Who Is Bernt Børnich? The Founder Behind 1X and the NEO Robot

On October 28, 2025, a Norwegian company started taking $20,000 pre-orders for a humanoid robot you are supposed to let walk around your house. The robot is called NEO, it is wrapped in a soft knit suit, and its maker — 1X Technologies — says it will fold your laundry, fetch your coffee and tidy your shelves. The man behind it is Bernt Børnich, a Norwegian engineer who has spent more than a decade insisting that the first genuinely useful humanoid would not be built for a factory floor, but for a living room.

His story is the story of a bet almost nobody else made — and of the single most uncomfortable question in home robotics right now: when your $20,000 robot cannot do something, a stranger in a VR headset might quietly drive it for you. So let's get to know Børnich, the company he renamed from Halodi to 1X, and the honest version of what NEO can and can't do on its own.

First, the short answer: who is Bernt Børnich?

Bernt Børnich is the founder and CEO of 1X Technologies, the OpenAI-backed company building NEO, a humanoid robot designed to live and work inside your home. A Norwegian engineer, he started the company as Halodi Robotics in 2014 and spent years obsessed with a single unglamorous problem — a motor safe, quiet and gentle enough to stand next to a human — before renaming it 1X in 2022 and pointing it squarely at the household. Where most of the humanoid field chases the factory first, Børnich's thesis has always been the opposite: the home is the hardest market and the right one.

From Norway to Silicon Valley: the Halodi years

Børnich founded Halodi Robotics in Norway in 2014, and from the start his fixation was the actuator — the motor at each joint. His conviction was that you cannot put a robot in a home until its body is inherently safe: back-drivable, compliant, quiet, and strong for its weight. That led to 1X's signature tendon-drive system, built around what the company calls some of the highest torque-density motors made. In 2018 Halodi shipped its first robot, EVE — a wheeled humanoid aimed at logistics, security and healthcare — proving out the actuators in the real world.

Then came the swerve that defines him. In 2022, Halodi rebranded to 1X — a name meant to evoke amplifying human capability "one times" over — and refocused from industrial contracts to a single audacious goal: a humanoid for the home. The company moved its center of gravity to the Bay Area (Palo Alto headquarters, with manufacturing in Hayward, California and its original Moss, Norway plant), and Børnich started saying out loud that he wanted to build a robot people would actually welcome into their kitchens.

Almost every other humanoid company starts with the factory because it's the easier, richer market. Børnich started with the actuator and the home — a slower, harder road — on the bet that a robot safe enough to hand your child a glass of water is the only robot that will ever really matter.

The bet nobody else made: a soft robot for the home

NEO does not look like its rivals, and that is the whole point. Where Tesla's Optimus and most others are rigid metal, NEO has a head-to-toe soft body made of custom 3D-lattice polymer structures under a removable knit suit (tan, gray or dark brown). It weighs about 30 kg (66 lb) — light for a humanoid — yet 1X says it can lift up to roughly 70 kg (154 lb) and carry around 25 kg (55 lb). It is deliberately quiet, and it walks on two legs rather than rolling. Every one of those choices trades raw industrial power for the one thing a home robot needs most: being safe and unthreatening around people.

This is a genuinely different engineering fork, not a marketing gimmick — the same kind of contrarian hardware bet that Astribot's rope-driven S1 makes on the other side of the world. It also means NEO is weaker and slower than a metal humanoid. Børnich's wager is that for the home, safe and welcome beats strong and scary every time.

NEO — and the teleoperation asterisk everyone's arguing about

Here is where an honest profile has to slow down. NEO can handle a "Day 1" set of tasks on its own — opening doors, fetching items, turning off lights — and it learns new "Chores" over time. But for anything it does not yet know how to do, 1X's answer is remarkable: you can schedule a remote human operator — a "1X Expert" — who drives the robot through a VR headset to complete the task, while the session doubles as training data. At launch, independent reporting noted that most complex household tasks were teleoperated by a person, not performed autonomously.

That's the same "demo versus reality" gap we keep flagging across the industry in how you actually test a humanoid robot. To be fair to 1X, it disclosed the teleoperation rather than hiding it, and using human operators to bootstrap training data is an industry-wide pattern. But the honest read is this: NEO is real, novel hardware with a genuinely thoughtful safety-first design — and its autonomy is early enough that, for now, you are partly buying a beautifully engineered data-collection device that a stranger can sometimes drive.

The money: OpenAI, EQT, and a $10-billion target

The capital has arrived fast. 1X raised a $23.5 million Series A2 led by the OpenAI Startup Fund in March 2023 (with Tiger Global), then a $100 million Series B led by EQT Ventures in January 2024 — joined by Samsung NEXT, OpenAI and Tiger Global — at roughly an $820 million valuation. By September 2025, it was reported to be raising up to $1 billion at a valuation of at least $10 billion: more than a 12x jump in under two years. 1X has also signed a deal with EQT to deploy up to 10,000 NEO units across EQT's 300-plus portfolio companies between 2026 and 2030.

What you're really buying at that valuation is the bet that home-first, safe-by-design is the winning road — before NEO has proven it can do the chores on its own. It's a lot of promise priced in, which is precisely the dynamic we've been cautioning about in the coming robotics shakeout.

What he gets right — and the risks

Strip away the launch hype and the case for Børnich — and the worry — both come into focus:

• A genuinely different, safety-first design. The soft body and tendon drive make NEO plausible around children and elderly relatives in a way a rigid metal humanoid simply isn't.
• Relative honesty about the human in the loop. The teleoperation exists and is disclosed — more candid than the fully-autonomous theater elsewhere in the industry.
• The right, hardest market. Home-first is contrarian, and if it works it is the biggest market of all — the reason OpenAI and EQT are on the cap table.
• The risks: autonomy and privacy. True at-home autonomy is unproven, and the "who's-driving-my-robot" question could define the brand. At a reported $10-billion valuation built largely on promise, the shakeout we keep warning about is a real risk — and Tesla and Figure have far deeper pockets.

How NEO compares to Optimus and Figure

NEO sits in a category almost by itself. Tesla's Optimus is bigger, metal and factory-first, and you can't buy one; Brett Adcock's Figure is aimed at commercial and industrial customers before consumers. NEO, for all its caveats, is the only major humanoid you can pre-order for your home today, and the only one built deliberately soft. The trade-off is stark: NEO is weaker, slower and leans on teleoperation, but it is buyable and designed to be safe; Optimus and Figure are more powerful but not consumer products. If you're weighing whether to be an early adopter at all, we walk through that robot early-adopter window — and NEO is in our roundup of upcoming humanoid robots for 2026.

The quick facts on Bernt Børnich

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