Phoenix

Where Tesla and Figure are racing toward factory-floor manufacturing scale, Sanctuary AI has taken a different bet: lean heavily on teleoperation to collect training data and develop what it calls a cognitive architecture for general-purpose work.

Sanctuary has raised roughly $59 million in known funding — modest next to the biggest US and Chinese players — and its long-term competitiveness likely depends on that data-and-software approach paying off before manufacturing-led rivals scale past it.