Robotics company 1X found some big potential buyers for its humanoid robots designed for consumers — the portfolio companies of one of its investors.
The company announced a strategic partnership to make thousands of its humanoid robots available for EQT’s portfolio companies on Thursday. EQT is a large Swedish multi-asset investor, and its venture fund EQT Ventures, is one of 1X’s backers.
This deal involves shipping up to 10,000 1X Neo humanoid robots between 2026 and 2030 to EQT’s more than 300 portfolio companies with a concentration on manufacturing, warehousing, logistics, and other industrial use cases.
1X will sign individual deals with each of EQT’s interested portfolio companies, 1X confirmed to TechCrunch.
This partnership is particularly interesting because 1X’s Neo has been marketed as a humanoid for personal use and tagged as the “first consumer-ready humanoid robot designed to transform life at home.” Unlike some of 1X’s peers, like Figure, it has not been marketed as a bot for commercial purposes.
1X does have a robot designed for industrial purposes, Eve Industrial, but this deal specifically involves the Neo humanoid.
When the company opened up preorders for the $20,000 robot in October, the announcement was focused on how the robot would operate in someone’s home from descriptions of the different chores that the robot is able to perform and how it interacts with people.
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This deal is quite a different use case.
That’s likely because humanoids for the home will remain a hard sell for quite some time while industrial use cases are an easier sell. The $20,000 price tag automatically limits the potential pool of consumer customers too.
The Neo specifically also comes with a privacy element that would be hard to swallow for many people — human operators from 1X are able to look through the robots eyes into someone’s home.
Humanoids also come with potential safety issues around pets and small children due to their size and instability. Multiple VCs and scientists in the robotics field told TechCrunch this summer that humanoid adoption wouldn’t be for multiple years, if not a decade away.
The company declined to share how many preorders it received for its Neo bot but a spokesperson said preorders “far exceeded” the company’s goal.
Founded in 2014, 1x has since raised more than $130 million in venture capital from firms, including EQT Ventures, Tiger Global, and the OpenAI Startup Fund, among others.
