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For most of its life this company was called Halodi Robotics, a Norwegian outfit founded in 2014 to build safe actuators and full-body control systems for industrial and healthcare robots. That is a deeply unglamorous problem, torque-to-weight ratios and pinch points, and it is also exactly the problem you have to solve before a robot can stand next to a person without being a liability. The company’s bet, which looks more reasonable every year, was that the hard part of humanoid robotics is not walking but manipulation: getting a machine to handle the world with its hands at a human’s footprint and a human’s level of safety.
In 2022 the company rebranded to 1X Technologies and pointed itself at the home. The first-generation android, EVE, rolls on wheels and works in logistics and guarding, including a long-running deployment with ADT in the United States. The second-generation android, NEO, has two legs, an aluminium core under a soft outer layer, and weighs about 30kg, which is roughly a third of EVE. The legs are not a vanity feature. As founder and chief executive Bernt Oivind Bornich likes to point out, you need a small footprint and the ability to brace, lean, and reach over furniture to be useful in a kitchen.
The capital arrived in two quick steps. In March 2023 the OpenAI Startup Fund led a Series A extension, with Tiger Global and Sandwater alongside, the moment a frontier-model lab decided embodied AI was worth a position. Ten months later, in January 2024, EQT Ventures led a $100M Series B to fund volume manufacturing of NEO and the data-collection operation behind it, where human operators in VR headsets teleoperate androids to generate training data. By the close of that round 1X had raised over $125M inside a year, which is a fast way for a fifteen-year-old actuator company to become a humanoid story. It remains one of the clearest pieces of evidence that the physical-AI race has a serious European node, headquartered in Moss, south of Oslo.
Frequently asked
1X was founded in 2014 as Halodi Robotics by Norwegian roboticist Bernt Oivind Bornich. It rebranded to 1X Technologies in 2022, around the time it shifted its focus from industrial and security androids toward humanoid robots for the home.
1X's March 2023 Series A extension was led by the OpenAI Startup Fund with Tiger Global and Norwegian investor Sandwater. Its $100M Series B in January 2024 was led by EQT Ventures, with Samsung NEXT, the Nistad group, Skagerak Capital, and existing backers joining. The two rounds brought 1X past $125M raised in under a year.
Two. EVE is a wheeled android already deployed in logistics and security work. NEO is the bipedal, soft-bodied humanoid built for domestic tasks, the product the Series B was raised to bring to market.
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