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.
If simulation-trained dexterous manipulation holds up across more production lines, it could cut the cost and time of factory automation; the performance figures so far are the company's own claims.
In most factories, automation is fixed: robots and machines are programmed for one specific task and product. Changing a line means reprogramming and physical retooling, or swapping out equipment, which can take weeks or months. San Francisco-based Industrial Next says it’s changing that.
The startup, which presented today on the Startup Battlefield stage at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026, builds AI-driven, self-contained robotic stations powered by proprietary foundation models that connect vision, task context, and motion. The company says this lets a production line be retooled in minutes rather than weeks without traditional programming. The goal is to let manufacturers automate complex and delicate tasks that traditionally require human labor.
The company announced onstage that it’s partnering with BMW Group Technology Office to evaluate Industrial Next’s AI-powered dexterous manipulation for manufacturing.
Industrial Next was founded in 2021 by Lukas Pankau and Allen Pan, both of whom previously worked at Tesla. Pankau served as a lead electrical architect at Tesla before moving on to Waymo. Pan led Tesla’s autonomous factory efforts and later became a chief architect at autonomous driving company Neolix.
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