Who are 1X Technologies's decision-makers?

Bernt Øivind Børnich (Founder & CEO) has been the singular driving force since May 2014. He decided at age 11 to build humanoid robots, developed proprietary actuator technology at the University of Oslo where he studied Robotics and Nano-electronics, and bootstrapped Halodi Robotics for nine years without institutional venture capital — a rare discipline in deep tech. He drove the strategic pivot from wheeled industrial humanoids (EVE) to bipedal consumer humanoids (NEO) in 2022, relaunched the company as 1X Technologies, and has positioned the homes-before-factories data strategy as 1X's core competitive moat.

The financial function was substantially upgraded in April 2025 with the appointment of CFO Mustally Hussain, formerly Managing Director, Global Treasurer, and Head of Financial Services at Lucid Group. Hussain has raised over $50B in capital through public and private markets and previously held senior finance roles at Herc Holdings and Hyundai Capital. His appointment signals 1X is building the financial infrastructure needed for a potential public offering or very large-scale private round.

The AI research axis was restructured in January 2026 when Eric Jang stepped down as VP of AI after four years, and again upgraded in June 2026 when 1X established the World Model Lab and hired Samarth Sinha (founding researcher at Luma AI, with deep expertise in scaling multimodal generative video models) as Head of World Models. Mohi Khansari, the architect of Redwood AI and former Distinguished AI Engineer at 1X and founding member of Google X's Everyday Robots imitation learning effort, led robot learning between the Jang departure and the Sinha hire but subsequently announced his own departure for a reset period.

For consumer hardware and go-to-market decisions (NEO at $20,000), strategy runs through Dar Sleeper (VP of Growth, ex-Tesla Cybertruck PM, owns demand strategy and consumer GTM) and Jorge Milburn (VP of Sales, ex-Tesla global growth, owns channel and fulfillment). Pricing and product decisions retain CEO involvement at this stage of the company.

For enterprise fleet deployments (EQT-style strategic partnerships), the sales relationship for anchor accounts runs through Jorge Milburn and directly to the CEO for deal terms. For vendors selling into 1X's own operations, Vikram Kothari (VP of Operations, ex-SpaceX 8+ years, ex-Microsoft hardware supply chain) is the primary budget owner for manufacturing, supply chain, and operational tooling at both the Hayward NEO Factory and the planned San Carlos facility. Samarth Sinha (Head of World Models) and the World Model Lab team own AI infrastructure purchases — GPU training compute, data infrastructure, vector databases, and annotation platforms. CFO Mustally Hussain controls the overall budget and will increasingly be a stakeholder in any large vendor relationship as the company scales toward a potential Series C close.

The Summer 2025 consolidation into the 80,000 sq ft Palo Alto HQ merged what had been separate Sunnyvale and Moss, Norway teams under one roof — a deliberate single-site operating model for speed and cohesion. Manufacturing remains bifurcated: NEO production at the Hayward, California NEO Factory (58,000 sq ft, opened April 2026, targeting 10,000 units annually) and secondary actuator manufacturing in Moss, Norway. A second large-scale facility is under construction in San Carlos, California, targeting 100,000 units per year by end of 2027.

At approximately 1,049 employees as of April 2026 (up from 663 in September 2025), 1X is in the rapid-scaling phase where functional VPs are building full teams beneath them. The June 2026 launch of the World Model Lab as a dedicated frontier AI research organization signals a structural separation between product AI (Redwood AI, on-device) and research AI (world models, scaling), a pattern seen at companies like DeepMind and OpenAI. The hiring pattern — Tesla/BMW on go-to-market, SpaceX/Microsoft on operations, Lucid Group on finance, Luma AI on AI research — reflects deliberate domain expertise acquisition at the VP layer.