Sanctuary AI

Prior to co-founding Sanctuary AI, was a co-founder of Kindred AI, a Vancouver-based robotics startup focused on human-in-the-loop AI systems for retail and warehouse automation. Kindred was acquired by Ocado Group in 2020. Also serves as a professor of strategic management at the University of Toronto's Rotman School of Management and founded the Creative Destruction Lab, a seed-stage mentorship program for science and tech startups. His academic and entrepreneurial work sits at the intersection of AI, robotics, and economics, and he has co-authored books including *Prediction Machines* on the economics of artificial intelligence. He holds a PhD from the University of Toronto.

Earned a PhD in physics from the University of British Columbia, where his research involved quantum effects in magnetic materials. In 1999, he founded D-Wave Systems, the world's first commercial quantum computing company, and served as its CTO and later CEO — an unusual, long-running bet on an unproven technology that eventually went public via SPAC in 2022. He subsequently co-founded Kindred AI (2014), a Vancouver robotics startup building humanoid robots with reinforcement learning, which was acquired by Ocado in 2021. That work fed directly into Sanctuary AI, which he co-founded in 2018 with several Kindred alumni. The throughline across his ventures is a willingness to commercialize technologies — quantum computing, then humanoid robotics — that most consider decades away. Rose stepped down as Sanctuary's CEO in November 2024 but remains a board member and co-founder.

Olivia Norton previously worked at Kindred AI, the humanoid-robotics venture co-founded by Geordie Rose and Suzanne Gildert, where she contributed to the development of general-purpose robotic systems. Earlier in her career, she was at D-Wave Systems, the quantum-computing company also founded by Rose. She holds a degree from the University of British Columbia. Norton is less publicly visible than her co-founders, but within Sanctuary AI she leads the technical development of Phoenix's cognitive architecture and software stack, with a particular emphasis on dexterous manipulation and scalable AI control systems.

Holds a PhD in experimental quantum physics from the University of Bristol. Began her career as a senior scientist at D-Wave Systems, working on quantum computing hardware. Co-founded Kindred AI in 2014, a robotics company that used human-in-the-loop reinforcement learning to train dexterous robotic manipulation in retail warehouse settings. Kindred was acquired by Ocado Group in 2020 for £262 million. Went on to co-found Sanctuary AI in 2018, and departed the company in April 2024. Across her ventures, she has consistently focused on bridging AI cognition with physical dexterity—first via teleoperation-based training at Kindred, then through Sanctuary's biologically-inspired cognitive architecture and humanoid form factor. She has publicly emphasized a long-termist, safety-conscious approach to artificial general intelligence and has written about the philosophical dimensions of machine consciousness.