Vention has officially opened a dedicated Physical AI and industrial robotics laboratory in Montreal, reinforcing Canada's position in advanced manufacturing automation. Led by Dr. Jimmy Li and advised by Dr. Joelle Pineau of Cohere, the lab will focus on robotic manipulation for complex and unstructured production tasks. The initiative builds on Vention's global manufacturing footprint and its fastest-growing business segment, which recorded a 400 percent increase in related revenue over the past year.
Canada's Leading Physical AI Lab for Manufacturing
Vention says the new lab is the largest of its kind in Canada and gives researchers access to real production environments across more than 4,000 factories worldwide, including 90 of the Fortune 500. The agenda spans industrial data collection, robotics control, motion planning, classical computer vision, vision foundation models, learning from demonstration, and reinforcement learning. Its mandate is scalable deployment, validating new capabilities against the reliability, cost, and variability requirements of real production lines.
From AI Research to Industrial Deployment
Dr. Jimmy Li brings more than a decade of peer-reviewed research from McGill University, with expertise in computer vision, robot perception, autonomous systems, and AI-powered robotic manipulation. Over the past two years he has led Vention's Physical AI strategy and technical collaboration with NVIDIA. The lab currently has eight team members and is expanding to include more than 16 positions across robotics control, simulation, and Physical AI research.
A key innovation to emerge from the lab is GRIIP, a modular Physical AI pipeline launched in February 2026 that covers scene digitalization, object segmentation, pose estimation, grasp selection, and collision-free motion planning. It leverages foundation models from technology leaders such as NVIDIA as well as Vention's proprietary models. The company will release a public GRIIP Software Development Kit to enable engineering teams to extend the pipeline for their own needs.
Vention is also collaborating with global industrial and electronics manufacturers, including a large automotive original equipment manufacturer, on high-complexity and unstructured robotic tasks in final assembly. These projects are intended to test research results against live production problems rather than isolated laboratory demonstrations. Client feedback from those deployments feeds directly back into model development and benchmarks.
Bringing World-Class AI Expertise to Industrial Robotics
Dr. Joelle Pineau, Chief AI Officer at Cohere, joins the lab as External Technical Advisor and will contribute to model architecture decisions, research prioritization, and connections into the broader AI community. Her involvement is expected to strengthen the lab's work at the intersection of foundation models, robotics, and industrial automation. The advisory role is part-time and complements Dr. Li's leadership of the Montreal team.
CEO Etienne Lacroix said the lab works on missions that are roughly 12 months out, while most of Vention's research and development organization remains focused on the next quarter or release. He believes Physical AI will fundamentally expand what manufacturers can automate, but the real challenge is making these capabilities reliable, economical, and deployable across thousands of factories. Canada's AI ecosystem, combined with Vention's robotics expertise and full-stack automation platform, provides the foundation to close that gap.
Strategic Ambition in a Growing Market
The move comes as Physical AI emerges as a critical area of industrial automation, with the global manufacturing automation market estimated at 130 billion dollars. Lacroix expects that value could expand by up to a factor of ten once Physical AI matures, and he frames the lab as a way to avoid missing a major technology shift. He cited BlackBerry and Kodak as examples of companies that failed to respond to such transitions.
By pairing fundamental research with a large installed base, Vention is positioning its Montreal laboratory as a bridge between cutting-edge AI and practical manufacturing deployment. The lab's focus on data, model development, and real-world validation could accelerate the adoption of Physical AI in complex production environments. As the program expands, Vention aims to ensure Canadian robotics expertise remains central to the next wave of industrial automation.