At 1X, our mission has always been to create true societal abundance by building an endless supply of capable, helping hands. In this keynote, CEO and Founder Bernt Børnich shares a fundamental shift in how we believe this mission will be achieved (fastest).

A recent insight sparked by the striking dexterity demonstrated by our latest hands led us to reimagine our entire approach. While building advanced humanoid robots in-house has driven remarkable progress, keeping NEO closed would slow the very abundance we’re pursuing. The fastest path to physical intelligence lies in opening the platform to the world.

Today, we are proud to introduce the NEO Developer Platform: a full-stack humanoid system that empowers developers everywhere to build, innovate, and accelerate the future of robotics alongside us. NEO stands apart as the West’s premier humanoid platform. It integrates a complete, human-like system: body, industry-leading hands, and onboard compute- engineered for safety, strength, agility, and dexterity at scale. Safety is not an afterthought but the foundation: only robots that can safely operate alongside people in unstructured, human environments (homes, hospitals, offices, etc) can access the rich, diverse real-world data essential for general physical AI. Unlike caged industrial machines, NEO is designed for the real world, where safety means reliable coexistence rather than perfection.

Central to NEO’s performance is our proprietary tendon-drive system—the result of a decade-long contrarian bet. Using high-torque-density motors, pulleys, and tendons we design and manufacture in-house, NEO achieves biological-like movement that harmonic-drive approaches cannot match. Combined with our vertically integrated hardware stack and groundbreaking human-level hands--widely regarded as one of the hardest challenges in robotics- we have created a platform that maximizes capability, data collection, iteration speed, supply-chain control, and cost efficiency.

We now have the critical pieces in place: safe, capable robots operating in human spaces, rich human data, and powerful world models. By opening NEO to developers globally, we can solve physical AI together—faster than any single company ever could.

This is how we deliver abundance, one helping hand at a time.