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What's happening in robotics and AI — curated by the wujec.ai editors.
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.
NEO →1X gives NEO hands that can feel a grip slipping — 25 force-controlled degrees of freedom, IP68, 10,000 units a year
1X has replaced the hands on its NEO humanoid with a tendon-driven design that the company positions as its answer to the hardest part of home robotics: touching things that were not designed for robots. The numbers 1X publishes are unusually specific. The hand carries 25 degrees of freedom — 22 fully actuated in the fingers and palm, three at the wrist — and, crucially, all 25 are natively force-controlled and fully backdrivable. That is the difference between a gripper that closes to a commanded position and one that closes until it feels the right amount of resistance. The drive is quasi-direct: 1X's own tendon system running gear ratios of roughly 5:1 to 15:1, low enough that external forces travel back through the mechanism instead of being absorbed by a gearbox. Strength and delicacy are quoted side by side: 3.5 Nm peak torque at the thumb CMC joint, 2.6 Nm at the finger MCP joints, up to 45 N of distal flexion force and 17.75 Nm at the wrist, with positioning accuracy of ±0.2 mm. Tactile sensing runs across the fingertips and surfaces and measures three things — normal force, contact location and shear. Shear is the one that matters for the headline: it is what lets the robot notice an object starting to slide and tighten its grip before the object falls, rather than after. Two details point at a machine meant to live in a kitchen rather than a lab. The hand is rated IP68 and built from food-safe polymers and components, so it can be washed. And 1X says wrist joints have been proven beyond two million cycles under high loads, with components tested to millions of cycles. The part that is hardest to fake is manufacturing. 1X says hundreds of the hands have already come off a scalable production line, with capacity for 10,000 hands in 2026. "These hands are the culmination of intensive engineering focused on making humanoids truly useful," said chief executive Bernt Børnich. Hands remain the bottleneck for every humanoid programme: they are the component with the worst ratio of degrees of freedom to available space, and the one that wears out first. A vendor quoting cycle-life figures and a production line — rather than a demo video — is the more telling signal here.
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