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Sanctuary AI (formally Sanctuary Cognitive Systems Corporation) is a Canadian artificial intelligence and robotics company headquartered in Vancouver, British Columbia. Founded in 2018 as a spin-off from Kindred Systems, the company develops general-purpose humanoid robots powered by its proprietary Carbon AI control system. Sanctuary AI's stated mission is to create the world's first human-like intelligence in general-purpose robots, with the goal of addressing global labor shortages and advancing research toward artificial general intelligence (AGI) through physical embodiment.
The company is best known for its Phoenix robot platform, which has gone through eight generations of development as of early 2025. Phoenix was recognized as one of TIME magazine's Best Inventions of 2023 and was the first humanoid general-purpose robot to be deployed in a commercial setting.
Sanctuary AI traces its origins to Kindred Systems Inc., a Vancouver-based robotics company that used reinforcement learning in production robots for warehouse automation. In January 2018, Kindred announced the spin-off of its artificial general intelligence (AGI) research division into a new entity called Sanctuary. The rationale for the split was that Kindred's product division and AGI research division had been operating increasingly independently, and separating them would maximize the likelihood of success for both.
The founding team included Geordie Rose, Suzanne Gildert, and Olivia Norton, all of whom had been key figures at Kindred. Sanctuary licensed some of Kindred's patents and software, and Kindred maintained a minority ownership stake in the new company. The new entity was incorporated as Sanctuary Cognitive Systems Corporation and established its headquarters in Vancouver.
During its first several years, Sanctuary AI focused on developing its core technology stack, including the Carbon AI control system and early prototypes of humanoid robots. The company built approximately 50 robots during this period, including five humanoid models across its first several generations. Sanctuary operated largely in stealth mode while refining its approach to embodied AI and developing the mechanical systems needed for human-like dexterity.
In March 2022, the company closed an oversubscribed Series A funding round of C$75.5 million (approximately US$58.5 million). Investors included Bell Canada, Evok Innovations, Export Development Canada, Magna International, SE Health, Verizon Ventures, and Workday Ventures. Later that year, in November 2022, Sanctuary received a C$30 million contribution from the Government of Canada's Strategic Innovation Fund.
In early 2023, Sanctuary AI achieved a significant milestone by completing the first commercial deployment of a humanoid general-purpose robot. The deployment took place at a Mark's retail store (owned by Canadian Tire Corporation) in Langley, British Columbia. During a week-long pilot, the robot successfully completed 110 retail-related tasks, including picking and packing merchandise, cleaning, tagging, labelling, and folding garments. A second pilot followed at a SportChek store, also owned by Canadian Tire Corporation.
In May 2023, the company publicly unveiled Phoenix, its sixth-generation humanoid robot, which attracted widespread attention. Later that year, Phoenix was named one of TIME magazine's Best Inventions of 2023, the only humanoid general-purpose robot on the list. Sanctuary AI was also recognized by LinkedIn as a Canadian Top Startup of 2023.
In 2024, the company accelerated its pace of development and partnerships. In March 2024, Accenture Ventures made a strategic investment in Sanctuary AI (the amount was not disclosed). In April 2024, Sanctuary announced a strategic partnership with Magna International, one of the world's largest automotive suppliers, to deploy Phoenix robots in Magna's manufacturing facilities. Magna also made a strategic equity investment in the company. In May 2024, Sanctuary AI announced a research collaboration with Microsoft to accelerate AI development for general-purpose robots, leveraging Microsoft Azure cloud infrastructure.
In July 2024, additional strategic financing from BDC Capital's Thrive Venture Fund and InBC Investment Corp. brought total investment in the company to over $140 million.
Sanctuary AI experienced significant leadership transitions in 2024. In April 2024, co-founder and Chief Technology Officer Suzanne Gildert departed the company to pursue a new venture called Nirvanic Consciousness Technologies. Fellow co-founder Olivia Norton assumed the roles of CTO and Chief Product Officer.
In November 2024, the company's board of directors removed co-founder and CEO Geordie Rose from his position. James Wells, the company's Chief Commercial Officer who had been with Sanctuary for five years, was appointed as Interim CEO. Following Rose's departure, approximately 30 employees were laid off, including software engineers and marketing staff. The board formed a search committee to find a permanent CEO replacement.
In January 2025, Sanctuary AI released the eighth generation of its Phoenix robot, optimized for high-quality data capture and improved manufacturing efficiency. The company also pursued additional funding, undertaking a US$10 million convertible note offering to finance operations through fiscal 2025.
In early 2025, Sanctuary integrated new tactile sensors into Phoenix's finger pads, with each pad containing a seven-cell touch sensor array using micro-barometers capable of detecting forces as low as 5 millinewtons, approaching human-level sensitivity. The company also announced its use of NVIDIA Isaac Lab for accelerating dexterous learning in simulation, training thousands of virtual hands simultaneously through reinforcement learning.
As of early 2026, the company employs approximately 163 people.
| Person | Role | Background |
|---|---|---|
| Geordie Rose | Co-founder, former CEO (departed November 2024) | PhD in theoretical physics from the University of British Columbia. Previously co-founded D-Wave Systems (1999), the world's first commercial quantum computing company, and served as CEO of Kindred Systems. |
| Suzanne Gildert | Co-founder, former CTO (departed April 2024) | Experimental quantum physicist who worked at D-Wave Systems before co-founding Kindred Systems. Departed to found Nirvanic Consciousness Technologies. |
| Olivia Norton | Co-founder, CTO and CPO | Took over as CTO after Gildert's departure in April 2024. Previously served in leadership roles at Kindred Systems. |
| James Wells | Interim CEO (appointed November 2024) | Former Chief Commercial Officer at Sanctuary AI with five years at the company. Appointed interim CEO following Rose's departure. |
| Ajay Agrawal | Board member | Professor at the University of Toronto's Rotman School of Management and founder of the Creative Destruction Lab. |
Geordie Rose's career trajectory is notable for spanning three pioneering technology companies. He co-founded D-Wave Systems in 1999, which became the first company to sell quantum computers to organizations such as NASA and Google. He then co-founded Kindred Systems, which became the first robotics company to deploy reinforcement learning in a production environment. Sanctuary AI represented his third major venture, applying lessons from both quantum computing and AI robotics to the challenge of building general-purpose humanoid robots.
Phoenix is Sanctuary AI's flagship humanoid robot platform, designed as a general-purpose robot capable of performing a wide range of work tasks. The robot has gone through eight generations of hardware iterations since the company's founding, with each generation introducing improvements in capability, manufacturing cost, and learning speed.
| Specification | Details |
|---|---|
| Height | 170 cm (5 ft 7 in) |
| Weight | 70 kg (155 lbs) |
| Payload capacity | 25 kg (55 lbs) |
| Hand degrees of freedom | 20 to 21 per hand |
| Hand actuation | Hydraulic |
| Locomotion | Wheeled base (not bipedal) |
| Sensors | Depth cameras, vision cameras, force-torque sensors, proprietary tactile/haptic sensors |
| AI control system | Carbon |
Phoenix stands at 5 feet 7 inches tall and weighs 155 pounds, dimensions deliberately chosen to approximate average human proportions. The robot can carry up to 55 pounds, making it suitable for a range of physical tasks in retail, manufacturing, and logistics environments.
Unlike many competing humanoid robots that prioritize bipedal locomotion, Phoenix uses a wheeled base for movement. This design decision was informed by customer feedback indicating that bipedal legs are too fragile to support the strong upper body needed for precise and safe industrial work. As Geordie Rose explained in an interview with IEEE Spectrum: "Legs are nowhere near as important as hands, so in our strategy for rolling out the product, we're perfectly fine using wheels." The company has stated that "value as a worker is not primarily defined by legs," emphasizing that manipulation capability is more critical than walking ability for most practical applications.
One of Sanctuary AI's most significant technical achievements is its robotic hands, which the company considers industry-leading. Each hand features 20 to 21 degrees of freedom with hydraulic actuation, rivaling the dexterity and fine manipulation capabilities of the human hand. The hands incorporate proprietary haptic technology that enables the robot to perceive tactile feedback, mimicking the human sense of touch.
In February 2025, Sanctuary integrated a new generation of tactile sensors into Phoenix's finger pads. Each finger pad contains a seven-cell touch sensor array built with micro-barometers. These sensors can detect forces as low as 5 millinewtons (mN), which approaches human-level tactile sensitivity. This tactile capability is critical because, without it, robots must rely solely on visual feedback to interact with objects. Vision-only systems often struggle with tasks requiring precise grip control, leading to inefficient grasping and re-grasping attempts.
The company's use of hydraulic actuation in the hands is distinctive among humanoid robot developers, providing a combination of high strength, speed, and controllability. Sanctuary has stated that its hands possess kinematics "beyond human capability," meaning the mechanical range of motion in certain axes exceeds what human hands can achieve.
Phoenix has evolved through eight generations of hardware.
| Generation | Approximate Date | Key Developments |
|---|---|---|
| Gen 1 to 4 | 2018 to 2022 | Early prototypes and research platforms developed during the company's stealth period |
| Gen 5 | January 2023 | First commercially deployed humanoid general-purpose robot; deployed at Mark's retail store |
| Gen 6 | May 2023 | Publicly unveiled; named one of TIME's Best Inventions of 2023; 5'7", 155 lbs, 20 DOF hands |
| Gen 7 | April 2024 | Task learning reduced from weeks to under 24 hours; 10% weight reduction; miniaturized hydraulics; 100x more AI parameters; improved vision and tactile sensing |
| Gen 8 | December 2024/January 2025 | Optimized for high-quality data capture; improved cameras and telemetry; enhanced person-robot interaction; further cost and manufacturing improvements; integrated advanced tactile sensors |
The pace of iteration accelerated significantly starting in 2023, with the company releasing three new generations (6, 7, and 8) within approximately 20 months.
Carbon is Sanctuary AI's proprietary AI control system that serves as the "brain" of the Phoenix robot. It is designed as a cognitive architecture that mimics subsystems found in the human brain, including memory, sight, sound, and touch. Carbon translates natural language instructions into physical actions in the real world.
Carbon is not a single algorithm but rather a suite of interconnected AI models working together. The system combines multiple approaches to artificial intelligence.
| Component | Function |
|---|---|
| Symbolic reasoning | Structured task planning and explainable decision-making |
| Large language models | General knowledge and natural language processing |
| Deep learning | Perception, visual understanding, and pattern recognition |
| Reinforcement learning | Motor control and skill acquisition |
| Physics simulation | Training in virtual environments before physical deployment |
This hybrid approach enables Carbon to process information through four key stages: understanding natural language instructions, planning task sequences, executing physical actions, and learning from experience. The reasoning and task plans generated by Carbon are both explainable and auditable, which is a differentiator from purely neural network-based approaches.
Building on the foundation of large language models (LLMs), Sanctuary AI is developing what it calls "Large Behavior Models" (LBMs). While LLMs process and generate text, LBMs are designed to ground AI in the physical world by enabling systems to understand and learn from real-world experience. These models are trained on high-quality behavioral data collected from Phoenix robots operating in real environments and through teleoperation.
The concept reflects Sanctuary's broader thesis that achieving human-like intelligence requires physical embodiment. By interacting with the physical world, the AI system can develop a richer understanding of cause and effect, spatial relationships, and the properties of objects.
Sanctuary AI employs a combination of teleoperation and simulation to train its robots. Human operators can remotely control Phoenix robots to demonstrate tasks, generating behavioral data that the AI system learns from. Additionally, the company uses NVIDIA Isaac Lab, an open-source simulation framework, to train robotic hands in virtual environments before deploying skills to physical hardware.
Using simulation, Sanctuary can train thousands of virtual hands simultaneously, dramatically accelerating the learning process compared to training on physical robots alone. This approach also enables the learning algorithms to explore the full range of the hands' mechanical capabilities, including movements that exceed what human teleoperators can demonstrate. In Generation 7, these improvements reduced the time required to teach Phoenix a new task from weeks to under 24 hours.
Sanctuary AI's primary business model is "labor-as-a-service," in which general-purpose robots integrate into existing workforces to fill gaps caused by labor shortages. Rather than selling robots outright, this model allows organizations to deploy robotic labor flexibly. Bell Canada's 5G network has been identified as a key enabler for this model across Canada, providing edge computing capabilities and secure connectivity for remote robot operation.
The estimated price for a Phoenix robot is approximately $40,000 depending on custom integration, though the company's focus remains on the service model rather than unit sales.
Sanctuary AI's philosophical approach to artificial general intelligence is rooted in the belief that true human-like intelligence requires physical embodiment. The company's thesis is that a machine capable of performing all economically valuable work that humans do must possess a mind with many, if not all, of the properties of the human mind. By building humanoid robots that interact with the physical world in the same way humans do, Sanctuary aims to create the conditions necessary for AGI to emerge.
This perspective positions the humanoid robot as a means to an end rather than the end itself. The company's goal is not merely to build useful robots but to develop human-level intelligence by grounding AI systems in physical reality. This approach aligns with a growing body of research in embodied AI and embodied cognition, which argues that intelligence is fundamentally shaped by having a body that interacts with the environment.
In April 2024, Sanctuary AI announced a strategic partnership with Magna International, one of the world's largest automotive parts suppliers. Magna manufactures and assembles vehicles for automakers including Mercedes-Benz, Jaguar, and BMW. The collaboration encompasses several elements: deployment of Phoenix robots in Magna's manufacturing operations; a joint assessment of how to improve the cost and scalability of robots using Magna's automotive engineering and manufacturing capabilities; a strategic equity investment by Magna in Sanctuary AI; and plans for Magna to manufacture Phoenix robots under contract in the future.
This partnership is significant because it provides Sanctuary with both a major commercial customer and a potential manufacturing partner with deep expertise in high-volume production.
In May 2024, Sanctuary AI announced a collaboration with Microsoft focused on accelerating AI development for general-purpose robots. The partnership involves Sanctuary leveraging Microsoft Azure infrastructure for training, inference, networking, and storage. Microsoft Research is collaborating with Sanctuary on embodied AI research in areas including reasoning, planning, and human-agent collaboration.
The collaboration is particularly focused on advancing Large Behavior Models (LBMs) for the Carbon AI system, with Microsoft providing the cloud computing resources needed to train and deploy these models at scale.
Canadian Tire Corporation (CTC) was Sanctuary AI's first commercial partner. Through CTC's retail brands Mark's and SportChek, Sanctuary conducted pilot deployments in 2023 that demonstrated Phoenix's ability to perform retail tasks autonomously. These pilots were designed to test whether general-purpose robots could alleviate monotonous tasks and free employees for higher-value work such as customer service.
Sanctuary AI uses NVIDIA Isaac Lab for accelerating dexterous robot learning in simulation. This partnership enables Sanctuary to train its robotic hands in physics-realistic virtual environments, running thousands of simultaneous training instances to develop manipulation skills more efficiently than would be possible with physical robots alone.
Sanctuary AI has raised over $140 million in total funding from a diverse group of investors, including private venture capital, strategic corporate investors, and government sources.
| Date | Round/Source | Amount | Key Investors |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2018 to 2021 | Seed and early rounds | Undisclosed | Early-stage investors |
| March 2022 | Series A | C$75.5 million (US$58.5 million) | Bell Canada, Evok Innovations, Export Development Canada, Magna International, SE Health, Verizon Ventures, Workday Ventures |
| November 2022 | Government of Canada Strategic Innovation Fund | C$30 million | Government of Canada |
| March 2024 | Strategic investment | Undisclosed | Accenture Ventures |
| April 2024 | Strategic equity investment | Undisclosed | Magna International |
| July 2024 | Strategic financing | Undisclosed | BDC Capital (Thrive Venture Fund), InBC Investment Corp. |
| January 2025 | Convertible note offering | Up to US$10 million (target) | Various investors |
While the total exceeds $140 million, this figure is modest compared to some U.S.-based competitors in the humanoid robot space. Figure AI, for example, has raised over $675 million, and Tesla has committed significant internal resources to its Optimus humanoid robot program.
Sanctuary AI operates in the rapidly growing humanoid robot market, which was valued at approximately $2.92 billion in 2025 and is projected to reach $15.26 billion by 2030. The company faces competition from more than 20 companies actively developing humanoid robots.
| Company | Robot | Key Differentiator |
|---|---|---|
| Sanctuary AI | Phoenix | General-purpose AI intelligence (Carbon); industry-leading dexterous hands; wheeled base; labor-as-a-service model |
| Tesla | Optimus | Massive scale ambitions (targeting 100,000 units by 2026); leveraging Tesla's manufacturing and AI expertise |
| Figure AI | Figure 02 | Bipedal; partnership with BMW; significant funding (over $675 million) |
| Agility Robotics | Digit | Bipedal; dedicated factory capable of 10,000 units per year; deployed at Amazon warehouses |
| Boston Dynamics | Atlas | Advanced bipedal mobility; research-focused heritage |
| 1X Technologies | NEO | Consumer-oriented humanoid design |
| Apptronik | Apollo | Designed for logistics and manufacturing |
Sanctuary AI differentiates itself from competitors through several factors: its focus on hand dexterity over bipedal locomotion, its hybrid Carbon AI architecture combining symbolic reasoning with deep learning, its labor-as-a-service business model, and its philosophical commitment to achieving AGI through embodiment. However, the company's relatively limited funding compared to competitors like Figure AI and Tesla, combined with the leadership upheaval of 2024, presents challenges for scaling.
| Year | Award/Recognition |
|---|---|
| 2023 | TIME's Best Inventions of 2023 (Phoenix robot) |
| 2023 | LinkedIn Top Startup (Canada) |
Sanctuary AI faces several challenges as it looks ahead. The departure of two of its three co-founders in 2024, followed by staff layoffs, introduced uncertainty about the company's direction and stability. The capital-intensive nature of humanoid robotics means that continued fundraising will be essential, and the company's total funding of approximately $140 million, while significant, trails several U.S.-based competitors.
On the other hand, the company's strategic partnerships with Magna International and Microsoft provide both commercial deployment pathways and access to world-class manufacturing and cloud computing resources. The Magna partnership in particular could prove transformative, as it offers a path to high-volume manufacturing of Phoenix robots using Magna's automotive production expertise.
The broader humanoid robot industry entered a period of rapid growth in 2025, with multiple companies moving from prototypes to commercial deployments. Sanctuary AI's early mover advantage in commercial deployment (first in January 2023) and its sophisticated Carbon AI system position it as a notable player in this emerging market, though the company will need sustained investment and stable leadership to compete against increasingly well-funded rivals.