1X Technologies

1X Technologies (formerly Halodi Robotics) is a Norwegian-American humanoid robotics company backed by the OpenAI Startup Fund, EQT Ventures, and Tiger Global, having raised over $130 million including a $100 million Series B in January 2024. Founded in 2014, 1X builds NEO — a bipedal humanoid priced at $20,000 to purchase or $499 per month on subscription — targeting both home environments and industrial settings.

The company opened a humanoid manufacturing factory in Hayward, California with initial capacity to produce 10,000 NEO units per year, scaling to 100,000 units by end of 2027. 1X struck a landmark commercial deal with EQT portfolio of over 300 companies for NEO deployments across manufacturing, logistics, warehousing, facility operations, and healthcare between 2026 and 2030.

NEO features force-limited actuators and human-biomechanics-inspired body design for safe human interaction. The OpenAI connection gives 1X access to frontier AI for embodied cognition, with NEO designed to follow natural language instructions without task-specific programming — making it the clearest commercial bet on OpenAI multimodal models powering general-purpose physical AI.

1X is the only company in this category selling into the home rather than the factory, which changes the evaluation entirely: the deciding question is household data governance, not industrial safety certification. NEO is roughly 5 ft 6 in and about 30 kg, runs on NVIDIA Jetson Thor with 1X's Redwood AI software, and is reserved with a fully refundable $200 deposit against deliveries scheduled to begin in the United States and Canada in the second half of 2026.

The caveat a buyer must weigh is Expert Mode: where NEO cannot complete a task autonomously, a 1X teleoperator connects in a VR headset and drives the robot, seeing through its cameras inside the home. 1X says operators are vetted and supervised, sessions are logged, people can be blurred in the operator's view and users can define no-go zones the robot respects even under teleoperation — but these are company statements that have not been independently audited, and household audio and visual data is also used to improve the models.

Best fit: early adopters comfortable with a supervised-autonomy product and with that data trade-off; buyers who are not should treat NEO as a preview rather than an appliance.