Company
We build factory brains.
Rise is a Mila spinout building vision-powered intelligence for construction manufacturers. We started with one question: what if your operation could tell you everything it knows?
Our Mission
Every operation tells a story. Rise gives you the vision to read it.
Canada needs to build. Eighteen million new homes, $26 billion in government commitments, and construction productivity flat for thirty years. The factories building this country — millwork shops, precast plants, modular housing lines — are running hard. But they're running blind.
Enterprise MES platforms weren't built for the 50-person cabinet shop or the precast yard running three shifts. Those systems cost six figures, take months to deploy, and ask your workers to stop and type. Most shops that bought one found their people won't use it.
Rise is the alternative. Vision-powered intelligence that reads your operation in the background — nothing to fill out, nothing to scan, nothing changes on the floor. Enterprise intelligence that makes sense for a 20-person shop — or a 200-person plant.
Why Rise
MES failed your factory. We're the alternative.
Traditional MES platforms were built for 1995 enterprises and sold to 2026 SMBs. Six-figure deployments, months of consultants, and a team that won't use it. Rise is built for the way your floor actually runs.
Traditional MES
SAP, Plex, Epicor, Aptean…
- Deployment time
- ✕ 6–18 months. PMs, consultants, change orders.
- What you change
- ✕ Workflows, naming, every PO, every report.
- Data input
- ✕ Operators key it in. Or a barcode scanner. Late, partial, wrong.
- Who uses it
- ✕ A trained MES admin. Maybe two.
- First-year cost
- ✕ $180k–$600k+ once licensing, integration, training.
- What you learn
- ✕ What you told the system. Reports of what you logged.
Rise Factory Brain
Built for SMB construction & manufacturing
- Deployment time
- ✓ 2 weeks. Cameras up, dashboard live, team trained.
- What you change
- ✓ Nothing. We adapt to your floor, not the other way.
- Data input
- ✓ Cameras + sensors capture it as it happens. No clipboards.
- Who uses it
- ✓ Everyone. Floor leads see their own KPIs in 30 seconds.
- First-year cost
- ✓ Subscription. Pilot pays back inside one quarter.
- What you learn
- ✓ What's actually happening. Including what nobody knew to log.
MES asks your factory to become like a software company.
Rise meets your factory where it is.
Our Origin
Born at Mila. Built for the people who run operations.
Rise is a spinout of Mila — Quebec's AI Institute and one of the world's leading academic research labs in machine learning. Our core technology in scene understanding, robot planning, and computer vision was developed through peer-reviewed research published at top venues like ICRA 2026.
But research papers don't run factories. We took cutting-edge work in robotic perception, diffusion policies for control, and LLM-based planning — and turned it into software that plant managers can use on day one. The science is world-class. The deployment is practical.
Team
The people behind the factory brain.
Craig Buntin
CEO & Co-Founder
Former venture builder with deep experience in early-stage tech and industrial automation. Leads Rise's strategy, investor relations, and customer development.
LinkedIn →Liam Paull
Founder & Chief Science Officer
Roboticist and professor at Mila. Former MIT CSAIL researcher and lead of Toyota's autonomous vehicles program. Directs Rise's research agenda across perception, planning, and multi-robot orchestration.
LinkedIn →Charlie Gauthier
Founding Scientist
Robotics researcher at Mila. Working on scene understanding and cross-embodiment control and planning. Builds the brain behind the Factory Brain.
Ian Arthur
Head of Product & Customer Success
Systems thinker and platform builder. Leads Rise's product development, customer relationships, and operational infrastructure.
LinkedIn →Peter Mate
Head of Sales & Business Development
Leads Rise's sales pipeline, outreach, and market development across construction and manufacturing verticals.
Headquarters
Montreal, QC
150 rue Graveline, Saint-Laurent, QC H4T 1R7
Inside Mila — Quebec's AI Institute
Want to work with us?
We're building something new. If that sounds interesting, let's talk.