Montreal-based industrial automation company Vention is expanding its artificial intelligence team with the opening of a new Physical AI Lab focused on bringing advanced robotics into real-world manufacturing environments.
The lab currently employs eight people, with more than 16 additional positions available across robotics control, simulation and Physical AI research.
Led by Director of Physical AI Dr. Jimmy Li, the lab combines expertise in robotics control, motion planning, computer vision, foundation models, learning from demonstration and reinforcement learning.
Dr. Joelle Pineau, Chief AI Officer at Cohere and a prominent figure in Canada’s artificial intelligence community, has joined the initiative as an external technical advisor. Pineau will help guide decisions around model architecture, research priorities and connections with the wider AI ecosystem.
Unlike research environments focused primarily on laboratory demonstrations, Vention’s team will test its technology against the reliability, cost and variability requirements of working production lines.
The company’s technology has been deployed through more than 28,000 machines across over 6,000 factories, including operations belonging to 90 Fortune 500 companies. That footprint gives researchers access to manufacturing data, production challenges and direct feedback from industrial customers.
Physical AI has become Vention’s fastest-growing business segment, with related revenue increasing 400 per cent over the past year.
One of the lab’s projects is GRIIP, a modular Physical AI pipeline that helps robots identify objects, select how to grasp them and plan collision-free movements. Vention launched GRIIP in February and plans to release a public software development kit that engineering teams can use to adapt the system.
The company is also working with industrial and electronics manufacturers, including a major automotive producer, on complex robotic tasks in final assembly.
For Montreal’s technology workforce, the lab’s expansion creates specialized opportunities at the intersection of AI, robotics and advanced manufacturing—and further strengthens the city’s position as a centre for applied artificial intelligence.