Physical Address
304 North Cardinal St.
Dorchester Center, MA 02124
ow can a 1.7-meter-tall robot cost $20,000 upfront or $499 a month on subscription?
Today we dive into the business logic behind NEO, the humanoid home robot built by 1X Technologies — one of the most ambitious robotics companies reshaping how artificial intelligence enters our physical world.
💡 How It Works
You choose your robot’s color and place a fully refundable $200 deposit to reserve one.
You can either buy it outright for $20,000 or subscribe for $499/month.
Early Access deliveries are planned for 2026, beginning with those who opt for full purchase. The key: you’re not tied to any subscription if you buy it — ownership is clean and simple.
NEO is designed to coexist safely with children and pets, helping with daily household tasks. It runs on Redwood AI, a vision-language transformer built specifically for humanoid form factors — capable of learning end-to-end mobile manipulation tasks such as retrieving objects, opening doors, and navigating complex environments.
In short, it’s a robot that learns continuously from everyday life.
🧩 Beyond Functionality: The Business Play
The truth is — 1X isn’t selling robots. It’s selling a network of human data.
Every NEO functions as a training sensor: it observes, performs, learns, and sends information back to 1X’s AI models like Redwood AI.
So while $20,000 might sound like a high ticket, for a humanoid capable of this range of motion, it’s a bargain.
But the real product isn’t the hardware — it’s the collective intelligence being built through every user interaction.
⚙️ Why the Price Makes Sense
The subscription model is what fuels the engine. It finances ongoing operations, cloud infrastructure, and human supervision when needed — even if that means running close to break-even in the early years.
Think of it as a Tesla-style playbook: cars (or in this case, robots) that fund their own dataset. Each NEO deployed in a household becomes part of a learning fleet.
The hardware itself remains extremely costly — actuators, sensors, and balance systems aren’t cheap. So the $20K pricing likely works only in the early stage, before new integrated services or cloud-based features are introduced.
This moves us toward a new frontier:
RaaS — Robots as a Service.
🤖 Imperfect, Yet Transformative
NEO isn’t perfect.
When it doesn’t know how to act, a human operator can take control through an “Expert Mode”, teaching it what to do. This makes every failure an opportunity for learning — for both NEO and 1X’s AI backbone.
And that’s precisely the point.
🧱 Building the Physical Infrastructure of AI
1X’s long-term vision goes far beyond domestic helpers.
It’s building a physical infrastructure for artificial intelligence — giving large language models (like ChatGPT) a body: arms, legs, perception, and memory.
That’s why OpenAI Startup Fund, Tiger Global, and Samsung Next are among its investors.
In the coming years, NEO — along with its industrial counterpart EVE — will form an ecosystem where AI learns from human environments. Early adopters aren’t just buying robots; they’re funding the dataset that will power the next generation of embodied intelligence.
💭 The Broader Question
This evolution opens a new world of business opportunities — but also raises ethical questions:
Will it replace domestic workers and household staff? To what extent is it still an invasion of privacy if you’re the one paying for it?
🚀 These questions will define the social contract between humans and intelligent machines.👉 Follow Ascendit to explore how AI, business, and innovation are rewriting that future.
