Bernt Børnich
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Bernt Oivind Bornich (Norwegian: Bernt Oivind Bornich) is a Norwegian roboticist and entrepreneur who is the founder and chief executive officer of 1X Technologies, a company that builds general-purpose humanoid robots for industrial and home use. He founded the company in 2014 under the name Halodi Robotics and renamed it 1X Technologies in 2023. Bornich led the development of its wheeled android EVE and its bipedal home robot NEO, and he has positioned 1X as one of the most prominent entrants in the humanoid robotics field alongside Figure AI and Tesla Optimus. The company is backed by the OpenAI Startup Fund and a roster of venture investors.[1][2][3]
Bornich grew up in Norway and developed an early interest in computers and robotics. By his own account he learned to program as a child on an Intel i486 personal computer and was an avid modifier of video games, and he has said that he decided at around the age of 11 that he wanted to build humanoid robots, a goal he then pursued for the rest of his career.[2][3]
He studied at the University of Oslo, where he earned a degree in robotics and nanoelectronics.[2][3] After university he worked as a software developer before moving into hardware, spending time as a development engineer at Data Respons, a Norwegian firm that builds embedded systems for industries including defense, offshore energy, automation, medical devices, and telecommunications.[3] That combination of software and embedded-engineering experience shaped his hands-on approach to robotics: at 1X he has been credited as a designer across software and control architecture, mechanical and motor design, and electronics. Bornich has often summarized his outlook with a line from the children's character Pippi Longstocking: "I have never tried that before, so I think I should definitely be able to do that."[2]
Bornich founded Halodi Robotics in May 2014 in Moss, Norway, together with co-founders including Phuong Nguyen, who served as the company's chief technology officer, Jorgen Sundell, and Pal Loken.[3] The founding mission was to build general-purpose robots that could safely coexist with people and help expand the supply of physical labor.[2]
A central early problem was making a robot strong enough to be useful yet safe enough to work next to humans. Conventional industrial robots rely on rigid, high-ratio gearboxes that make them powerful but dangerous on contact. Instead of using off-the-shelf harmonic gears, Bornich's team developed a custom actuator called the Revo1, a cable-driven, low-friction drive that paired a tendon-style transmission with lightweight motors. He has been described as the inventor of the Revo1, which the company promoted as having one of the highest torque-to-weight ratios of any drive servo motor and as being designed specifically for low gear-ratio robotics and compliant, back-drivable joints.[2][3] The actuator became the mechanical foundation for the company's androids.
Around 2022 the company began pairing its hardware with modern machine learning, hiring researchers such as the former Google Brain scientist Eric Jang to lead its artificial intelligence work and integrating onboard NVIDIA computing into its robots.[3] This shift, from a hardware-and-actuator company to one focused on learned, autonomous behavior, set up the rebranding and consumer ambitions that followed.
In March 2023, coinciding with a new round of financing, the company announced that it was changing its name from Halodi Robotics to 1X Technologies.[4] Bornich explained that the name referred to the company's goal of androids that operate at human speed and scale, saying that its machines would eventually work among people "one by one" and that, unlike other androids that "have to slow down to be functional, 1X's models work at 1x speed."[4]
Under Bornich, 1X reoriented from selling industrial robots toward building a humanoid that ordinary households could own. In July 2025 the company relocated its headquarters from Moss, Norway, to the San Francisco Bay Area to be closer to Silicon Valley talent and investors, while keeping engineering and manufacturing operations in Norway and adding production capacity in California.[5][9] By late 2025 the company employed several hundred people and was widely grouped with Figure AI, Apptronik, Agility Robotics, and Boston Dynamics as a leader in the emerging market for embodied AI.[3][9]
Bornich frames humanoids as the physical interface for advanced AI, arguing that putting robots into real homes is the only way to gather the data needed to make them broadly capable. 1X trains NEO with a mix of imitation learning and reinforcement learning and is building neural-network control and world model systems intended to let the robot generalize across everyday tasks. He has laid out an aggressive production ambition, describing a path from thousands of units shipped in 2025 to tens of thousands in 2026 and, eventually, hundreds of thousands and then millions of robots later in the decade. He has also stressed that safety, security, and privacy must be designed in from the start, given that the robots will operate inside people's homes.[2][6]
EVE was 1X's first humanoid and the product that established the company. Bornich's team publicly demonstrated an early EVE prototype around July 2017, and later versions used the Revo1 actuator to give the robot roughly 25 degrees of freedom with dexterous arms.[3] Rather than walking on two legs, EVE moves on a wheeled base, standing about 1.85 meters (6 feet) tall and weighing on the order of 183 pounds. It was aimed at commercial and institutional work in logistics, security, and healthcare, and by 2019 demonstrations showed it navigating warehouses and sorting packages.[1][3] In March 2022 the company signed an agreement to deliver 140 EVE units to the security firm ADT, which leased each robot for roughly 50,000 dollars per year, an early sign of commercial demand for general-purpose androids.[3]
NEO is 1X's bipedal humanoid built specifically for the home, and it is the product on which Bornich has staked the company's future. 1X unveiled a research-oriented version called NEO Beta in August 2024, then introduced a redesigned, more manufacturable model called NEO Gamma in February 2025.[1] NEO is notable for a deliberately soft, lightweight design: it stands about 1.68 meters (5 feet 7 inches) tall and weighs around 30 kilograms (66 pounds), uses a knitted suit and a soft polymer body to reduce the risk of injury on contact, and can lift roughly 70 kilograms (154 pounds) with hands offering around 22 degrees of freedom.[1][6]
On October 28, 2025, 1X opened consumer pre-orders for NEO, which the company described as the first consumer-ready home humanoid. The robot was offered at 20,000 dollars as a one-time purchase, reservable with a 200-dollar deposit, or through a subscription of 499 dollars per month, with first deliveries planned for 2026 in the United States and expansion to other markets from 2027.[6][7] At launch, NEO is only partially autonomous, handling some routine tasks on its own while relying on remote human "experts" who can teleoperate the robot through a virtual-reality interface to complete unfamiliar tasks and to generate training data. Bornich has presented this teleoperation-to-autonomy pipeline as the mechanism by which NEO will steadily learn to do more without human help, even as critics have noted the privacy implications of remote operators and cameras inside the home.[1][6]
Under Bornich, 1X raised a series of venture rounds that grew sharply as interest in humanoid robotics accelerated. The OpenAI Startup Fund led a 23.5 million dollar Series A2 in March 2023, valuing the company at roughly 210 million dollars, and EQT Ventures led a 100 million dollar Series B in January 2024. The starting context's description of the Series B as led by "EQT and OpenAI" is imprecise: EQT Ventures led the round, while the OpenAI Startup Fund was an earlier lead investor and a returning participant. In September 2025, multiple outlets reported that 1X was in talks to raise as much as 1 billion dollars at a valuation of at least 10 billion dollars in what would be its Series C, a more than tenfold jump over its 2024 valuation, though the round had not been publicly confirmed as closed.[3][5][8]
| Round | Date | Amount | Lead investor | Selected participants |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Series A2 | March 2023 | 23.5 million dollars | OpenAI Startup Fund | Tiger Global, Sandwater, Skagerak Capital, Alliance Ventures |
| Series B | January 2024 | 100 million dollars | EQT Ventures | Samsung NEXT, Nistad Group, OpenAI Startup Fund, Tiger Global |
| Series C (reported) | September 2025 | up to 1 billion dollars (targeted) | not disclosed | reported at a valuation of about 10 billion dollars |
As of 2026, Bornich remains 1X's founder and chief executive, leading its push to ship NEO to consumers and to scale humanoid production. Whether the company can deliver reliable, genuinely autonomous home robots at the prices and volumes he has promised remains the central open question for both 1X and the broader humanoid-robotics industry.[6][9]