Sanctuary AI Phoenix Timeline

Sanctuary continues expanding its enterprise pilot programme with existing and new partners. Phoenix performs tasks including stock handling, shelf replenishment, and light assembly in live retail and light-industrial environments. The company gathers large-scale teleoperation data to train future Carbon iterations, with broader commercial availability targeted beyond 2026.

Sanctuary AI unveils Generation 7 of Phoenix, its most dexterous robot to date. The Gen 7 hands feature 20 degrees of freedom each, matching the complexity of human hand movement more closely than any previous version. Sanctuary reports the robot can perform 110+ distinct skills across retail and industrial settings.

Sanctuary deploys Phoenix in a PriceSmart Foods supermarket environment in British Columbia, demonstrating the robot's ability to handle grocery retail tasks including product handling, backroom logistics, and shelf management under real-world conditions.

Sanctuary announces commercial pilot deployments with Mark's and Sport Chek, both subsidiaries of Canadian Tire Corporation. Phoenix performs retail tasks in live store environments — the first public demonstration of a Canadian-built humanoid robot working in a commercial retail setting.

Generation 6 of Phoenix is described by Sanctuary as their first truly commercial-ready robot. It incorporates lessons from earlier generations and is built with reliability and task versatility as primary design goals alongside the Carbon AI system.

Sanctuary AI closes a $58 million Series A funding round led by Evok Innovations, with participation from Park West Asset Management, Export Development Canada, and BDC Capital. The round funds further development of Phoenix and the Carbon AI system, and expands the team significantly.

Sanctuary AI publicly reveals Phoenix, naming the robot and its Carbon AI brain. The company positions Phoenix as a general-purpose humanoid built specifically for the Carbon system, rather than a hardware-first design with AI added later.

Suzanne Gildert, Geordie Rose, and Olivia Norton co-found Sanctuary AI in Vancouver, British Columbia. Gildert and Rose previously worked together at D-Wave Systems. The founding thesis: the key challenge in robotics is general intelligence, not hardware, and a large action model analogous to a language model is the path to solving it.

The team builds early robot prototypes and develops the foundational architecture for Carbon. These early systems are used internally to test the teleoperation-to-autonomy pipeline. No public demos during this period.