Platform helps businesses create custom machines
Designing and building a custom industrial machine used to require months of work by people with specialized engineering skills and software, said Etienne Lacroix, the founder and CEO of Montreal-based Vention. Now, he says, his company can help people do it in as little as three days.
Lacroix describes Vention as a “digital manufacturing platform” — customers can design custom machines in 3D on its website and, when they’re finished, it sells them the parts to build the machine.
On Tuesday, the company announced it has raised $17 million in venture capital.
“With Vention, you work with modular parts; it’s really like Lego, so we have 500 Lego parts, whether they’re structural parts, motion parts or control parts,” Lacroix said.
All of those parts have been designed by Vention, Lacroix said.
And just like with Legos, Lacroix said, there’s a wide variety of machines that can be built.
“We’ve worked with an effects studio in Ottawa that made a machine to throw glass in the air, you know when a stuntman goes through a window and there’s a nice glass effect, we’ve done a machine for that. We’ve done machines for electric cars, to help with the quality inspection. We’ve done a lot of machines for robots, we’ve done stuff for aerospace,” he said.
Among the companies that have bought machines from Vention are Bombardier, Apple and Tesla.
“Back in the day, only engineers were able to do machine design because it’s so complex, you need to integrate components coming from motor manufacturers, sensor manufacturers, tooling manufacturers, and unless you know all of those fields of engineering, it’s super complex to just integrate all that into a coherent machine,” Lacroix said.
Lacroix said he wants maintenance managers, operation managers and other industrial professionals who haven’t had access to engineering tools to be able to design machines.
“Those guys are design savvy because they’ve operated those machines, they’ve repaired those machines, you give them the tool, they can do beautiful things,” Lacroix said.
Unlike traditional engineering design tools, users don’t pay for the software, only the machines they buy.
“There’s nothing to install, if you can run Facebook, you can run Vention and in that cloud environment, you design in 3D and it’s very, very easy because the software understands how all those ‘Lego’ parts can connect to one another,” Lacroix said.
Lacroix said he doesn’t believe any other company is doing what Vention does.
“There’s a few companies that do modular hardware, there’s no company that does hardware and software integration. The Vention workflow is very unique, you go design online,” he said, “you see costs in real-time, you can order for the next day. This is a three-day workflow, nobody else does that.”
Vention, which was founded in the summer of 2016, has grown to a staff of 40 people, up from nine a year ago. Lacroix said he expects it to add another 20 to 30 people by the end of the year.
The investment round, led by Boston-based Bain Capital, will allow the company to increase its distribution capacity — it’s already started to build a new warehouse — and to add new features to its software as well as develop new modules, particularly modules related to moving and controlling robots.
Also participating in the investment were Montreal-based firms White Star Capital and Real Ventures, as well as San Francisco-based Bolt.