Vention Launches Physical AI Lab in Montreal to Train Next-Generation Industrial Robot Models

Vention Inc. has opened its Physical AI Lab in Montreal, a facility focused on robotic manipulation for manufacturing environments.

The company stated that training physical AI models requires substantial industrial scale to generate high-quality dataset inputs.

"Any physical AI foundation model is data-hungry," Etienne Lacroix, founder and CEO of Vention, told The Robot Report. "We move several hundred robot cells a year, and they all collect high-quality industrial manipulation data. It was a massive asset that was not properly leveraged until now."

Vention's full-stack technology platform integrates hardware, software, and physical AI, enabling manufacturers to design, program, and deploy custom automation cells in days.

The Montreal company has deployed over 28,000 machines globally, serving a network of more than 6,000 factories, including 90 Fortune 500 manufacturers.

Vention reported that its physical AI-related revenue surged 400% over the past year, highlighting strong industrial demand for flexible automation.

"What makes this lab different is the loop we've built: academic research feeding directly into live production problems, and production feedback feeding back into the research," said Dr. Jimmy Li, director of physical AI at Vention.

Vention previously launched GRIIP (Generalized Robotic Industrial Intelligence Pipeline) in February 2026, combining foundation models from leaders like NVIDIA with proprietary software. The company plans to release an open-source GRIIP Software Development Kit (SDK).

Additionally, Vention appointed Dr. Joelle Pineau, Chief AI Officer at Cohere, as an external technical advisor for the new laboratory.