1X Technologies

Robotics · AI · Consumer Hardware

Milestone

1X opens NEO humanoid beta trial inside real households

The three-month pilot decides whether NEO can fold laundry and load dishwashers without a hidden remote operator pulling the strings.

• 1X Technologies has begun inviting a small group of households worldwide into a beta trial of its NEO home humanoid, running roughly three months to gather safety and reliability data before a wider rollout.
• 1X, founded as Halodi Robotics in Norway in 2014, is now based in Palo Alto under CEO Bernt Børnich and backed by the OpenAI Startup Fund and EQT Ventures.
• NEO is a 66-pound, tendon-driven humanoid with a soft knit exterior, running 1X's Redwood vision-language-action model on an onboard NVIDIA Jetson Thor chip.
• Consumers can order NEO for $20,000 outright or $499 a month after a refundable $200 deposit, though 1X's own order page still only says 'US deliveries start 2026' with no confirmed delivery date.
• 1X's Hayward, California factory began full-scale production on April 30, 2026, with more than 200 staff and capacity for roughly 10,000 units a year.
• Independent trackers found that most published NEO household demos, including folding a shirt and loading a dishwasher, were teleoperated rather than performed autonomously.
• A real-household beta is the test that actually matters for home humanoids: it's the only way to show NEO can function without a hidden human pilot, the gap that separates viral demos from a shippable product.