What is 1X Technologies? The NEO home humanoid at $20,000 or $499 a month, its Hayward factory and its funding explained

1X Technologies is betting that the first place a humanoid robot earns its keep will be a living room, not a factory floor. The Palo Alto company sells NEO, a 1.68-metre, 30-kilogram home humanoid, for $20,000 or $499 a month, and says a full year of production, 10,000 robots, was booked within five days of opening orders on Oct 28, 2025. Its rivals Figure AI, Agility Robotics and Apptronik sell to car plants and warehouses under contracts with no public price.

The bet is unusual, and so is the balance sheet behind it. 1X's verified funding in the MEKAWIRE database is $123.5 million, about one fourteenth of Figure's $1.745 billion. This explainer sets out what NEO is, how 1X builds it, how it is financed and what would show whether the home-first strategy works.

A Norwegian motor company that became a home-robot maker

1X began in 2014 as Halodi Robotics, founded by Bernt Øyvind Børnich, who is still chief executive. Its own history starts with a motor. In 2018 it built Revo1, which it calls the highest torque-to-weight drive servo in the world, designed for low gear ratios and tendon drives. In 2022 it deployed EVE, a wheeled humanoid, in customers' facilities. In 2023 the company switched its focus to the home, showed NEO Beta in 2024 and NEO Gamma in 2025, and now lists Palo Alto as its headquarters.

The motor lineage explains the product. Most humanoid joints use reduction gears of 100:1 or more, which make a robot strong but stiff. 1X drives NEO through tendons at gear ratios of about 5:1 to 15:1, according to its July 9, 2026 hand announcement, so the joints can be pushed back by a person or an object. For a robot meant to share a kitchen with children, that backdrivability is the safety argument.

What $20,000 buys

The order page offers two routes. Ownership costs $20,000 with a three-year warranty, premium support and priority delivery; the subscription costs $499 a month with standard delivery. Both start with a $200 refundable deposit, and 1X says US deliveries start in 2026. At list prices the subscription costs as much as buying after about 40 months.

The specification sheet lists a 154 lb lift and 55 lb carry, 842 Wh of battery for four hours, a 1.4 m/s walking speed, 22 dB of noise and an NVIDIA Jetson Thor computer branded NEO Cortex. The body is wrapped in a soft lattice polymer and a machine-washable knit suit. The hands listed on the product page have 22 degrees of freedom; in July 1X announced a 25-degree hand, 22 in the fingers and palm plus three at the wrist, which it says will ship on every NEO.

NEO costs more than Unitree's developer humanoids and less than its full-size H2. It is the only robot in that list sold to households, which makes the price comparison a question of what a family will pay for chores rather than what a lab will pay for a research platform.

The part of the product that is a person

The most important line on the product page is about autonomy. NEO "arrives with basic autonomy for early owners", runs 1X's Redwood AI model and, for chores it does not know, can be guided by a 1X Expert who remotely supervises it at scheduled times. 1X presents this as a way for the robot to learn while getting the job done.

That makes early NEO a hybrid of robot and remote service. The company's research shows why. Its 1X World Model, announced on Jan. 12, 2026, is a 14-billion-parameter video model mid-trained on 900 hours of human video and fine-tuned on 70 hours of NEO data, and 1X's own tests showed it handling simple tasks and failing on fine ones. In June 1X set up a World Model Lab, saying the only durable advantage in embodied AI will be data. Homes, and the operators who guide robots inside them, are where 1X plans to collect it.

A factory sized for the order book

On April 30, 2026 1X said its 58,000 sq ft Hayward factory had started full-scale production with more than 200 staff, and that Hayward plus a San Carlos site due later this year give capacity for up to 10,000 NEOs a year, with automation meant to lift that above 100,000 by the end of 2027. It builds nearly every part itself, including motors wound in-house, 17,000 of them so far, tendon systems, hands, battery packs at a rate of 10,000 a year, and electronics. The robots coming off the line were, at that date, going first to 1X employees' homes for testing.

Vertical integration is a choice Tesla has made for Optimus and Figure for its BotQ line. For 1X it also means that the 10,000 preorders map neatly onto one year of rated output, so the delivery schedule, not demand, is the constraint.

The money is small, and quiet

Only two 1X rounds are verified in our database, a $23.5 million Series A2 led by the OpenAI Startup Fund in March 2023 and a $100 million Series B led by EQT Ventures in January 2024. 1X has not disclosed a valuation, and reports of later, larger raises have not been confirmed by the company, so we leave them out. The hiring of Bill Nash, a former Cruise chief financial officer, in July 2026 points to a company preparing for larger capital raising, but that is our reading, not a disclosure.

The preorders give a sense of scale. At $20,000 each, 10,000 NEOs would be worth $200 million at list price, about 1.6 times verified funding. That figure is notional, because deposits are $200 and refundable, and 1X has not said how many buyers chose the subscription.