A Quebecer who worked at McKinsey after studying at Harvard has just received $20 million ($15 million) from the FTQ solidarity fund to break into the $180 billion domestic industrial automation market to invade abroad. Foreigner with his company Vention, learned The newspaper.
“I wanted to come back to Quebec because I had a deep connection to the company,” Étienne Lacroix, CEO of Vention, whose revenue is about $70 million, told the Journal.
“During my five and a half years at McKinsey, I completed several projects to help local companies. With all of our flagships making headlines, McKinsey was often not far behind,” says the École de Technologie Supérieure (ÉTS) graduate.
While our SMEs urgently need to automate, as Prime Minister François Legault recalled when announcing the launch of Northvolt, Vention wants to help them take action thanks to its sophisticated platform aimed at simplifying the robotization process.
Choose Quebec
3D design, code-free programming, logistics… Étienne Lacroix claims to have developed cutting-edge tools to robotize factories three times faster and at 40% lower cost.
Étienne Lacroix wanted to return to Quebec to help our companies transition to automation. Photo Francis Halin
For example, it can teach robots to sand wooden floors, weld tiny parts, or even pack boxes of different dimensions.
Once developed in the cloud, the software can send the robot to the factory so workers can manipulate it precisely.
“After Harvard, you can go anywhere you want. We had offers from Apple, BlackBerry, Sony, Samsung and all the consulting firms, so it was a conscious decision to come back here to contribute to the Quebec economy,” says Étienne Lacroix.
“During my time at Harvard, I published some excellent articles about Quebec. We can see the somewhat autonomous fiber there,” he jokes.
Northvolt robots
Google, Amazon, Facebook, IBM, BRP… already rely on Vention, based in Quebec, which employs around a hundred engineers in its research center.
“Northvolt engineers [en Suède] Visit our platform to design robotic cells, test cells and devices,” explains Lacroix, who learned a lot about the technical aspect of his job during his time at General Electric (GE).
According to him, the arrival of Northvolt will certainly support and create real champions in the ecosystem and top companies will emerge.
Vention also wants to support the smallest family businesses, such as machine shops, which often have the greatest difficulty in the world automating themselves with a robot.
“The emergency is not necessarily as well understood here as in other regions,” analyzes the man, whose customers include Fortune 500 manufacturers.
Quebec money
Its investors include Vention Fidelity, another McKinsey alum, Toronto-based Emily Walsh, and Quebecer Jean-François Marcoux, co-founder of White Star Capital.
It is also thanks to the investment of the Fonds de solidarité FTQ in White Star Capital that Étienne Lacroix established connections with the workers’ fund.
“There are a lot of great things we can do here with a partner that is already established in manufacturing, like the FTQ Solidarity Fund,” believes the boss of Vention.
“We have had a free adventure center here since the beginning of the year. We allow factory workers to test the robots. This is the social aspect of our business model,” the man concludes before returning to his robots.
In short, vision
- Founded: 2016
- Co-founders: Étienne Lacroix and Max Windisch
- 302 employees (including 269 in Montreal)
- 4000 customers
- Equipment designed and deployed: 15,000
Shareholders
- First (not a majority): Bain Capital Venture (Boston, United States)
- Second: The Lacroix Family Trust (Montreal, Quebec)
- Third: White Star Capital (London, England)
(Source: Vention and Quebec Enterprise Registrar)