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38 BCBusiness ApRIL 2018 lIfE SToRY: Sanctuary AI was spun off from robot developer Kindred Systems Inc.'s artificial general intel- ligence division in January. "The day-to- day goals for me are aligned with our previous work," Olivia Norton observes. "We continue to tackle the same hard problem, with a mandate to create synthetic humans that are indistinguish- able from us." Norton was born and raised in Calgary, where her mother worked in geoscience and her father was an architect. She received a BSc in computer engineering with a specializa- tion in biomedical engineering from the University of Calgary in 2011. Norton then stayed in her hometown to work for Quorum Business Solutions Inc., which creates software for the energy industry, until moving to Vancouver in 2014 to attend UBC. While she was completing a master of engineering in electrical and computer engineering, she was hired by Kindred, where she led the develop- ment of an AI system that can enable machines from full-sized humanoid robots to kitten-sized quadrupeds to learn complex tasks. THE boTToM lINE: Kindred, which will maintain a minority owner- ship in Sanctuary, raised more than US$44 million in venture capital from investors including Data Collective, Eclipse Ventures LLC, First Round Capital, google Ventures and Tencent holdings Ltd. –F.S. o L I v I A n o R t o n Co-founder and chief technology officer sanctuary ai age: 29 thirty unDer thirty