Summary
Bernt Børnich is a Norwegian roboticist and the founder and CEO of 1X Technologies, a company building bipedal humanoid robots for home and enterprise use. Børnich founded the company in 2014 in Moss, Norway, under the name Halodi Robotics, and has led it through a rebrand and strategic pivot to become one of the most closely watched humanoid robotics companies pursuing the consumer home market, backed by investors including the OpenAI Startup Fund and EQT Ventures.
Career
Børnich has described wanting to build humanoid robots since he was a teenager, citing science fiction—particularly the 1982 film Blade Runner—as an early inspiration. He holds a bachelor’s degree in robotics and nanoelectronics from the University of Oslo. His self-described fields of expertise span software and architecture, control and algorithms, mechanics design, motor design, and electronics, reflecting the multidisciplinary approach he has applied to robot hardware design.
In 2014, Børnich founded Halodi Robotics in Moss, Norway, alongside co-founders Phuong Nguyen, Jørgen Sundell, and Pål Løken. The company’s early technical work centered on reducing actuator inertia and friction to allow robot limbs to move safely and naturally around people, an approach inspired by human tendon actuation. This research led to Børnich’s invention of the Revo1, a proprietary cable-driven servo motor with an exceptionally high torque-to-weight ratio, which he has described as the world’s highest torque-to-weight direct-drive servomotor. The company’s first commercial platform, EVE, a wheeled humanoid for logistics and security applications, launched in 2018 and was later deployed commercially with customers including ADT Security Services.
In 2022, Børnich connected with Eric Jang, then an AI researcher at Google, after a prospective investor asked Jang to evaluate Halodi’s technology. According to a 2026 profile in The New York Times, Jang was struck by the sophistication of Halodi’s hardware and went on to help bring modern AI and imitation-learning techniques to the company’s humanoid platform. The collaboration contributed to the company’s 2023 rebrand from Halodi Robotics to 1X Technologies and its strategic pivot toward consumer-focused humanoid robots, moving its center of gravity from Norway to Silicon Valley while retaining its Norwegian engineering roots.
Under Børnich’s leadership, 1X raised a $23.5 million Series A2 round led by the OpenAI Startup Fund in March 2023—the fund’s first robotics investment—followed by a $100 million Series B led by EQT Ventures in January 2024 at a reported $820 million valuation. Børnich has continued to lead the company through the development of the NEO Beta and NEO Gamma humanoid prototypes, the 2025 acquisition of Kind Humanoid, and the 2025 launch of NEO pre-orders at a $20,000 price point, with first shipments to U.S. homes beginning in 2026.
Børnich is a frequent public speaker on the future of humanoid robotics. In April 2025, he delivered a talk at TED2025 titled “Meet NEO, your robot butler in training,” featuring a live demonstration of the robot performing household tasks such as vacuuming and watering plants. In the talk, Børnich argued that truly intelligent, general-purpose robots can only be developed by learning from the “beautiful chaotic” diversity of the home environment, drawing an analogy to how the internet provided the data diversity needed to train large language models. He has said he treats his own NEO unit “like a butler, like a companion… part of the family,” while acknowledging that some of its capabilities are still driven by remote human operators as the system learns.
Børnich has been candid in interviews about the current limits of NEO’s autonomy and has framed the robot’s early teleoperated deployment in customer homes as a deliberate data-collection strategy intended to accelerate the path toward full autonomy, rather than a permanent feature.
Source Notes
This profile draws on Bernt Børnich’s LinkedIn profile, his April 2025 TED2025 talk “Meet NEO, your robot butler in training,” and a 2026 feature in The New York Times (via Facto News) profiling the growth of 1X Technologies and the origin of Børnich’s collaboration with AI researcher Eric Jang. Birth year is estimated from a reported age of 42 in a 2024 news account. Career history and technical background are corroborated across 1X’s official “About” page, LinkedIn, and speaker biography listings.