Sanctuary AI Brand Guidelines: Vancouver’s 2018 Phoenix Humanoid & Hydraulic Hands

A Vancouver company chasing humanlike intelligence.

Sanctuary AI was founded in Vancouver, British Columbia, in 2018; its registered name is Sanctuary Cognitive Systems Corp., The Robot Report noted in 2024. Geordie Rose led it as founder and chief executive, IEEE Spectrum reported in 2023, and Olivia Norton is a co-founder who became its chief technology officer. The company has said that members of its team founded the quantum-computing company D-Wave, the robotics company Kindred and the Creative Destruction Lab, a programme for science-based start-ups. Speaking to IEEE Spectrum, Rose called Kindred “our previous company” and said Sanctuary’s cognitive approach was a deliberate departure from the road Kindred had taken.

The goal was large. In 2024 the company said it was on a mission “to create the world’s first human-like intelligence in general-purpose robots,” The Robot Report quoted. Its route there was data from people. IEEE Spectrum’s robotics editor Evan Ackerman wrote in May 2023 that Sanctuary had long been known through videos of the upper half of a dexterous humanoid doing a wide range of handling tasks, steered by a remote human pilot. Those sessions gave the company records of how people actually do things, which it planned to transfer to a very humanlike robot.

One early test was in retail. The Robot Report reported that a teleoperated Sanctuary robot completed 110 retail-related tasks during a week-long pilot at a Mark’s store in British Columbia. Where many rivals began by solving walking, the same publication wrote, Sanctuary took a different tack, working on dual-arm, hand-eye coordination, perception and task planning.

Phoenix, Carbon and a hydraulic hand.

The robot is Phoenix. Sanctuary unveiled it in May 2023 as what it called a “sixth-generation, general purpose robot,” Robotics 24/7 reported, and IEEE Spectrum described it as a new bipedal humanoid designed for hand-dependent manual work. The company’s release gave it hands with 20 degrees of freedom and haptic technology meant to mimic touch. Its software is Carbon, which Sanctuary calls an AI control system, and Rose, quoted by Robotics 24/7, called the robot “just a tool” for “the robot’s Carbon-based mind.” IEEE Spectrum was sceptical of the claim that Carbon let Phoenix “think and act” like a person, advising readers to take the press release with a grain of salt. In April 2024, The Robot Report noted, Sanctuary unveiled the seventh generation of Phoenix and announced a partnership with the automotive parts supplier Magna.

The hand has always been at the centre. Speaking to The Robot Report in February 2025, the then chief executive James Wells said the company had focused on “the highest-value part of the hardware tech stack, which is the hands.” It had built five generations of grippers — electromechanical, cable-driven and pneumatic among them — before choosing hydraulics for their flow resolution, small size and sensitivity. Wells recalled that in 2019 he had gone out to customers trying to explain what a general-purpose robot even was. In December 2023, the publication noted, Sanctuary had acquired intellectual property in touch and grasping technology. In February 2025 it added new tactile sensors to Phoenix’s fingertips, using small pressure cells of the kind found in smartphones. The company’s own milestones page counts eight hardware generations between 2018 and 2024, says it miniaturised 60 of its own hydraulic valves into a form the size of a human forearm, and lists a 17-degree-of-freedom hydraulic hand as in development in 2026. In April 2026, The Robot Report noted, it demonstrated “zero-shot” learning for in-hand manipulation on one of those hands.

How humanoid-robot makers present themselves.

Humanoid and legged-robot makers sell machines that most people have only seen on a screen, so video carries much of their identity. Boston Dynamics built a public following through clips of its robots: a 2017 video of the Spot quadruped opening a door for another robot reached the top of YouTube, “Parkour Atlas” followed in 2018, and in 2025 a troupe of robot dogs danced on America’s Got Talent, according to Wikipedia. When Hyundai Motor Group completed its purchase of the company in 2021, its announcement video showed Atlas dancing beside a child, The Robot Report noted.

The newer story is work. Makers now show their robots in factories and warehouses rather than in labs: Agility’s Digit handling totes for the logistics group GXO, and Boston Dynamics’ electric Atlas being trained to sequence car parts at a Hyundai plant in Georgia, as each company describes it. Press releases lean on customer names, pilot sites and hours of operation, and trade reporters such as The Robot Report and IEEE Spectrum follow those claims from launch to deployment.

Launches happen on stages built for that audience. Agility presented a redesigned Digit at ProMat, the material-handling show, in 2023, and Boston Dynamics unveiled its new Atlas at Hyundai’s media day at CES 2026, the companies say. Research conferences such as ICRA, the IEEE’s robotics and automation meeting, and the World Robot Conference in China play the same part for engineers and the trade.

Identities shift as the companies grow up. In March 2026 Agility Robotics became simply Agility, with a refreshed logo that the company said was inspired by the hardware and software it builds, The Robot Report reported. This guide sets out what can be checked about each company: who founded it, who owns it, where it builds its robots, and which claims rest only on its own word.

New leaders and a new route to factories.

Backers have been largely Canadian and corporate. The Robot Report listed BDC Capital, InBC, Accenture, Bell, Export Development Canada, Magna, Verizon Ventures and Workday Ventures among its investors in July 2024.

Leadership has changed twice. On 10 November 2024 the company announced that Geordie Rose was leaving the chief executive’s post and that James Wells would serve as interim chief executive. On 16 June 2026 it named its chairman, Daniel Friedmann, as chief executive; the company notes that he led the aerospace company MDA for nearly two decades and later chaired and ran Carbon Engineering.

The strategy changed with him. On 17 June 2026 Sanctuary said that, rather than wait for humanoid hardware to reach mass production, it would deploy its “Physical AI” on existing industrial robots, while keeping a path to humanoids. The Robot Report and the Vancouver site Techcouver both reported the shift, along with a proof of concept in which its system plugged flexible wires into parts on a moving conveyor at a global Tier 1 automotive supplier. The company says the work led to its first commercial purchase order in 2026. Its website now describes Sanctuary as delivering “production-ready Physical AI to industry,” with its hydraulic hands as the hardware it is still developing.

For a design guide, Sanctuary AI shows a robotics brand that has told its story through hands, data and software rather than a face or a figure, and has shifted that story as its strategy changed. Compare Apptronik, which Robotics 24/7 listed among Sanctuary’s partners in 2023, and Universal Robots, a maker of the kind of industrial arm Sanctuary now targets. For this guide we use a cedar green, slate and mist with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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