Vention Makes Major Announcements at Automate 2026
July 16, 2026
By Krystie Johnston
Vention is a Montreal-based startup company founded by the vision of unifying hardware and software to democratize automation. Early on in his career, CEO and founder Etienne Lacroix saw the disconnect between machines and their programs and set out to remedy it with a new approach to automation. Since 2016, he and his team have grown the company and fortified their vision with five pillars of automation and an ecosystem of strategic partnerships. At Automate 2026, they made several announcements that reinforce their foundation and steady themselves for future growth.
Vention’s platform extends to FANUC’s industrial robot portfolio
First, they announced an expanded collaboration with FANUC, one of their long-time partners, to extend the Vention platform to industrial robots. This announcement is significant because it simplifies industrial robot deployments through AI-powered programming, digital twin technologies, and modular automation. It means that Vention’s platform, proven for cobots, has been extended to industrial robots, making automation more accessible to enterprise customers, helping them meet the demands of a resurgence in manufacturing across North America and beyond.
“We used to be very cobot-focused at Vention. I think we are within the top three providers of cobots in North America. But now, as we are dealing with more clients that want high throughput and high reliability, we need to provide them with industrial robots as well. And we decided to do that with our long-term partner, FANUC,” Lacroix says.
With this announcement, he is excited to share that FANUC’s industrial robot portfolio, like the M-20iD, the LR Mate 200iD, and the M-710iD are fully integrated in Vention’s stack using the exact same technology and control layers they have previously been used for cobots.
Now manufacturers and enterprise customers can use Vention’s unified platform to design, program, simulate, deploy, and operate industrial robotic applications from a single digital environment. “What this means is, now when you deploy one of the industrial FANUC robots through the Vention platform, you get all the benefits of Vention,” Lacroix explains. “It means that those robots are now connected to remote support. It means instant code updates. It means full analytics. Think of it as a Ring camera but applied to an industrial product.”
Vention and Teradyne Robotics partner on digital world
Second, they announced a strategic collaboration with Teradyne Robotics that will accelerate the design and deployment of robot cells by leveraging Vention’s digital twin technology, now optimized for the Universal Robots (UR) platform. This announcement is significant because it streamlines the transition from initial concept to production-ready automation for UR deployments. It means that Vention’s modular platform, MachineBuilder, will simplify the creation of custom robotic work cells, accelerating the path to deployment through digital-first design and simulation.
Lacroix says he is excited about this announcement because it is geared towards serving more manufacturers and enterprise clients at scale.
“We are happy to offer our design and digital twin platform to Teradyne Robotics – for all their application engineers, solution architects, and sellers – to leverage Vention to create solutions for their own clients. Those solutions encompass Universal Robots’ products within the Vention backbone and can be combined to create solutions that can be showcased to clients in minutes and delivered as fast as next day if need be.”
Vention opens software stack to everyone
If you attended the Automate 2026 show and stopped by Vention’s booth, you may have noticed their Software Station, an activation where Lacroix and his team let visitors “play” with their software. Lacroix says they did not put a big microphone on it, but it gave coders and programmers an idea of where they are going. “It was our software stack, and there was a station where you could play with the design software, the programming and simulation software, the deployment software, and all the analytics,” he says. “We had a little demo about what can be done through agentic AI on the programming side.”
What’s next
If you did not get a chance to attend Automate 2026, you can still catch up with Vention at IMTS 2026. Lacroix says they are saving more for that show, but what he can share now is that Vention is going to keep working to solve the real problem of automation, not more autonomy or better automation. Removing the amount of integration that is needed. “You have to be vertically integrated in robotics if you really want to solve the integration problem. So that is what we have been doing for multiple years. But building those platforms is complex. They are, I would say, lifetime endeavours to build that type of automation platform.”
FANUC LR Mate Industrial robot uses Vention’s platform to play Jenga at Automate 2026.
Vention celebrates 10 years this year, and they have a lot to be proud of. Lacroix says they are in approximately 4,000 factories today, they have about 28,000 pieces of equipment in the field, and there is more of Vention blue across the show floors every year. “I think we have achieved a lot. But there is more ahead of us than behind. The ambition we have is pretty substantial. We want to build the next industrial giant, but digital end-to-end, fully integrated, so there is no integration left,” he says. “We know that the value we provide clients is desirable. That it solves a real problem. And I think that gives us the right to dream much, much bigger.”
More Information
Interested in learning more? Visit Vention today
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