The CEO of Canvas GFX wants the person holding the wrench to have the same quality of information as the engineer who designed the part.
CEO, Canvas GFX (Canvas Envision) - Boston
Manufacturing modernized its products and its processes. The people on the floor were handed a printed checklist. Garth Coleman built a company to fix that.
Garth Coleman runs Canvas GFX, a Boston software company known publicly as Canvas Envision. Its work is narrow and specific: take the dense engineering data that lives inside CAD and PLM systems and turn it into interactive, 3D visual instructions that a technician on a factory floor can actually follow. Not a static PDF. Not a stapled packet of screenshots. A living document a person can rotate, zoom, and step through at the exact moment they need it.
Coleman took the top job at Canvas after a long run in enterprise software, and he talks about the company less as a product and more as a correction. For two decades, he argues, the industry poured money into connecting machines and systems while the way knowledge reaches the workforce barely moved. "The way knowledge reaches the people doing the work hasn't fundamentally changed in twenty years," he has said. Closing that gap is the whole point of the business, and the whole point of how he now spends his days.
The company is small - roughly 28 people - and backed by a $9 million Series A, part of about $15.6 million raised to date. That scale is deliberate to the story he tells. He left a global corporation with tens of thousands of employees to chase a problem that the giants had left sitting in plain sight.
Coleman frames modern manufacturing as three pillars: product, process, and people. The first two got their digital revolution. Design moved into sophisticated 3D systems; production filled up with sensors, dashboards, and automation. "The people pillar has not kept pace," he says. "The way most manufacturers transfer engineering knowledge into guidance for the workforce has not fundamentally changed."
He breaks the problem into two halves. "The first mile is capturing knowledge from engineers and experienced workers and turning it into structured, reusable instructions," he explains. "The last mile is delivering that knowledge to technicians and operators at the moment they need it." Most companies, in his telling, are excellent at the upstream engineering and weak at both the capture and the delivery.
The phrase he keeps returning to is "connected knowledge," and he is careful to separate it from the more fashionable "connected worker." The worker, he suggests, is not short on screens or notifications. What is missing is a system that captures institutional expertise, structures it into clear visual guidance, and pushes it to the right hands at the right second - then listens for feedback so the whole organization gets a little smarter each time.
On artificial intelligence, he is enthusiastic but pointed. "AI is now redefining how knowledge is created, structured, and delivered," he says, while insisting on a practical question that a lot of hype skips: where does AI actually help the person holding the wrench, and where does it not? That distinction, more than any single feature, is the spine of how he talks about the product.
Coleman laid out his view of the modern factory floor on the Top Entrepreneurs Podcast, in a conversation titled "How This Expert is Rethinking the Factory Floor in the Age of AI."
Listen to the episodeColeman is a mechanical engineer who started his working life in quality assurance on a power-systems line - close enough to the floor to remember what it feels like to need an answer and not have one.
Bachelor of Engineering & Society, mechanical engineering. The technical foundation under everything that followed.
MBA, summa cum laude, with a focus on entrepreneurship - the business half of an engineer's mind.
A black belt in Kuk Sool Won who plays guitar, skis, and scuba dives. Discipline and craft, on and off the floor.
There is a small story Coleman tells that explains a lot about him. After moving from the Toronto area to Boston, he slowly picked up the local way of speaking without ever noticing it happen. The realization came during a phone call with his mother, when her familiar accent suddenly sounded foreign to his own ears. He had changed and had not felt it.
He treats that moment as more than a curiosity. It hardened a belief that runs through his career: how a message lands matters as much as the message itself. It is the same instinct behind his most quoted line, and behind a company built on the idea that the right information, delivered the wrong way, may as well not exist.
Coleman wants to lead a movement toward connected knowledge in manufacturing - every frontline worker with clear, visual, interactive guidance at the moment they need it, and feedback flowing back so the whole organization gets smarter over time. Small company, unglamorous problem, and by his own framing, one of the last big gaps in the digital factory.