On January 27, 2026, Vention out of Montreal just raised a $110M USD Series D, or $150M CAD, and it reads less like a funding round and more like a factory floor power-up. Investissement Québec led it with $55M USD, the biggest venture check it has written, with NVentures joining as a new name on the cap table, plus new money from Desjardins Capital and returning participation from Fidelity Investments Canada ULC. When a government-backed investor and NVIDIA’s venture arm both show up, it is not charity and it is not a hobby. It is a signal.
Vention was founded in 2016 by Etienne Lacroix and Max Windisch, and the origin story is the kind engineers respect and CFOs fear: take industrial automation, strip out the mystery tax, and sell speed. Etienne Lacroix brought the GE product scars and McKinsey pattern recognition, plus an MBA from Harvard Business School and a mechanical engineering degree from École de Technologie Supérieure. Max Windisch brought the deep technical mileage from Microsoft, EMC, Softimage-Microsoft, Kaydara-Autodesk, and GE, then aimed it at one blunt question: why does automation still move like paperwork.
The numbers say the answer landed. Vention says it serves 4,000+ manufacturing facilities across 30+ countries, with 25,000+ machines deployed. By the end of 2025, it cleared a $100M CAD annual run rate, roughly $75M to $80M USD, and did it with what might be the most impolite flex in modern go-to-market: 100% inbound, grassroots-driven revenue. Now about 40% of revenue comes from companies doing over $1B in annual revenue, the kind that do not buy tools, they buy standards. North America is 70% of the base, Europe is 20%, Canada is 10%, with Berlin as the European HQ and Boston in the mix for proximity to the buyers who live on spreadsheets and downtime reports.
The product story is full stack, but not in the “everything and nothing” way. MachineBuilder is the browser-based design layer, backed by a library of 3,000+ pre-engineered components. MachineLogic pushes code-free programming with Python compatibility and digital twin simulation. MachineAnalytics monitors fleets. MachineMotion AI is the edge controller built on NVIDIA Jetson, built to run up to 30 daisy-chained motors and robots over EtherCAT, robot-agnostic across FANUC, Universal Robots, and ABB, with LTE connectivity tied to the Bell partnership, OTA updates, IP54 protection, and security claims aligned to ISO 27001 and NIST 800. Then comes the twist that makes the round make sense: Physical AI. GRIIP Physical AI and Rapid OperatorAI are Vention’s bet that perception and motion planning can stop being artisanal and start being repeatable, with “Zero-Shot Automation” as the punchline it wants the factory to feel, not just the pitch deck to recite.
Capital like this does not show up to admire what is already working. It shows up to turn “one plant” into “every plant.” Etienne Lacroix has been explicit that manufacturers are choosing Vention as a company-wide platform, and that is the real fight: standardization across continents, not one clever cell in one corner of one facility. With François Giguère driving technology execution as Chief Technology Officer since July 2023, and a roadmap already stacked with MachineMotion AI, the Rapid Series Cobot Palletizer, the 3M sanding collaboration, the Bell connectivity layer, and the Vention Developer Toolkit, the question is not whether automation is coming. The question is who gets to be the operating system when it arrives, and what gets left behind when the factory stops waiting for specialists and starts expecting speed. Where do you think the first real pushback shows up, engineering, procurement, or the integrators who built a business on “it takes months”?
