The only humanoid you can actually order is being bought at a lower price than it asked for

SoftBank is in talks to take a majority stake in 1X Technologies, the Norwegian maker of the home humanoid NEO, in a deal that would value the company at about 6 billion dollars. The talks were first reported by The Information on 26 August 2026 and relayed by Reuters; SoftBank declined to comment and 1X did not respond to a request for comment. Terms may still change. The number is the story. According to reporting on last year's fundraising, 1X was seeking a valuation of roughly 10 billion dollars for a round of about 1 billion. A controlling stake at 6 billion is therefore not a step up in the middle of a humanoid boom — it is a markdown of about 40 per cent against the company's own asking price, and it comes with a loss of control. Set that against what the money is buying. NEO is one of very few humanoids a private customer can order at a published price, and its 2026 hand is the most detailed piece of hardware 1X has documented: 25 degrees of freedom, force control on every axis, fingertip sensing that measures shear so a slipping object can be re-gripped. Three days before this report, XPeng's robot unit — which has no customers at all — was valued at 6.3 billion dollars in a funding round. A shipping consumer product is being priced below a pre-revenue subsidiary. For SoftBank the logic is continuity rather than novelty. The group agreed in 2025 to buy ABB's robotics division for 5.4 billion dollars, and it has been assembling automation assets around its AI investments; 1X would add a consumer-facing humanoid and a home dataset to an industrial portfolio. OpenAI's Startup Fund led an early round in 1X in 2023 and OpenAI itself is reported to have looked at buying the company in 2025 before those talks ended. Nothing has been signed. But if the price holds, the first serious valuation event for a humanoid that ordinary buyers can order will have set the market lower, not higher.