As a child, Etienne Lacroix was obsessed with Legos.
He has told Chief Executive magazine that it was early training in creative problem-solving, and in how to build big things from small, standard parts. It is hard to read the story of Vention without thinking of that box of bricks.
What nearly no one outside his circle knew was that he held the idea for two years while still at McKinsey.
Lacroix became a mechanical engineer, and he spent his first decade in the trade. At GE Lighting he worked on LED product development, including the company's first LED effort for commercial agriculture. Then came a Harvard MBA in 2012 and a job at McKinsey, advising manufacturers on operations and product development. He saw plenty of factories and plenty of delay. Getting a custom machine built could take months.
In 2014 he had the idea that would not leave him. Web technology, he reasoned, could let an engineer design a machine in the cloud, order the standard parts and receive them the next day, ready to assemble. It was Lego for factories.
But he did not jump. What nearly no one outside his circle knew was that he held the idea for two years while still at McKinsey. In 2016 he left, and with Max Windisch he founded Vention in Montreal. A beta of the 3D design tool MachineBuilder followed in 2017, backed by about US$3.5m from White Star Capital, Bolt and Real Ventures.
The company soon moved beyond parts. It launched the MachineMotion controller in 2018 and the code-free MachineLogic software in 2019, so that a factory worker could program a machine without writing code. Bain Capital Ventures led a Series A, and Georgian and Fidelity led a US$95m Series C in 2022, just as headlines were calling the market rapidly cooling.
In January 2026, Vention raised a US$110m Series D, with Nvidia's venture arm taking part. The company says it has deployed more than 28,000 machines at over 4,000 factories, and total funding is above US$260m.
Lacroix's own account of the hard years is short. Asked about failure, he tells leaders to learn from it, and we do not invent more. What the record does show is the patience of a man who waited two years for the right moment. A founder who carries an idea long enough, while learning how the customer actually works, often builds a sturdier company than one who leaves first and asks questions later.