1X unveils NEO Gamma, a quieter home humanoid in a knitted suit, and begins internal home testing

1X Technologies on Feb. 21, 2025 unveiled NEO Gamma, the latest version of its NEO humanoid robot for the home, calling it the next generation of its home humanoids with changes across both hardware and artificial intelligence. The Palo Alto, California company said the new design opens the way to internal home testing, which it described as a first step toward fully autonomous humanoids. 1X did not give a price, a delivery date or basic specifications such as height, weight or battery life.

The numbers 1X published are relative rather than absolute. The company said NEO Gamma operates about 10 decibels more quietly than before, which it compared with the sound level of a refrigerator, and that hardware reliability has improved tenfold. Its whole-body control skills run at 100 Hz, meaning the control policy updates 100 times a second. For hearing and speech, the robot carries four directional microphones with beamforming and echo cancellation, plus three speakers: one in the chest for voice and two in the pelvis for sound in every direction.

The most visible change is on the outside. NEO Gamma wears a knitted suit and matching shoes that 1X said are 3D printed from soft, durable nylon on a Japanese Shima Seiki machine, using a whole-garment seamless knitting process so the fabric follows the body without hindering movement. Illuminated "Ear Rings" on the head give people nearby real-time visual feedback about what the robot is doing. Beneath the fabric, the joints are moved by 1X's own Tendon Drive actuation, which is now encased in soft covers that the company said improve passive safety. 1X called safety its top priority.

On the software side, 1X described three pieces. A whole-body controller, trained with reinforcement learning on human motion capture data, lets NEO walk with a natural human gait and arm swing, squat to pick things up from the floor and sit in chairs while keeping its balance. A visual manipulation model can pick up a wide variety of objects in different settings, including environments it did not see during training, according to the company. Underneath both sits the approach 1X describes as neural networks trained to predict teleoperated actions directly from raw sensor data.

Chief executive Bernt Børnich tied the release to a single goal, saying every engineering and design decision was made to get NEO into customers' homes as quickly as possible. In his account, homes provide the real-world context and the diversity of data that humanoids need to become more intelligent and more autonomous. That argument explains why a company competing in a capital-intensive field has put its effort into noise, fabric and soft covers rather than payload or speed.

1X was founded in 2014 as Halodi Robotics by Børnich, according to the company's website. It raised $23.5 million in a Series A2 round in March 2023 led by OpenAI, then announced a $100 million Series B on Jan. 13, 2024, led by EQT Ventures with Samsung NEXT joining as a new investor and Sandwater, Skagerak Capital and Nistad group participating. At the time 1X said it had raised more than $125 million in under 12 months and would use the money to bring NEO to market, support enterprise customers in logistics and guarding, and scale its data collection for embodied AI. On Jan. 27, 2025, less than four weeks before the Gamma reveal, 1X acquired Kind Humanoid, a Palo Alto start-up founded by former Stanford scientist and Google robotics team member Christoph Kohstall, which had developed a bipedal home and healthcare humanoid called Mona. Terms were not disclosed.

The timing put 1X next to a louder rival. One day earlier, on Feb. 20, 2025, Figure AI introduced Helix, a vision-language-action model that Figure said runs entirely on embedded low-power GPUs, was trained on about 500 hours of teleoperated demonstrations and lets its robots pick up thousands of household objects they have never encountered. Helix pairs a 7-billion-parameter vision-language model running at 7 to 9 Hz with an 80-million-parameter policy running at 200 Hz. Figure raised $675 million in a Series B in February 2024, and Apptronik announced a $350 million Series A on Feb. 13, 2025. Against those sums, 1X's last disclosed round is the smallest of the three, yet it is the one that has defined its flagship product around the home from the start.

The technical choices are easier to read once the terms are unpacked. A tendon drive moves a joint by pulling on cable-like tendons from motors placed elsewhere in the body, which can make limbs lighter and more compliant when they touch people or furniture; 1X has not published the internal details of its version. Learning locomotion from motion capture means the controller is rewarded for moving like a recorded human, which tends to produce gaits that look natural to onlookers. Predicting teleoperated actions is a form of imitation learning in which a human pilots the robot and the network learns to map what the robot sees to what the human did.

For the wider industry, NEO Gamma is a statement about what a home robot has to get right before it can be useful. A refrigerator-level hum, fabric instead of hard shells and lights that signal intent address acceptance by the people who live with the machine, which matters in a home in a way it does not in a fenced factory cell. The disclosed AI capabilities, walking, sitting, squatting and picking up objects, are the foundations of household work rather than household work itself.

Several questions remain open. 1X gave no autonomy metrics, so it is unclear how much of NEO's behaviour in homes will be autonomous and how much will depend on remote operators. The tenfold reliability gain was stated without a baseline or test method. No home safety certification was mentioned, and without a price there is no way to judge whether a household market exists at the cost NEO will need to carry. The company is also smaller in disclosed funding than Figure or Apptronik.

The next markers are concrete. Investors and rivals will watch for results from the internal home tests, for any announcement of a price or reservation process, and for a new funding round that would show whether 1X can finance production. Figure's decision to pitch Helix around household objects one day earlier suggests the two companies will be compared directly through 2025.