Allen Pan

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   Industrial Next unveils AI robot stations it says retool in minutes, partners with BMW

   At the Startup Battlefield stage at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026, San Francisco startup Industrial Next presented self-contained robotic stations powered by proprietary foundation models that connect vision, task context and motion — which the company says lets a production line be retooled in minutes rather than weeks without traditional programming. The company announced it is partnering with BMW Group Technology Office to evaluate its AI-powered dexterous manipulation for manufacturing. Industrial Next says some of its workstations are already used to build a popular smartphone, handling tasks such as threading a delicate flex cable and snapping a tiny connector cap into place, and that a "film peeling" station strips protective film off camera modules and buttons at or above human speed with 100% accuracy even when moved to an unseen phone model and line. Founders Lukas Pankau and Allen Pan, both former Tesla employees, said the robots are taught through simulation and demonstration in a high-fidelity virtual environment rather than hard-coded scripts.

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