Vention, a 3D industrial design platform, is transitioning to open-beta today.

Since launching the closed-portion of their beta program in February, Vention has onboarded several hundred users from 200+ US and Canadian clients in the aerospace, automobile, industrial and research industries and has delivered 4x more industrial equipment than initially planned.

Founded in 2016 by a group of former mechanical and software engineers from McKinsey & Co, GE, Microsoft, and Pivotal, the platform scales-up the LEGO concept to the industrial level, with 3D design software and artificial intelligence (AI) support. The company raised a pre-seed round backed by Bolt and Real Ventures, two technology funds based out of Toronto and Boston, and a handful of prominent angel investors in the CAD and robotic communities.

“The initial vision was realizing that there’s all this new technology available to us, and that we could completely change the way people have been designing machines for the last 20 years. All by integrating or breaking down the frontier between the software world and the hardware world,” founder and CEO Etienne Lacroix previously told MTLinTECH.

The transition to open beta will help grow Vention’s hardware library to support a wider range of applications, notably in the field of motion and controls with the introduction of Vention Machine MotionTM. In addition, a list of 50+ client-requested features will be implement to Vention’s browser-based 3D Machine BuilderTM over the coming months.

Exciting milestone as we move to OpenBeta, giving free access to our 3D MachineBuilder @ https://t.co/n3XGPhyeTS #MachineDesign #Engineering pic.twitter.com/XJ7stQAfd6

— Vention.io (@Vention_io) June 6, 2017

“The closed-portion of our beta program has been a great success. We have supported hundreds of clients that are seeking an easier and faster ways to design, order and assemble industrial equipment. Those close client relationships led to 150+ new software features and hardware components added to the platform over the last 3 months. Our team is now ready for open-beta with a platform suitable for experts and emerging designers in an array of industries” said Lacroix.

Vention.io is a graduate of the Creative Destruction Lab, which recently announced a forthcoming branch based at HEC in Montreal, and won second place at the Harvard New Venture Competition. The first full release of Vention.io is scheduled for later this year.

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