1X Technologies Unveils NEO Hand: 25-DOF Tendon-Driven Dexterous Hand at Scale

1X Technologies, the Norwegian-American robotics company behind the NEO home humanoid robot, has unveiled the NEO Hand — a 25-degree-of-freedom (DOF) tendon-driven dexterous hand that the company claims represents the most biomimetic robotic hand ever brought to mass production. The announcement was made at the company's inaugural developer day at its San Carlos, California headquarters on May 10, 2026.

The NEO Hand uses a tendon-driven actuation system inspired by human hand anatomy, with 25 active degrees of freedom controlled by 20 artificial tendons routed through a pulley system. This design allows the hand to achieve human-like compliance and adaptive grasping — the fingers naturally conform to the shape of objects being held, similar to how human fingers adjust their grip. The hand can exert up to 30 newtons of grip force while handling objects as delicate as a raw egg or as heavy as a 5-kilogram dumbbell.

Critically, 1X announced that the NEO Hand has entered mass production at the company's Moss, Norway manufacturing facility, with an annual capacity of 10,000 units. The hand will be sold as both an integrated component of the NEO robot and as a standalone product for researchers and competing robotics companies, priced at $4,800 per hand — approximately 60% below comparable dexterous hands from Shadow Robot and Schunk.

The company also announced that the NEO humanoid robot has completed its second phase of in-home pilot testing, with 50 units deployed in elderly households across Norway and the San Francisco Bay Area. The pilot results showed that NEO, equipped with the new hand, successfully completed 94% of assigned household tasks including cooking, laundry folding, dishwashing, and object retrieval, up from 71% with the previous generation hand.

1X founder and CEO Bernt Børnich positioned the NEO Hand as a key enabler for the company's broader vision of bringing humanoid robots into homes at scale. He announced that the company has secured $100 million in Series C funding led by OpenAI Startup Fund and EQT Ventures, which will be used to scale NEO production to 5,000 complete robots annually by 2027 and expand the in-home pilot to 500 households.

The hand is the hardest problem in humanoid robotics. We've solved it the way nature solved it — with tendons, not motors. And now we can make 10,000 of them a year.

— Bernt Børnich, Founder and CEO of 1X Technologies