SoftBank is negotiating to buy a majority stake in 1X Technologies, the OpenAI-backed maker of a household humanoid robot, in a deal that would value the Norwegian-American startup at roughly $6 billion — well below the $10 billion figure 1X was seeking as recently as last year, according to a report from The Information that first surfaced the talks.
1X, founded in Norway in 2014 as Halodi Robotics before rebranding in 2023, builds NEO, a humanoid robot aimed at the home rather than the factory floor, designed to fold laundry, vacuum and handle other domestic tasks. The company operates out of both Moss, Norway, and Sunnyvale, California, and has positioned itself as a safety-focused alternative to the industrial humanoids being built for warehouses and assembly lines by rivals such as Boston Dynamics and Figure.
The proposed valuation marks a sharp comedown for a company that tried, less than a year ago, to raise $1 billion at a $10 billion valuation and came away with less than half that target, according to Tech Startups' account of the negotiations. OpenAI invested in 1X in 2023 through its Startup Fund alongside Tiger Global and a group of Norwegian investors, and the two companies discussed a possible acquisition last year that did not proceed to a deal.
Another piece of SoftBank's robotics buildout
A 1X acquisition would follow SoftBank's $5.4 billion agreement to buy ABB's robotics division, a deal expected to close later this year, and would give the Japanese conglomerate a foothold in consumer and domestic robotics to sit alongside that industrial hardware and its sprawling AI-infrastructure bets, which include large stakes in OpenAI and Arm. SoftBank founder Masayoshi Son has described physical, embodied AI as the successor act to the current generation of chatbots and coding assistants, a thesis a 1X deal would extend into people's homes rather than just their warehouses.
Terms of the talks could still change, and neither company has confirmed a transaction publicly. But the trajectory reflects a broader reset in humanoid-robot valuations after a frothy 2024 and 2025: investors are increasingly demanding evidence that the robots can perform reliably and safely outside of tightly controlled demo settings before paying premium multiples for the promise of embodied AI, and 1X's discounted price tag suggests that reckoning has reached even OpenAI-backed startups.
