Vention is building MachineMotion controllers into a factory automation control layer

Vention raised $110 million USD on January 28, 2026, equivalent to $150 million CAD in the company release, with Investissement Quebec, Desjardins Capital, Fidelity Investments Canada ULC, and NVentures participating. The financing followed a $95 million Series C in 2022 and supports Vention's effort to make factory automation easier to design, control, deploy, and maintain.

Vention was co-founded in Montreal in 2016 by Etienne Lacroix and Max Windisch. Lacroix developed industrial technologies at GE and supported manufacturers at McKinsey, while Windisch worked across industrial automation, Softimage-Microsoft, Kaydara-Autodesk, PI-EMC, and GE. The company's platform combines MachineBuilder for machine design with MachineMotion for execution and control.

MachineMotion AI is the controller layer in this story. Launched in 2025, the compact automation controller is powered by NVIDIA Jetson and connects robots, motors, conveyors, sensors, and safety devices from one unit. It supports up to 30 daisy-chained high-performance step-servo drives with integrated motors over EtherCAT, and connectivity through Ethernet, Wi-Fi, cellular IoT, and 5G.

The controller supports UR, FANUC, and ABB robots alongside conveyors, actuators, and safety devices. Vention lists plug-and-play safety with physical and software reset functions, while MachineLogic gives teams Python and code-free programming paths. Over-the-air updates can move through cellular, Wi-Fi, or 5G, making the controller part of Vention's broader software-defined factory thesis.

The competitive field includes traditional PLC and motion-control suppliers, Siemens, Rockwell, Beckhoff, Omron, robot OEM controllers, integrators building custom panels, and modular automation platforms such as MachineMetrics-adjacent factory software stacks. Vention's distinction is a unified design-to-control platform for smaller manufacturers and machine builders that want robot cells without a long custom integration project.

Public material does not show controller install time by customer, robot-cell uptime, failed deployment rate, service-response time, field maintenance cost, pricing by controller, or commercial renewal metrics. MachineMotion sits below Vention's later GRIIP and Interpack coverage: it is the control layer underneath the robot cell. If Vention can turn controllers, design software, and remote updates into a repeatable deployment path, it becomes an operating system for modular factory automation rather than a catalog of machine parts.

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