From EVE to 1X NEO Gamma to NEO: the road to a $20,000 home robot

1X Technologies did not set out to build a robot for your kitchen. It started in Norway in 2014 as Halodi Robotics, its first real product was a motor, and its first big customer wanted a night watchman. The robot that customer bought, EVE, rolled on wheels and could be taken over by a human in a VR headset.

That arrangement, a machine with a person available behind it, is what households are now sold as Expert Mode. Here is the road from a servo motor through EVE and 1X NEO Gamma to the $20,000 NEO on the order page.

The ledger

Date	What happened
2014	Halodi Robotics founded in Norway by Bernt Øivind Børnich
2018	Revo1 motor, then EVE, a wheeled humanoid for logistics and security work
Apr 2021	ADT Commercial invests under a strategic partnership
Apr 2022	140-robot contract with ADT Commercial
Jan 2023	EvoGuard launches at CES, built on the Halodi robot
Spring 2023	Renamed 1X; $23.5M Series A2 led by OpenAI's Startup Fund
Jan 2024	$100M Series B led by EQT Ventures, over $125M in under 12 months
Aug 30, 2024	NEO Beta unveiled
Jan 27, 2025	1X acquires Kind Humanoid
Feb 21, 2025	NEO Gamma
Jul 2025	Palo Alto HQ: 80,000 sq ft, room for 400
Oct 2025	NEO preorders open: $20,000 or $499/mo, $200 deposit
Dec 2025	Up to 10,000 NEOs to EQT portfolio companies, 2026 to 2030
Apr 2026	Hayward factory: 58,000 sq ft, 200+ staff, 10,000 units a year
Jul 2026	25-DOF production hands, hundreds built

Halodi: eight years before the robot was the product

The company's own about page dates the Revo1 motor to 2018 and calls it the world's highest torque to weight drive servo motor, a maker claim with no independent benchmark behind it. It tells you what 1X was for a decade: a components company that bolted its motors into a humanoid shape.

EVE was that shape: a wheeled humanoid with a castor at the back, claw hands rather than fingers and a small LED smiley face. It opened doors, moved objects into bins and charged itself, and by February 2024 1X said it had trained 30 EVEs through imitation learning and teleoperation. Nobody called it a home robot. The word 1X used then was "android," and the market was work.

The security guard years

In April 2021 ADT Commercial, a US commercial security firm, invested in Halodi to build a robot for its physical security business. A year later that produced a contract for 140 humanoid robots, announced April 2022. Børnich's line at the time: "To our knowledge, this is the single biggest contract ever for humanoid robots."

Read what those robots were sold as doing: autonomous patrols and anomaly reporting, plus security operators in VR headsets who could take remote control for door access and fetching objects. Teleoperation was in the pitch in 2022, to a buyer who knew what it was paying for.

ADT Commercial branded it EvoGuard at CES in January 2023, the Halodi humanoid paired with a patrol drone, commercialization targeted for late 2023. Then the trail goes quiet. I can find no public accounting of how many of the 140 were delivered. 1X's January 2024 Series B post still listed "existing enterprise clients in logistics and guarding" among the things the money would support, the last first-party mention of it I can find. On August 7, 2026, 1x.tech/eve loads a page headed Eve Industrial with no specs, no customers and no way to order one.

The OpenAI turn

The pivot has a price tag on it. In spring 2023 the OpenAI Startup Fund led a $23.5 million Series A2, Tiger Global participating, and TechCrunch noted on April 6, 2023 that the name Halodi had become 1X a month earlier. (Wikipedia dates the rebrand to 2022; 1X's own timeline does not date it at all.) TechCrunch's read on the robot has aged well: more sophisticated than the 2021 version, but "the wheeled-base betrays how much further is left to go."

1X's milestone list marks 2023 as the year it shifted from enterprise to the home: the money arrived, the name changed, and the target moved from warehouses to living rooms inside twelve months. EQT Ventures then led a $100 million Series B in January 2024, taking the total past $125 million in under a year. Keep EQT's name in mind.

Beta, Gamma, and the one you can actually order

NEO Beta arrived August 30, 2024, legged at last, with safety as the entire framing. Børnich: "Safety is the cornerstone that allows us to confidently introduce NEO Beta into homes."

NEO Gamma followed on February 21, 2025, the version most people picture when they search for this robot, and the one that went viral. Gamma brought the knit suit, nylon knitted without seams over soft covers protecting the tendon drives, plus a claimed tenfold reliability improvement and a 10 dB noise reduction that put the robot at roughly refrigerator level.

One clarification, because the search term outlived the product. NEO Gamma was never sold. It was the development generation that ran through 2025, and the thing you can put a deposit on now is called simply NEO.

In March 2025 1X said it would place NEO Gamma in "a few hundred to a few thousand" homes by the end of that year, with remote teleoperators watching through the robot's cameras because it "is not fully capable of autonomous movements today." No public count of how many homes it reached has followed.

Preorders opened in late October 2025 at $20,000 outright or $499 a month, $200 refundable to reserve. Engadget's October 29, 2025 writeup carried Børnich's cleanest statement of the deal: "If we don't have your data, we can't make the product better." Owners can schedule operator access, blur faces and mark rooms off limits. What they cannot buy is the version that works without a person on the other end. The full preorder terms sit next to how far off autonomy is.

1X's Neo robot will ship to homes in 2026, and it just may need to be operated by a human in a VR headset. (@JoannaStern, 2025-10-28)

The money, and the stock nobody can buy

Publicly, 1X has raised over $125 million. The Information reported in September 2025 that the company was targeting $1 billion in new funding; I can find no announcement that a round of that size closed, and 1X's newsroom has run executive hires rather than financings all year. One of those hires reads like preparation for scale: Bill Nash as CFO in July 2026, previously CFO at Ursa Major and at Cruise.

There are no shares. 1X is private, no ticker, and "neo home robot stock" has no answer that involves owning part of this company. The map of public humanoid makers is short, and 1X is not on it.

The December 2025 deal says the most: up to 10,000 NEOs into EQT portfolio companies between 2026 and 2030, for manufacturing, warehousing and logistics. EQT Ventures led the Series B. The home robot company's largest announced order is for factories, placed with its own lead investor's portfolio, aimed at the market EVE was built for.

Where the company physically sits

The July 2025 headquarters move folded the Sunnyvale office and the Norwegian operation in Moss into 80,000 square feet in Palo Alto, and manufacturing went to Hayward: 58,000 square feet, over 200 employees, permits in January 2026, 17,000 motors built, capacity for 10,000 NEOs a year against a stated target above 100,000 by the end of 2027. In August 2026 its job listings sit in San Carlos and Hayward only. The Norwegian chapter is closed, and among the rest of the field 1X is the one US maker taking money from households at all.

Twelve years in, the part of this company furthest along is still a component. In July 2026 it was the hands: 25 degrees of freedom, hundreds off the line, 10,000 planned for the year. Halodi began by selling a motor and got very good at it. The order page still says US deliveries start 2026, the NEO FAQ asks when deliveries begin and gives no date, and the product 1X has never shipped is a robot that finishes a job with nobody watching through its eyes.