The race to build useful humanoids is coming down to the hands.
1X, which builds the home humanoid NEO, unveiled a new robotic hand last week that it says matches or exceeds human performance. The company said the hand can pour tea, sort grapes by color, plug in a USB-C charger, and communicate in sign language.
Humanoid companies have been gunning to solve what Elon Musk has called the “hands problem,” the challenge of building a mechanical equivalent of the human hand by replacing skin and muscle with sensors, motors, and software. It’s a big challenge because human hands are exceptionally complex, combining strength, agility, and flexibility. Seemingly simple tasks like zipping a jacket or washing dishes demand intricate movements that robots have long struggled to master.
When Business Insider asked Dar Sleeper, 1X’s head of product, if the company has finally solved the problem, he said, “The short answer is yes.”
“This is by far the closest hand to human-level dexterity,” Sleeper added.
1X
1X’s new hand has 25 degrees of freedom, just shy of the 27 degrees of freedom in the human hand. That range of motion allows it to pinch, twist, grasp, and use tools. Its fingers can move extremely quickly and bend beyond the range of human fingers.
The system is also waterproof, meaning the robot can wash its own hands, and it is strong enough to carry grocery bags and suitcases.
In a bizarre moment in the launch video released by 1X, the robot’s hand does not break even after being repeatedly struck with a hammer. It then opens a bag of Funyuns and hands one to its human attacker.
A 1X spokesperson said the robot in the video worked with a mix of autonomous operation and remote control “to show the upper limit of the hardware’s capabilities.”
1X raised $100 million in 2024 and has been backed by OpenAI and Samsung. The NEO robot costs $20,000 upfront or $500 a month.
Sleeper said 1X will soon announce when it will start shipping robots and has identified early customers who will receive NEO in 2026. He declined to say how many robots the company plans to ship this year.
How 1X built its robotic hand
Before the interview, Sleeper gave Business Insider a quick video tour of 1X’s manufacturing facility in Hayward, California. In the background, NEO robots stood on the floor, their heads slumped, while robot parts sat arranged on shelves.
Sleeper sat at a table with six versions of 1X’s robotic hand behind him, showing the progression from the earliest prototype to the final product. The newer versions rotated their wrists and flashed peace signs.
1X began working on the hand about a year and a half ago, Sleeper said. One of the biggest challenges was making the hand small enough to be useful. The first version, he said, was way too bulky.
“We jokingly called that robot Popeye, because the hands were huge, heavy, and bigger than the biceps,” he said.
Sleeper said shrinking the hand also meant simplifying it enough to manufacture at scale. It can now be assembled almost like a Lego kit, he said, and 1X has already built hundreds of them.
1X
Motors sit in the forearm and pull tendon-like cables to move the fingers, similar to how muscles and tendons move a human hand. 1X said the novel system makes the fingers lighter, easier to control, and able to give way when they hit something.
Sleeper said the company’s Hayward facility can produce 10,000 robots a year. 1X has also opened a facility in San Carlos, California, that Sleeper said will eventually produce 100,000 to 250,000 robots a year.
The company said it received 10,000 preorders of NEO within a few days after releasing a 10-minute demo last year showing the humanoid vacuuming, folding laundry, and unloading a dishwasher.
Why 1X focused on robotic hands
1X focused on building a human-like hand because of how much humanoid robots can do with them.
“So much of human intelligence comes from our ability to probe the world for truth and to really figure out how the world works through our hands,” 1X CEO Bernt Børnich said on TBPN on Thursday.
He added that while the hand is complex, it is the simplest design capable of doing everything a humanoid hand needs to do.
A human-like hand could also make it easier to train robots from videos of people doing everyday tasks. If a robot hand moves like a human hand, it could learn more easily from footage of human hands cleaning, folding laundry, and cooking.
“If you get all these details right, you can take all the video that’s out there on the internet, and you can train huge world models based on this,” Børnich said. World models are AI systems that help robots understand how the physical world works.
1X is competing in home robots
Weave Robotics
1X faces competition from a handful of robot companies racing to enter the home.
Weave Robotics has said it will ship Isaac 1, its $8,000 robot that folds laundry and tidies up, to California homes this fall. Sunday Robotics is also preparing to launch Memo, a wheeled robot that can do the dishes, fold laundry, and pull an espresso shot, through a beta program this fall. Tesla plans to eventually bring its Optimus humanoids into homes.
Unlike 1X, Weave and Sunday’s robots have grippers instead of human-like hands. They’re also building machines with wheels instead of legs.
Some Silicon Valley investors question whether copying the human form adds unnecessary cost and complexity. Sleeper defended 1X’s approach.
“The human form factor is uniquely perfect for the world, mostly because we built the world around ourselves,” he said.
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