1X Technologies

Phase A — Understand the business

Lens 1 · Company Overview

1X Technologies is a Norwegian-American humanoid-robotics company founded May 2014 in Moss, Norway as Halodi Robotics, rebranded to 1X in March 2023. Founder-CEO Bernt Børnich (also CTO) is a Norwegian roboticist; the company is now dual-sited with engineering/HQ shifting to Palo Alto, CA (announced July 2025) while retaining manufacturing roots in Moss. Headcount ~663 employees.

How it makes money — and the pivot. The original, only-real revenue line was industrial: leasing the "EVE" wheeled security/utility robot, anchored by an ADT Security Services lease deal that produced ~$7M revenue in 2022. The whole company has since pivoted to a consumer-first model around NEO, a bipedal home humanoid:

• NEO pricing: $20,000 outright (Early Access, $200 deposit) or $499/month subscription (6-month minimum); U.S. deliveries beginning 2026, international 2027.
• Enterprise channel: a deal with private-equity giant EQT to deploy up to 10,000 NEO units across EQT's 300+ portfolio companies, 2026–2030 — i.e. the "home" robot is also being routed into factories/warehouses.

Contract structure / payment terms. Two revenue shapes: (1) hardware sale (one-time $20K), and (2) recurring subscription ($499/mo) — the latter is the strategically important one, because it keeps the robot (and its in-home camera feed) on 1X's books as a data-generating asset, not a sold appliance. The EQT deal is a volume framework, not a take-or-pay commitment — "up to 10,000" is a ceiling, not a floor.

The core mechanic to understand. NEO is sold as an AI home robot but today operates primarily via human teleoperation — a remote 1X operator in a VR headset ("Expert Mode") performs the chores while the onboard AI ("autonomous mode") handles a narrow set of tasks. The business is explicitly a "data flywheel": put robots in homes, have humans pilot them, harvest "continuous embodied experience" to train the policy toward genuine autonomy. The customer is, functionally, paying $20K to be a beta data-collection node.

Lens 2 · Supply Chain

Map: in-house actuators + motors → 1X assembly (Moss/Hayward) → consumer home or EQT enterprise site, with onboard AI trained on a teleop+sim data loop. Named stakeholders along the chain (grounded in kb/robotics/wiki/supply-chain.md + web):

Chokepoints / single-source dependencies:

• NVIDIA onboard compute — like every Western humanoid builder, 1X sits downstream of NVIDIA for inference silicon (sector-wide concentration per kb/robotics/wiki/supply-chain.md). This is the one node 1X does not control.
• Actuator cost vs. China — 1X's vertical integration is a moat and a cost liability: Chinese competitors hold a reported 40–60% cost advantage on components. The actuator-cost curve is the binding bottleneck on sub-$50K humanoids [kb/robotics/wiki/bottlenecks.md], and China's vertical integration is "dragging the price floor down aggressively."
• Fleet-scale teleop data — low substitutability; this is the intended moat (see Lens 3).

Lens 3 · Competitive Advantages (moats)

Real, defensible edges:

1. Hardware safety architecture (the strongest genuine moat). NEO is a 66 lb, 5'5" tendon-driven humanoid built for intrinsic safety: soft 3D-lattice body, pinch-proof joints, low-inertia cable drives that yield on contact, ~22 dB acoustic (quieter than a fridge), HIC < 250. The custom Revo1 motor delivers ~5.5× the torque-to-weight of prior leading motors. This "safe enough to share a kitchen with" design is a real differentiator versus the rigid, heavy industrial humanoids (Optimus, Digit, Apollo) — and it is the prerequisite for the home market no one else is seriously attacking.
2. In-home data flywheel. If 1X actually fields thousands of home units, it accrues unstructured-environment embodied data that factory-bound rivals (Figure/BMW, Agility/Amazon) structurally cannot. 1X's thesis: the home is the hardest, richest training environment, so winning it trains better general intelligence. Teleop data doesn't transfer between companies — it's locked in per fleet [kb/robotics/wiki/positioning.md].
3. Vertical integration — own motors, own assembly, own AI stack (Redwood + World Model). Controls its BOM destiny better than integrators buying Harmonic Drive.

Bargaining power: Weak today. As a pre-scale private burning toward a $1B raise, 1X needs capital, NVIDIA silicon, and customers more than they need 1X. Its only leverage is the OpenAI halo and the safety-design lead.

Moat durability — the hard question. The data-flywheel moat only exists if NEO sells in volume and the teleop-to-autonomy transfer actually works. Neither is proven. And the safety-hardware lead is a 12–24 month lead at best — copyable by a well-funded rival.

Lens 4 · Segments

No audited segment financials exist (private). Reconstructed /:

Trend: decelerating-to-zero on the one real (industrial) line, betting everything on a consumer ramp that hasn't started. Production roadmap (management's own, ``): thousands (2025) → tens of thousands (2026) → hundreds of thousands (2027) → millions (2028) — aggressive to the point of implausibility (see Lens 13).

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Phase B — Measure performance

(+private overlay: Phase B reframed — there is no earnings print. Lens 5 → funding & valuation trajectory; Lens 7 → cap table & secondary marks; plus a traction/unit-economics read.)

Lens 5 · Funding & Valuation Trajectory (overlay-swapped from Earnings Result)

• Total raised to date: ~$136.5M across the disclosed rounds.
• The $10B target = a ~12× step-up over the implied Jan-2024 valuation. As of the latest available reporting (early 2026) the round was announced but NOT confirmed closed — treat the $10B as a target, not a mark.
• Burn signal: 663 employees + in-house manufacturing + a pre-revenue consumer ramp = a heavy cash burn that requires the mega-round to land. The timing (Sep 2025, days after Figure's $1B/$39B close) reads as a competitive-raise scramble.

Lens 6 · Founder & Narrative Sentiment (overlay: founder interviews/podcasts, not earnings calls)

Børnich is unusually candid for a fundraising founder — a sentiment tell in itself. The trend across 2024→2026 interviews:

• June 2025 (pre-launch, sober): "All our current AIs completely fail at most reasoning tasks" — a striking admission from a CEO selling an AI robot.
• On manufacturing risk: "something kind of magical happens when you go from tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of units… Many companies fail there" — naming the exact wall most hardware startups hit.
• Oct 2025–Feb 2026 (launch + backlash, defensive): After WSJ's Joanna Stern exposed the demo as fully teleoperated, Børnich pivoted to defending teleop as a "data collection play" and argued a vetted remote operator is "more secure than a cleaner". He disputed the "deception" framing: the AI planner text overlays were autonomous, even if the actions weren't.

Tone shift: from visionary ("humanoids will change everything") to damage-control + reframe. The recurring phrase that appeared is "data flywheel"; the thing they'd rather not say out loud is "the robot can't actually do this yet." Sentiment: founder is technically honest but commercially over-promising — a dangerous combination for consumer trust.

Lens 7 · Cap Table & Comps (overlay: syndicate quality + secondary marks; plus humanoid peer table)

Syndicate quality. Mixed-tier. The crown jewel is the OpenAI Startup Fund lead (its first-ever humanoid investment) — a strong IPO-proximity signal historically. Tiger Global (crossover) and Samsung NEXT (strategic) add credibility. But: no Sequoia/a16z/Founders Fund-tier lead, no Fidelity/T. Rowe crossover mark yet, and the syndicate skews European/strategic rather than the Silicon Valley elite backing Figure (Nvidia, Intel Capital, Salesforce, Qualcomm, Parkway). No secondary marks disclosed.

Humanoid peer table (private valuations — ``, last marks):

The provenance conflict worth flagging: Humanoid Index lists 1X at "~$500M+, Sequoia among investors" — but Sacra/Contrary/TradedVC do not show Sequoia in the cap table, and the $500M figure is stale vs. the $10B target. I do not treat the $10B as a mark (round unconfirmed closed), and I flag the Sequoia attribution as unverified — likely a data-aggregator error. Where sources conflict, the bear case uses the conservative reading.

Lens 8 · Traction & Catalyst Events (overlay: funding/product events, not stock moves)

Events that have moved 1X's narrative valuation (the private analog of a >5% stock move):

• Mar 2023 — OpenAI Startup Fund leads Series A2 → instant "OpenAI-backed" halo, the single biggest valuation driver.
• Aug 2024 — NEO prototype unveiled → repositions 1X from industrial to consumer.
• Jan 2024 — $100M Series B → scale capital.
• Mar 2025 — NVIDIA GR00T N1 integration demo at GTC → AI-credibility bump.
• Jun 2025 — Redwood AI reveal (160M-param onboard VLA) → proof of in-house stack.
• Sep 2025 — $1B/$10B raise reported (days after Figure's $39B) → the keeping-up catalyst.
• Oct 2025–Feb 2026 — NEO consumer pre-order launch + teleop backlash (WSJ/Joanna Stern, Fireship, Medium "deception" pieces) → the first negative narrative catalyst, denting consumer credibility.
• Jun 2026 — OpenAI launches its own robotics division → investor-turned-competitor; the most dangerous catalyst for the thesis.

Pattern: the market (private capital) reacts to proximity to OpenAI/NVIDIA and funding leapfrogs by Figure, far more than to NEO's actual capability. The recent shift is that capability scrutiny (does it work autonomously?) has finally started to bite the narrative.

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Phase C — Judge people & books

Lens 9 · Management

• Bernt Børnich (Founder/CEO/CTO). Norwegian roboticist; decided at age 11 he'd build humanoids. Founder archetype, technically deep (started in motors/transmissions, not software), and notably candid about the tech's limits. Track record: built the company from a Norwegian hardware shop to a $130M+-funded global contender and a genuine motor/safety innovation (Revo1); but no record of shipping a profitable product at scale — the EVE/ADT line was small (~$7M) and is being abandoned. Skin in the game: founder, presumably large equity (undisclosed); high conviction.
• Notable bench (a real strength): 1X has recruited an A-list operating team — Eric Jang (ex-Google Brain, AI); Jorge Milburn (VP Sales, ex-Tesla global growth); Dar Sleeper (VP Growth, ex-Tesla Cybertruck PM); Per Selvaag (VP Design, ex-BMW lead designer); Vikram Kothari (VP Operations, ex-SpaceX Dragon/Starship supply chain, Aug 2025). The SpaceX supply-chain hire is the most telling — it signals they know the scaling wall is manufacturing, not demos.
• Capital allocation: Acquired Kind Humanoid (Jan 2025), bringing star industrial designer Yves Béhar and researcher Christoph Kohstall — a design/talent acqui-hire consistent with the consumer-brand ambition. Otherwise capital has gone into vertical integration (motors, manufacturing) — high-conviction, high-burn, unproven-return.
• Red flags (management conduct): The NEO launch marketing is the red flag — presenting teleoperated demos in a way that led credible outlets (WSJ) and the developer community to call it "deception". Børnich's defense is coherent (it's a data play; the planner was autonomous), but the gap between marketing and reality is a trust/governance concern for a consumer brand whose entire premise is "let a robot into your home."

Lens 10 · Forensic Red Flags

No audited financials exist (private, no SEC filings). A forensic accounting teardown is therefore impossible — which is itself the headline risk: every number in this dossier is company-sourced or press-reported and unaudited. Specific concerns:

• Revenue recognition / "revenue" ambiguity — the only revenue figure (~$7M, 2022, EVE/ADT) is being deprioritized; there is no disclosed NEO revenue. Any future "bookings" (pre-orders, the EQT "up to 10,000" framework) are not recognized revenue and should not be conflated with it. Watch for aggregators counting pre-order deposits or the EQT ceiling as traction.
• Burn vs. cash — undisclosed. With ~663 staff + in-house manufacturing + a stalled-to-pre-revenue consumer line, burn is high and the company is dependent on closing the $1B round — a going-concern-style dependency for a private.
• Capability-disclosure integrity — the teleop-vs-autonomy gap (Lens 6/9) is the forensic-equivalent of an aggressive non-GAAP adjustment: the presentation (autonomous AI robot) overstates the substance (human-piloted hardware). No fraud — but a material expectation gap.
• Data/privacy liability (off-balance-sheet risk) — putting cameras + remote human operators inside thousands of homes creates a latent legal/regulatory exposure (consent, recordings, minors, GDPR in EU homes) that no balance sheet captures.

Regulatory findings (required sub-section).

• SEC (EDGAR LR + AAER): None possible — 1X has no CIK; it is private and does not file. Confirmed via regulatory/regulatory-findings.md (0 findings, fetched 2026-06-17).
• Non-SEC enforcement (web): Web search ("1X Technologies" (FTC OR DOJ OR FDA OR... ) enforcement) surfaces no formal enforcement action, consent decree, fine, or settlement as of 2026-06-17. The teleop launch drew heavy media criticism and privacy debate but no regulator has filed an action to date.
• Item 3 Legal Proceedings: n/a — no 10-K exists (private).
• Net: No material regulatory or legal findings on record — verified via SEC EDGAR EFTS (returned 0, no CIK), web enforcement search, as of 2026-06-17. Forward risk (privacy/consumer-protection scrutiny of in-home teleop) is real but un-actioned.

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Phase D — Project & stress-test

Lens 11 · IPO-Readiness & Path-to-Tradeable (+private overlay; no private-watch.json exists, so reconstructed /)

Stage: Late-stage private, pre-IPO and not S-1-ready. Pre-revenue on its flagship, unaudited, and mid-raise on a target (not closed) $10B round.

Milestones that unlock an S-1 (and the realistic window):

1. Close the $1B round — the immediate gate; reportedly unconfirmed as of early 2026. Without it, the burn problem dominates.
2. Ship NEO in real volume — move from "thousands (2025)" aspiration to audited shipped-unit revenue. The management roadmap (tens of thousands 2026) is the bar; reality (first deliveries late 2026, teleop-dependent) lags it badly.
3. Demonstrate teleop→autonomy transfer — the entire valuation rests on the data flywheel converting to genuine autonomy. No public proof point yet.
4. Recurring revenue base — the $499/mo subscription needs a real installed base to underwrite an IPO multiple.

Estimated IPO window: not before 2028–2029. Figure is far closer to tradeable (higher valuation, commercial deployments, elite syndicate, IPO chatter for 2026) — 1X is the earlier, cheaper, riskier humanoid bet.

Be-early write-back: No research/private-watch.json exists to update; the +private ledger entry should be created (stage: late-stage private / pre-S-1; ipo_readiness: low; catalyst: $1B round close + first audited NEO shipment revenue; dossier: this file). Flagging for the central post-wave step — I do not edit ledgers in --watchlist.

No Brier EPS forecast logged — pre-revenue private, no EPS line, and forecast.ts create is skipped in the breadth loop per SKILL.

Lens 12 · Bull vs Bear

Bull case. 1X is the only serious Western bet on the single largest robotics TAM — the home — with the one thing that market actually requires: a robot safe enough to share a kitchen with (66 lb, soft, tendon-driven, yields on contact, fridge-quiet). The humanoid TAM is enormous and early — Goldman ~$38B by 2035 (250k+ units by 2030, ~70% CAGR), Morgan Stanley $5T by 2050 / 1B units. If even the teleop data flywheel works as designed, 1X compounds an unstructured-environment dataset no factory-bound rival can match, and the $20K/$499-mo model gets it into homes years before competitors target consumers. Vertical integration (Revo1, in-house AI) controls its cost curve; an A-list ex-Tesla/SpaceX/BMW/Google-Brain team is built precisely to crack the manufacturing wall. At a ~$10B target it's a ~4x discount to Figure's $39B for the consumer-market optionality. The earnings/valuation surprise: a credible autonomy demo (NEO doing a real task with zero teleop) would re-rate it overnight.

Bear case (2–3 permanent-impairment risks).

1. The product doesn't work and the trust is spent. NEO is sold as autonomous AI but runs on strangers in VR headsets watching your kitchen. If autonomy stays years away (Børnich himself: "all our current AIs completely fail at most reasoning tasks"), early adopters churn, the "deception" narrative sticks, and the consumer brand — the whole thesis — is permanently damaged before it scales.
2. OpenAI, the halo, becomes the executioner. OpenAI led 1X's first round; in June 2026 OpenAI launched its own robotics division. 1X's single biggest credibility asset is now a competitor with infinitely more capital, the best models, and the same ambition. The "OpenAI-backed" story inverts.
3. China crushes the cost curve. Chinese builders hold a 40–60% component cost advantage and are dragging the humanoid price floor toward 1X's $20K with autonomy that doesn't depend on a remote human. 1X's vertical integration becomes a cost anchor, not a moat.

Pre-mortem (18 months out, thesis broke): The $1B round closed smaller/down, or didn't close. NEO shipped a few thousand units to enthusiasts; teleop never meaningfully receded; a viral privacy incident (a leaked in-home feed) or a regulator's inquiry froze consumer demand. Meanwhile OpenAI + Figure soaked up the talent and capital. 1X becomes an acqui-hire — its motors and safety IP bought by a better-capitalized rival.

Are multiples too high? At a $10B target on ~$0 product revenue, this is a pure narrative/optionality mark — by definition "too high" on fundamentals, justifiable only on the home-TAM call and the OpenAI-halo (which is eroding). Contrarian view of what the market refuses to see: the consensus treats teleop as a temporary scaffold to autonomy; the market refuses to price the possibility that for the home, teleop is the product for the next 3–5 years — in which case 1X is a labor-arbitrage staffing company (remote operators piloting hardware) wearing an AI-robotics multiple.

Lens 13 · Devil's Advocate (short-seller)

Dismantling the bull case. The way 1X "makes money" structurally breaks the moment you notice it doesn't make money — the one real revenue line (~$7M EVE/ADT) is being abandoned for a consumer product that cannot perform a single chore without a human in a headset. Revenue is concentrated at zero on the thing they're valued for. The "data flywheel" is a bet that imitation-learning from teleop converges to autonomy — an unproven research conjecture the CEO himself undercuts ("AIs completely fail at most reasoning tasks"). The most dangerous competitor bulls underestimate isn't Figure — it's OpenAI, which just turned from patron to rival (June 2026) and owns the model layer 1X depends on; if OpenAI builds the brain, 1X is a contract motor-and-chassis shop. The worst "capital allocation" signal is vertical integration into manufacturing right as China commoditizes the BOM at 40–60% lower cost — they're building a high-cost moat against a falling price floor. For today's ~$10B target to hold, you must assume: NEO ships tens of thousands by 2026 (vs. first deliveries late 2026), teleop recedes fast, no privacy disaster, the $1B closes, and OpenAI doesn't out-build them. If the consumer ramp disappoints by 20–30%, there's no floor — there are no earnings, no audited revenue, and the comparable (a sold appliance vs. a piloted-by-strangers beta unit) collapses. The single scenario that permanently impairs the business: a publicized in-home privacy breach (a teleoperator records or leaks a customer's home), which would make "let 1X's robot into your house" radioactive — plausible at scale, and uninsurable against in reputation terms.

Lens 14 · Management Questions (ordered by information value)

1. What % of NEO task-time in customer homes is currently autonomous vs. teleoperated, and what is the measured month-over-month trend toward autonomy?
2. Has the $1B round closed, at what valuation, with which lead — and what is current cash + monthly burn + runway?
3. Show the teleop→autonomy transfer curve: for tasks NEO has the most data on, what's the autonomous success rate, and how fast is it improving with fleet hours?
4. With OpenAI now building its own humanoids, what is the status of the OpenAI relationship — still an investor, still a model partner, or now a pure competitor?
5. What is NEO's true unit cost today and your credible path to a sub-$20K gross-margin-positive BOM given China's 40–60% component cost edge?
6. What is your data-privacy architecture for in-home teleop — operator vetting, recording policy, encryption, breach liability, EU/GDPR handling — and have you had any incident?
7. The roadmap says tens of thousands of units in 2026; deliveries start late 2026. Reconcile that — what's the actual 2026 shipped-unit and revenue plan?
8. What fraction of "10,000 EQT units" is contractually committed vs. an aspirational ceiling, and what are the cancellation terms?
9. What's the realistic timeline to a NEO that does a full household task with zero human in the loop, and what's the gating technical bottleneck?
10. How do you defend the safety-hardware lead (Revo1, tendon drive) against a well-funded fast-follower — what's patented vs. trade secret?
11. What's the subscription churn / retention assumption, and what's actual retention among the earliest $499/mo users?
12. Given Børnich's "many companies fail at tens-to-hundreds-of-thousands," what specifically changes in your manufacturing to clear that wall (and why the SpaceX/Tesla ops hires)?
13. What are your unit economics on the subscription — does $499/mo cover the cost of the teleoperators servicing that unit, or is it subsidized?
14. What's the IP/regulatory plan if a regulator (FTC/EU) opens a consumer-protection or privacy inquiry into in-home teleoperation?
15. Why consumer-first when every competitor with revenue (Figure, Agility, Apptronik) chose commercial — what do you know about home unit economics that they don't?

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