presents it as the successor to two earlier machines, NEO Gamma and NEO Beta.^[1]

The hardware rests on the company's patented Tendon Drive actuation. In NEO, 1X says each hand has 22 degrees of freedom — degrees of freedom being the count of independent directions in which a mechanism can move, so a hand with more of them can form finer and more varied shapes, which is what grasping a cup, a cloth or a drawer handle requires.^[1]

The software is Redwood AI, which 1X describes as its generalist vision-language model. A vision-language model pairs images with language, so a machine can connect what it sees to a described task. NEO uses Redwood AI to learn tasks and then repeat them.^[1]

Buying one is priced two ways. Early Access costs $20,000 and secures priority delivery in 2026. A subscription at $499 per month is the alternative, shipping later than the Early Access units. The robot is offered in three colours: Tan, Gray and Dark Brown.^[1] First orders ship to consumer homes in 2026, mainly in the US, with expansion to other markets from 2027.^[1]

Where it sits

For the robotics industry, the home is the harder sale. A factory can be rearranged, floored with smooth surfaces and staffed by people trained to work alongside machines; a house cannot. Everything in a home — stairs, clutter, pets, a toy left on the floor — arrives without warning and without a manual.

Putting a robot into that setting tests both halves of the company's work. The actuator has to be safe enough to be near people and quiet enough to live with; the model has to handle a task that was shown once rather than scripted a thousand times. Years spent on servo motors and on factory deployments with paying customers are the base the home product stands on.

1X's timeline also shows how long the run-up has been. Between the founding in 2014 and the NEO announcement in 2025 lie eleven years of actuator development and several generations of machines, of which NEO Gamma and NEO Beta are named as predecessors.^[1][2] The consumer launch, and the 2026–2027 shipping schedule attached to it, are the point at which that work is offered for sale to ordinary households.