A NEO humanoid robot from 1X.

1X

Silicon Valley-based 1X has commenced full-scale production of Neo, its humanoid robot designed for the home. 1X booked 10,000 pre-orders for Neo in just five days starting in October of last year, and CEO Bernt Børnich promised that the company would start shipping before the end of 2026, and today he reiterated that promise.

“The NEO Factory in Hayward, California is America’s first vertically integrated high-volume humanoid robot factory,” the company said today. “Spanning 58,000 sq ft and already employing 200+ team members, the NEO Factory has commenced full-scale production of NEO.”

1X has another facility in San Carlos coming online later this year, the company added, and says that with planned increased in automation will be able to scale to 100,000 humanoid robots per year by the end of 2027.

This is just another signal that we are very near if not right at the tipping point for humanoid robots. Agibot just shipped 5,000 in a single quarter, Figure has doubled production and deliveries for three months running, and Apptronik just hired new talent formerly at Boston Dynamics, Waymo and Amazon.

"Most people think humanoids are a robotics problem," CEO Bernt Børnich wrote. "They're wrong. It's a manufacturing problem. Production makes prototypes look easy."

Neo is a different kind of humanoid robot, and 1X is a different kind of humanoid robot company. Neo’s been squarely targeted at the home market; 1X says it will do basic tidying, fetch items, open doors for guests and more. The 5’6" robot weighs in at around 66 pounds, and will also remind you of birthdays, help you with scheduling, will remember conversations and orders you’ve given it and might even be able to fold your clothes.

Where many humanoid robot manufacturers outsource much of the physical bits and pieces to other companies – actuators come from Harmonic Drive in Japan or Chinese suppliers, battery cells are sourced from CATL or LG, motor controllers are off-the-shelf – 1X is extremely vertically oriented.

The Hayward factory has already produced 17,000 motors since opening. The Revo2 motor, what 1X calls the heart of NEO’s tendon-driven actuation system, is built from raw spools of copper that get wound, fabricated, and assembled by machines 1X engineers designed themselves. 1X's pitch is that by manufacturing the Revo2 motors, the proprietary tendons, the battery packs, the BMS electronics, and even the soft polymer "flesh" in-house, the company controls cost, iteration speed, quality, and — increasingly important — geopolitical risk.

1X head of design Dar Sleeper said earlier this week that 1X has "the cheapest and most performant actuators in the world by orders of magnitude." That’s a marketing claim, not an audited one. But the structural argument behind it is real: if you don’t own your actuator stack, you probably don't own your roadmap.

Others might argue diversification opens up opportunities as well, and that’s true, but for those who want to own an industry, this bears a lot of resemblance to the arguments Tesla made about battery cells a decade ago and SpaceX made about rocket engines. In both cases, the conventional wisdom that vertical integration is expensive, slow, and unnecessary turned out to be wrong once volume showed up.

The differentiation 1X is staking out is twofold: it’s the only company explicitly targeting consumer homes for first deliveries, and it’s the only one making "American-made, every layer down to the copper coil" a core part of the pitch. That’s a big deal in a very uncertain trade environment.

It will be interesting to see how autonomous the Neos that ship later this year will be. 1X has used human-in-the-loop teleoperation in some cases, though it has recently announced advanced in its World Model AI that might make that unnecessary.

The factory 1X has built is fascinating in and of itself. Every build will be fully digitally traceable, the company says, and the factory is designed around “continuous flow rather than traditional departments,” with needed components coming in pre-kitted modules. In addition, there will be robotic help. The factory that builds Neo already has Neo models helping out, and their role will grow, 1X says.

“In the coming months, they will take on broader roles such as facility security and other longer-horizon tasks where reliable, helpful hands are needed most.”

It all sounds very promising. The kicker will be: can 1X make it happen, or will the company hit some form of “manufacturing hell” that Tesla ran into early in the Model 3 days?

If everything works out, 1X has a strong shot at being the first western humanoid robot company to hit serious production numbers.