About | Vention

Photo of Etienne Lacroix and Max Windisch, co-founders of Vention

From LEGO to automating the world’s largest factories

We grew up surrounded by LEGO. Beyond the bricks were budding engineers dismantling VCRs, building life-size airplanes, and designing suspension bikes from the ground up. We eventually turned our childhood hobbies into lifelong careers and experienced firsthand the first generation of CAD software, from I-DEAS and Mechanical Desktop, to Catia and Pro-Engineer.

Today the process to design, simulate, procure, and commission industrial equipment is complex and slow. It’s targeted towards a small group of experts and it limits widespread adoption.

We envision a world where the process to build industrial equipment is as straightforward, and enjoyable, as building with LEGO. A world where you imagine your machine in the morning and build it in the afternoon. We are pioneering an industry where agility, speed and simplicity meet industrial automation. Our mission is to make machine design accessible to everyone by re-engineering the process of designing, simulating, procuring and commissioning industrial equipment.

This is Vention.

Our Principles

We build long-term relationships

We understand that our client relationships will last beyond the life of their Vention equipment. From working with our clients to design the right-size solution to providing support during commissioning and when the equipment is in operation, we don't manage client relationships by looking at the fine print. Instead, we do what's right even when it's tough on us. You chose to work with us based on trust, and we continuously invest in our relationship to make you proud of that decision.

We thrive on client feedback

As a high-growth start-up seeking to democratize industrial automation, we have thousands of software, hardware, go-to-market channels and user experiences to re-invent. We will not get every product right the first time, so we promote humility as a company value. This makes us good listeners and open to client feedback. No matter the source, every piece of client feedback is shared across our organization and acted on by the right team.

We make industry-grade products simple

Vention helps some of the largest manufacturers develop and run reliable production systems. This takes industrial-grade hardware that is designed to last. But this should not be done at the expense of a simple and intuitive user experiences. From developing one of the simplest cloud-CAD there is, to creating plug & play industrial automation components, to enabling users to check out with their credit card for next day delivery, we believe consumer-grade simplicity will lead to a truly democratized industry.