In Less Than a Year, This OpenAI-approved Company Has Grown 12x in Valuation

The emerging robotics company 1X Technologies, which received investment from OpenAI, has quietly announced new developments. According to multiple sources who have communicated with CEO Bernt Øivind, the company is seeking to raise a new funding round of up to $10 billion, targeting a valuation of at least $100 billion.

If this rumored funding round is successfully completed, it would mean the company's valuation has increased more than twelvefold compared to its funding round in January of this year, highlighting the explosive popularity of the "AI + robotics" sector. According to informed sources, the company's valuation was "only" $820 million during that previous round.

As background, 1X Technologies was founded by Bernt Øivind in 2014 under the name Halodi Robotics. It initially provided safety drives and full-body control systems for the robotics industry and released its first wheeled humanoid robot, EVE, in 2018. The company later changed its name in 2022 and shifted its focus to developing home-use robots.

A pivotal turning point for the company occurred in March 2023. OpenAI, which had just gained widespread fame with ChatGPT, set its sights on this Norwegian startup, investing in the embodied intelligence sector. 1X has already utilized OpenAI's AI models to implement voice functionality in its robots and is developing its own proprietary Vision-Language-Action (VLA) model for robots, named Redwood.

Being endorsed by the AI star company also attracted renowned technology investment funds such as Tiger Global, EQT Ventures, and Samsung NEXT to join 1X Technologies' shareholder list, propelling the company into the ranks of top-tier tech startups.

While a tenfold valuation increase in a year might sound like science fiction, it's not uncommon in the robotics field. For instance, Figure, another robotics company that previously received investment from OpenAI, announced just last week that it had completed a funding round valuing the company at $39 billion – a fifteenfold increase from its previous round in March 2024, which valued it at $2.6 billion. Figure also publicly announced in February this year that it was ending its collaboration with OpenAI to focus on developing its own robotics AI model.

In terms of business progress, 1X Technologies has achieved significant milestones over the past nine months. In February, the company unveiled its new home robot, Neo Gamma, which quickly attracted capital market attention due to the woven nylon material used in its shell. Neo Gamma can perform actions like squatting to pick up objects from the floor or sitting on a sofa – capabilities that competitors like Tesla's Optimus are also striving to achieve.

Subsequently, the company announced a collaboration with NVIDIA to jointly address numerous unresolved research challenges in the embodied AI industry. For the general public, this collaboration became widely known through the viral story of the robot "delivering a jacket to Jensen Huang."

According to earlier disclosures by 1X Technologies, the goal for this year is to place robots into "hundreds to thousands" of homes for early testing. However, CEO Øivind Børnich has been candid that the current robots are not yet capable of fully autonomous operation. Therefore, to facilitate these home tests, the company will use remote operators to monitor Neo Gamma's cameras and sensors in real-time and control its limbs.

Øivind has stated that a major challenge for home robots is ensuring safety, for example, guaranteeing that a robot won't fall over and potentially injure a nearby child or pet.

In the summer of this year, 1X Technologies relocated its headquarters from Norway to Palo Alto, California, to facilitate the "recruitment of top talent" and enable closer collaboration with partners.