Geordie Rose
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Geordie Rose (born January 6, 1972) is a Canadian theoretical physicist and technology entrepreneur who has co-founded three pioneering deep-technology companies: D-Wave Systems, one of the first firms to build and sell quantum computing hardware; Kindred, an early reinforcement learning robotics company; and Sanctuary AI, the Vancouver maker of the Phoenix general-purpose humanoid robot. A prominent figure in Canadian deep tech, Rose has, by his own account, helped raise roughly 1.7 billion US dollars of venture capital across quantum computing, robotics, and artificial general intelligence ventures, and is an inventor on more than 70 granted US patents [1]. Foreign Policy magazine named him one of its 100 Leading Global Thinkers of 2013 for "pioneering the development of quantum computers" [1]. He led Sanctuary AI as chief executive from its founding in 2018 until November 2024 [4][5].
| Company | Founded | Rose's role | Field |
|---|---|---|---|
| D-Wave Systems | 1999 | Co-founder and CTO (and early CEO) | Quantum annealing computing |
| Kindred | 2014 | Co-founder and founding CEO | Reinforcement-learning robotics |
| Sanctuary AI | 2018 | Co-founder and CEO (2018 to 2024) | General-purpose humanoid robots |
Rose grew up in Northern Ontario and Montreal, the son of a fisheries scientist [15]. He studied engineering physics at McMaster University, where he specialized in semiconductor engineering and graduated at the top of his class. He had earned admission in part on the strength of his wrestling, and was later inducted into the McMaster athletics hall of fame as a member of the university's 1994 national championship wrestling team [1]. He went on to complete a PhD in theoretical physics at the University of British Columbia (UBC) in 2000, and he has published research in journals including Nature and Science [1][2].
Athletics has been a constant in his life. Rose is a two-time Canadian national wrestling champion, and in 2010 he won NAGA world titles in Brazilian jiu-jitsu in both the gi and no-gi categories; he has also held a British Columbia provincial beach volleyball title and a provincial masters powerlifting record [1]. He often ties that physical discipline to the persistence required to build hard-technology companies.
The venture that became D-Wave began in 1998, when Rose, then a PhD student, presented on quantum computing in an entrepreneurship course taught by venture capitalist Haig Farris at UBC [19]. Farris provided initial backing, and D-Wave Systems was incorporated in 1999 with Rose, Farris, Bob Wiens, and physicist Alexandre Zagoskin as co-founders [2][19]. The company grew out of UBC's physics community and set out to commercialize quantum computing, a goal then widely regarded as decades away [2].
Rose co-founded D-Wave and was its long-serving chief technology officer; he also led the company as chief executive in its early years, before D-Wave hired Vern Brownell, a former Goldman Sachs technology executive, as CEO in 2009 [1][2]. D-Wave pursued quantum annealing, a specialized form of quantum computation aimed at optimization problems rather than the universal gate model that most later quantum companies chose. It demonstrated a 16-qubit Orion prototype in 2007 and, in 2011, announced D-Wave One, a 128-qubit machine that it billed as the world's first commercially available quantum computer [2]. Lockheed Martin became the first customer, and a later system was installed at a quantum computing laboratory run jointly by Google and NASA [2]. D-Wave raised more than 200 million US dollars from backers that included the CIA's venture arm In-Q-Tel and Jeff Bezos [15]. The company's performance claims drew sustained scientific debate over whether its hardware delivered a genuine quantum speedup, a controversy that shadowed D-Wave for years [2]. Rose left the company in 2014 [1].
In June 2014, Rose co-founded Kindred, originally Kindred Systems, with Suzanne Gildert, George Babu, and James Bergstra, and served as its founding CEO [7][8]. Kindred set out to pair deep reinforcement learning with physical robots, and it describes itself as the first company to put reinforcement learning to work in a production robot [1][7]. Its Kindred Sort machines, which combined machine learning with human teleoperation to grasp and route items, were deployed by retailers including Gap to fulfill online orders [7]. Early Kindred research used human pilots in exoskeleton-style rigs to teleoperate robots and gather training data [7].
In January 2018, Kindred spun off its AGI research division into a new company, Sanctuary. Rose and Gildert left to lead the spin-off, while Jim Liefer became Kindred's CEO and Bergstra its chief scientist [8][9]. Kindred itself was acquired by the British online-grocery company Ocado in 2020 for about 262 million US dollars [10].
Rose co-founded Sanctuary AI, legally Sanctuary Cognitive Systems, in 2018 alongside Gildert, Olivia Norton, and economist Ajay Agrawal, founder of the Creative Destruction Lab [11][20]. Based in Vancouver, the company set out to create human-like intelligence in general-purpose humanoid robots, with Rose as CEO and Gildert as chief technology officer [11].
Its flagship product is Phoenix, a general-purpose humanoid robot unveiled in May 2023 as the company's sixth-generation system and named one of TIME magazine's best inventions of 2023 [11]. Phoenix is paired with Carbon, Sanctuary's proprietary AI control system, which uses teleoperation by human pilots to collect high-fidelity visual and haptic data that the robot then uses to carry out tasks autonomously [11][14]. The robot's highly dexterous hands, with roughly 20 degrees of freedom and proprietary miniaturized hydraulics, were a central focus of the design [11][14]. A seventh-generation Phoenix released in April 2024 shrank the hydraulics further and cut the time needed to automate a new task to under 24 hours [12].
Sanctuary closed a 75.5 million Canadian dollar (about 58.5 million US dollar) Series A round in 2022, with participation from the venture arm of auto-parts maker Magna International, and it raised on the order of 140 million US dollars in total from investors that included the Canadian government's Strategic Innovation Fund, BCE, and Export Development Canada [13][6]. In April 2024 Sanctuary announced a deal for Magna to deploy Phoenix robots in its factories [5][6].
The company went through two major leadership changes in 2024. Co-founder and CTO Suzanne Gildert left in April 2024 to pursue work on AI consciousness, and Olivia Norton took over the technology role [5]. On November 11, 2024, Sanctuary announced that Rose was stepping down as CEO "after much consideration," and named chief commercial officer James Wells interim chief executive [4][5]. The Logic later reported that Sanctuary's board had pushed Rose out [6]. The change came just as Phoenix robots were headed for deployment at Magna, and the company shed staff in the following weeks [5].
After leaving Sanctuary, Rose moved into advisory positions in the AI industry. In November 2025, ExperienceFlow.AI appointed him a strategic advisor, citing his record as founder of D-Wave, Kindred, and Sanctuary [3]. By December 2025 he had become a founding advisor to Ineffable Intelligence, a UK superintelligence startup founded by David Silver, the former Google DeepMind reinforcement-learning lead [1]. In April 2026 Ineffable emerged from stealth with a 1.1 billion US dollar seed round, described as the largest in European history, at a valuation of about 5.1 billion US dollars; the round was co-led by Sequoia and Lightspeed with participation from Nvidia and Google, among others [16][17]. By his own account Rose helped raise that round [1].
Rose has spent his career chasing artificial general intelligence, which he has called "the biggest single quest that humanity has ever undertaken" [15]. He argues that intelligence cannot be separated from physical experience, describing embodiment as "absolutely critical in the journey to building AGI, as our interactions within the real world are an essential part of what makes us human" [14]. He frames general-purpose humanoids as a practical response to labor shortages, reasoning that because "the world, and the workplace, were designed by and for people," a human-shaped robot is more cost-effective than redesigning every workplace around special-purpose machines [14].
He has also made sweeping claims about the stakes of the technology. Rose has compared the arrival of synthetic minds to the invention of gunpowder and to nuclear weapons, and has said that capable embodied AI would "fundamentally alter the basis of capitalism itself" by creating a new kind of synthetic worker able to do much of the intellectual and physical labor now done by people [15]. Those statements, together with the long-running scientific disputes over D-Wave's quantum claims, have made him an influential but polarizing voice in deep tech.