Vention Opens a Physical AI Lab Where the Factory Is the Dataset
Vention opened a Physical AI lab in Montreal today. The work is robot arms on production lines, not humanoids. The company says the point is to take manipulation research and run it against the reliability, cost, and mess of a real factory.
Dr. Jimmy Li, Vention’s director of Physical AI and a McGill robotics researcher, runs it. Dr. Joelle Pineau, Cohere’s chief AI officer, joins as external technical advisor. The lab is eight people now, with more than 16 roles posted in control, simulation, and Physical AI.
What they will train on
Vention’s PR puts the footprint at 90 of the Fortune 500, more than 28,000 machines, and a community of more than 6,000 factories. Physical AI is the fastest-growing segment, with related revenue up 400% over the past year. BetaKit, citing CEO Etienne Lacroix, says the lab holds 16 of about 120 R&D staff and that the company raised a $110 million Series D in January.
The research list is industrial and unglamorous: data collection, motion planning, classical vision, vision foundation models, learning from demonstration, reinforcement learning. Target work is unstructured manipulation in industrial goods, electronics, and automotive, including a large unnamed automotive OEM on final-assembly tasks.
The lab already shipped GRIIP, launched in February 2026: scene digitalization, object segmentation, pose estimation, grasp selection, collision-free motion planning, mixing NVIDIA foundation models with Vention’s own. A public GRIIP SDK is promised so plant engineers can fork the pipeline.
“The real opportunity is making these capabilities reliable, economical, and deployable across thousands of factories,” Lacroix said in the release.
“Our clients aren’t waiting for a finished product to test; they’re in the room while we build it,” Li said.
The Robot Report’s write-up of the same announcement shows the cells: arms in cages, bins, teach pendants. No humanoid in the shot, and Lacroix has said in prior Robot Report coverage that Vention is staying on arms and AMRs.
A Human’s Take
A lab whose training set is live plants is the right argument. Four hundred percent revenue growth is a company number, not a grasp-success number. I will care when GRIIP’s SDK ships and someone outside Vention posts a cycle time on that unnamed auto line.