Products are being made differently and that’s why we’re backing Vention
When most people think of innovation, they think of businesses that have changed the way they consume a product or service (Amazon, Uber, etc…) or of the latest smartphone. But they rarely think of the innovation that needs to happen behind the scenes on the factory floor before it lands in the hands of the consumer.
Innovation has made us more efficient. It’s also made us more demanding. We want the best new thing, and we want it now! This is causing product life cycles to shorten which has put tremendous pressure on the way that products are conceived, developed, manufactured and delivered. The old way of manufacturing stuff can’t keep up.
We at White Star Capital see this is as a great opportunity. Whether you call it Industry 4.0 or Smart Factory, it means a new way of making things. We’ve been developing this thesis for a while now and it has various components. One that is often talked about is the Internet of Things: connecting manufacturing equipment to the internet and using its data to increase efficiency. It led to our investment in mnubo back in 2015. Another, is optimizing the supply chain, which led us to our recent investment in Vention.
The Original Equipment Manufacturer’s supply chain has not yet adapted to the shortened product life cycle. Today, OEMs source their custom equipment from suppliers with long lead-times caused by a uselessly complex and iterative design-quote-order process.
Vention is the first digital manufacturing platform dedicated to machine design. The company provides a fully integrated 3D MachineBuilder™ and modular component library that lets users design, order and assemble custom industrial equipment directly from a web browser in just a few days instead of months.
Essentially, Vention’s hardware is like “Industrial LEGO™”, and its 3D MarchineBuilder™ allows OEMs to design and receive the equipment they need to develop, manufacture and test their latest product much faster: dramatically lowering their time to market and making them more competitive.
You can say that Vention is bringing e-commerce to the industrial sector. This fits perfectly into one of our core areas of focus: Disruptive Commerce. It is also another great example of why White Star is bullish on investing in Canada.
We are very pleased to be partnering with Bolt and Real Ventures as well as Notable angel investors also include Jon Stevenson, CTO at Stratasys, Louis Tetu, CEO at Coveo and Rob Stevens, CRO at Tive.
Etienne Lacroix’s (CEO) experience as a mechanical engineer at GE and Max Windisch’s (CTO) experience in 3D at Microsoft Softimage and Autodesk were the perfect combination of co-founders to get Vention off the ground. They also have the drive to make their platform an industry standard. And we look forward to it.
