1X Technologies is a humanoid-robotics company, originally founded in Norway as Halodi Robotics and later renamed 1X. On March 23, 2023 it announced a 23.5 million dollar Series A2 round led by the OpenAI Startup Fund, with participation from investors including Tiger Global. OpenAI’s chief operating officer Brad Lightcap said 1X was “at the forefront of augmenting labor through the use of safe, advanced technologies in robotics.”
The company builds two robots. EVE is a wheeled android that 1X describes as its first commercially available model, aimed at uses such as logistics and security. NEO is a bipedal humanoid designed specifically for the home, with a deliberately slim, lightweight, human-like build intended to operate safely in the cluttered, unstructured environments of a house.
1X stands out in the humanoid wave for two reasons: its backing from OpenAI, which ties it to frontier AI for the robot’s intelligence, and its unusual focus on domestic rather than purely industrial deployment, a much harder environment than a controlled warehouse.
For a general reader, 1X is a useful marker of how leading AI labs began investing directly in physical robots, betting that the same advances powering chatbots could give general-purpose machines the judgment they need to be useful in the messy real world.