1X Technologies — bipedal humanoid robots for the home

• 2014
  Founded (as Halodi)
• Moss, Norway
  HQ (+ Palo Alto)
• NEO
  Latest flagship (2025)
• ~$136.5M
  Funding raised
• Norway / USA
  Country
• Private
  Status

About 1X Technologies

1X Technologies was founded in May 2014 in Moss, Norway by roboticist Bernt Øivind Børnich — an actuator engineer who has publicly said he decided at age eleven that he wanted to build humanoid robots — together with co-founder Nguyen Ho Quoc Phuong. Originally operating under the name Halodi Robotics, the company spent nearly a decade developing proprietary low-inertia, cable-driven actuators (including the Revo1 motor) before rebranding to 1X Technologies in March 2023 and pivoting decisively toward general-purpose humanoids that could operate safely alongside people.

The rebrand coincided with a strategic milestone: a $23.5 million Series A2 led by the OpenAI Startup Fund — OpenAI's first-ever robotics investment — alongside Tiger Global and a group of Norwegian investors including Sandwater, Alliance Ventures, and Skagerak Capital. Less than a year later, in January 2024, 1X closed a $100 million Series B led by EQT Ventures, with Samsung NEXT, Nistad Group, Tiger Global, and the OpenAI Startup Fund participating, at a reported $820 million post-money valuation. In total 1X has raised approximately $136.5 million in disclosed institutional funding, and was reportedly in discussions in 2025 to raise up to $1 billion at a valuation exceeding $10 billion.

1X's first commercial platform is EVE, a wheeled humanoid roughly human in height, deployed since 2022 for enterprise security and logistics. In 2021, ADT Commercial (now Everon) partnered with and invested in Halodi to develop humanoid security robots under its EvoGuard program, and in early 2022 signed a leasing agreement for 140 to 250 EVE units — at the time the largest disclosed humanoid-robot order in the industry. EVE robots have since patrolled commercial buildings in Norway and the U.S., performing night-guarding, two-way communication, and door and elevator operation under a mix of autonomy and remote supervision.

The company's second act is NEO, a bipedal humanoid built for the home. Following NEO Beta and NEO Gamma developer units in 2024 and 2025, 1X opened U.S. pre-orders for the consumer NEO Home Robot on October 28, 2025 at $20,000 outright or $499 per month on subscription, with first U.S. shipments in 2026 and international availability from 2027. The bet — shared with Tesla, Figure, and Apptronik — is that the current AI boom in foundation models finally makes a general-purpose humanoid economically viable, and that a soft, tendon-driven machine is the right embodiment for a home designed for people.

Technology stack

1X's platform is built around one contrarian thesis: a general-purpose humanoid that has to work in homes and around people cannot be a rigid, high-inertia industrial machine. Instead of hydraulics or heavy geared servos, 1X uses a tendon-driven soft actuation architecture, and pairs it with an in-house foundation model designed specifically for the messy, unstructured physics of a real home.

Perception

NEO's perception stack combines multi-camera vision with microphones for voice interaction and a dense array of touch and force sensors across the tendon-driven joints and hands. Because the actuators themselves are inherently compliant, the robot can feel contact rather than crush it — a requirement for handling laundry, loading dishes, or working near children and pets. EVE pairs multi-camera vision with a self-balancing wheeled base optimized for structured commercial spaces.

Redwood AI — the in-house model

NEO runs Redwood AI, 1X's in-house Vision-Language-Action model with a built-in large language model for natural-language interaction. Redwood maps camera frames, spoken instructions, and proprioceptive feedback directly to actuator tendon commands, and is trained heavily on data captured from real 1X robots in real homes — the reason the early-adopter Gamma program matters so much strategically. Although 1X is an OpenAI Startup Fund portfolio company and has integrated OpenAI models in earlier research work, the shipping NEO platform runs Redwood on-device rather than depending on a cloud model for real-time control.

Actuators, power, and compute

NEO's defining hardware feature is its tendon-driven actuator system: low-inertia motors pull tensioned cables routed through the robot's skeleton, giving it human-like compliance and a 22 dB noise floor. Walking speed is ~1.4 m/s with a claimed sprint of 6.2 m/s. Power comes from an 842 Wh battery pack supporting roughly four hours of continuous operation with a six-minute quick-charge to one hour of runtime, and on-board compute is anchored by an NVIDIA Jetson Thor running Redwood AI locally.

Under the skin, that soft, quiet exterior depends on a demanding mix of electronic components. Each tendon actuator needs a compact, high-efficiency BLDC motor driver capable of precise torque control at low speed, and every gate-drive stage benefits from wide-bandgap SiC and GaN power semiconductors to keep thermals in check inside a lightweight polymer chassis. Precision current-sense resistors, tightly matched MLCC capacitors on every rail, and multi-stage battery-management ICs around the 842 Wh pack are what turn a bench prototype into a machine that can run for hours in a customer's living room without generating heat, noise, or safety incidents.

The robotics supply chain — where Hybrid Electronics fits in

A modern humanoid robot is one of the most component-dense products ever built. A single NEO-class platform depends on thousands of individual electronic components: precision BLDC motor drivers for every tendon actuator, high-torque servo modules, IMUs and 6-DoF force-torque sensors, LiDAR and time-of-flight modules, GPU compute boards such as NVIDIA Jetson Thor, custom battery-management ICs for the 842 Wh pack, wide-bandgap SiC/GaN power semiconductors, high-speed board-to-board and coax connectors, precision current-sense resistors, and thousands of MLCC capacitors distributed across every power and signal rail.

Building that kind of hardware puts enormous pressure on the electronic-components supply chain. Prototype pilots and low-volume production runs frequently hit allocation, EOL notices, and long lead times on the exact parts they need, and R&D and field-service teams routinely have to support older platforms — an EVE fleet in the field, an early NEO Beta or Gamma unit — that use semiconductors no longer in mainstream distribution. During the current humanoid robotics and general-purpose robot AI boom, this pressure is amplified: dozens of well-funded teams are chasing the same short list of high-torque BLDC drivers, precision IMUs, GPU compute modules, and automotive-grade power semiconductors, and franchise stock on many key parts is now measured in months of lead time rather than weeks.

Hybrid Electronics has been sourcing electronic components for industrial and embedded systems since 1995. For robotics teams — humanoid, mobile, industrial, and research — we specialize in finding the parts you need when mainstream distribution can't:

Trademark and affiliation notice. 1X®, 1X Technologies, Halodi Robotics, EVE, and NEO are trademarks of 1X Technologies AS. Hybrid Electronics is an independent electronic-components sourcing company and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or authorized by 1X Technologies AS. All information on this page is compiled from public sources for educational and reference purposes.