1X Brand Guidelines: Halodi Robotics of Norway, EVE & the Knitted NEO Home Humanoid

A Norwegian start with a wheeled robot called EVE.

1X began in Norway in 2014 as Halodi Robotics, founded by the roboticist Bernt Øivind Børnich, who still leads it. The Norwegian science site forskning.no reported in May 2024 that the company, then based in Moss on the Oslofjord, set out to build humanlike robots that could work side by side with people to meet a demand for labour. English Wikipedia says the early work centred on actuators and whole-body control for industrial and healthcare robots.

Its first humanoid, EVE, came out in 2018. EVE rolls on wheels rather than walking, and has hands that can grip; forskning.no described it opening doors, riding lifts and moving or lifting objects. In that 2024 interview Børnich said 1X had built 75 EVE robots, about half of them in use at customers in aviation, aerospace and logistics. Its main job, he said, was guarding large buildings: EVE drove its rounds on its own, and when something needed doing, such as closing a door propped open with a shoe, an operator could take over through a virtual-reality headset.

English Wikipedia says the company renamed itself 1X Technologies in 2022 and turned its attention to robots for the home. That was an unusual direction. TechCrunch wrote in February 2025 that its peers had prioritised warehouses and factories, and called 1X’s home-first approach unique among its direct rivals.

NEO, a humanoid in a knitted suit.

The home robot is NEO, a two-legged humanoid. The company unveiled NEO Beta in August 2024, The Robot Report noted, describing it as a soft and lightweight prototype. forskning.no reported that its motors pull on cords inspired by muscles, rather than turning joints directly.

The design story begins with the successor. On 21 February 2025 1X showed NEO Gamma, which TechCrunch described as a prototype for testing in homes, with images of it making coffee, doing laundry and vacuuming. Its body is covered by a suit of knitted nylon. Dezeen reported that the suit is 3D-knitted in one piece in a beige yarn, and that the company wanted a more Scandinavian, minimalist look than the black-and-grey NEO Beta, so that the robot would “complement living spaces rather than disrupt them.” Dezeen also described lit “emotive ear rings” on the sides of the head that show when the robot is listening or speaking, and soft covers over its hands. Inside the body, the magazine said, are four microphones and a set of speakers, one in the chest for the robot’s voice and two in the pelvis for sound and music; the robot was trained on human motion-capture data so that it walks with a natural gait and arm swing, squats and sits in chairs. TechCrunch added that 1X had built its own in-house AI models for the robot’s speech and body language, and that the company stressed Gamma was still a long way from commercial scale.

1X also grew by acquisition. In January 2025, The Robot Report reported, 1X agreed to acquire Kind Humanoid, a three-person Palo Alto start-up founded in 2023 by Christoph Kohstall, a former Stanford scientist. Kind had developed Mona, a bipedal home humanoid whose form it worked on with the designer Yves Béhar.

Hands came next. In July 2026 the company described tendon-driven hands for NEO with 25 degrees of freedom, a release that Wired covered the same month.

How humanoid-robot makers present themselves.

Humanoid and legged-robot makers sell machines that most people have only seen on a screen, so video carries much of their identity. Boston Dynamics built a public following through clips of its robots: a 2017 video of the Spot quadruped opening a door for another robot reached the top of YouTube, “Parkour Atlas” followed in 2018, and in 2025 a troupe of robot dogs danced on America’s Got Talent, according to Wikipedia. When Hyundai Motor Group completed its purchase of the company in 2021, its announcement video showed Atlas dancing beside a child, The Robot Report noted.

The newer story is work. Makers now show their robots in factories and warehouses rather than in labs: Agility’s Digit handling totes for the logistics group GXO, and Boston Dynamics’ electric Atlas being trained to sequence car parts at a Hyundai plant in Georgia, as each company describes it. Press releases lean on customer names, pilot sites and hours of operation, and trade reporters such as The Robot Report and IEEE Spectrum follow those claims from launch to deployment.

Launches happen on stages built for that audience. Agility presented a redesigned Digit at ProMat, the material-handling show, in 2023, and Boston Dynamics unveiled its new Atlas at Hyundai’s media day at CES 2026, the companies say. Research conferences such as ICRA, the IEEE’s robotics and automation meeting, and the World Robot Conference in China play the same part for engineers and the trade.

Identities shift as the companies grow up. In March 2026 Agility Robotics became simply Agility, with a refreshed logo that the company said was inspired by the hardware and software it builds, The Robot Report reported. This guide sets out what can be checked about each company: who founded it, who owns it, where it builds its robots, and which claims rest only on its own word.

From Moss to Palo Alto and Hayward.

The money behind 1X has come largely from technology investors. English Wikipedia, citing TechCrunch, says a March 2023 round was led by the OpenAI Startup Fund, with Tiger Global among the other backers, and that a January 2024 round was led by EQT Ventures, with Samsung NEXT taking part. TechCrunch noted in 2025 that the OpenAI connection was what first brought 1X to wide attention in the industry.

The company has since moved its centre of gravity to California. In early 2025 The Robot Report gave its offices as Moss and Sunnyvale. In July 2025 1X announced a new headquarters in Palo Alto, saying the move would bring its Sunnyvale and Moss teams under one roof. On 28 October 2025 it opened orders for NEO for homes, with release planned for 2026; English Wikipedia, citing Engadget, says the robot is offered in tan, grey and dark brown. Reviewing it for The Wall Street Journal that month, Joanna Stern reported that most tasks were then teleoperated by a person wearing a virtual-reality headset, which raised questions about privacy; Børnich said data from early users was needed to make the robot more autonomous.

Production followed. The Next Web reported on 1 May 2026 that 1X had opened a factory in Hayward, California, to build NEO, with motors, batteries, structures, transmissions, soft goods and sensors made in-house, which the company described as the first vertically integrated humanoid-robot factory in the United States. A larger plant in San Carlos was under construction, and first customer shipments were planned for 2026.

For a design guide, 1X shows how a humanoid maker can borrow the language of furniture and clothing — knitwear, warm neutrals and soft forms — to make a machine look at home. Compare Figure, another humanoid start-up with OpenAI ties, and Nvidia, whose computing platform NEO uses. For this guide we use a walnut brown, tan and oat with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep 1X’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.