Industrial Next pitches AI robots that retool lines in minutes

San Francisco-based Industrial Next presented on the Startup Battlefield stage at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026, pitching a fix for one of manufacturing’s oldest bottlenecks: traditional robots are programmed for one specific task and product, so changing a line means reprogramming and physical retooling that can take weeks or months.

The company builds AI-driven, self-contained robotic stations powered by proprietary foundation models that connect vision, task context and motion. Industrial Next says the approach lets a production line be retooled in minutes rather than weeks, without traditional programming, and its stations can be reconfigured, combined and redeployed across product lines, with new tasks taught through simulation and demonstration rather than hard-coded scripts.

On stage, the company announced 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, who met at Tesla — Pankau as a lead electrical architect before moving to Waymo, Pan leading Tesla’s autonomous factory efforts before becoming a chief architect at autonomous-driving company Neolix. The founders say the idea grew out of watching advanced vehicle and self-driving work held back by decades-old factory equipment that left even skilled engineers stumped. Robotics also lacks the vast training datasets that internet-scale AI models have, Pankau said, so Industrial Next built a high-fidelity simulation engine to teach robots high-precision, high-dexterity tasks.

“We can make robots do all these cool things like dance around, because there’s data for that, but we can’t make them assemble high-precision things,” Pankau explained.

Pankau said some of the startup’s workstations are already used in making one of the world’s most popular smartphones, handling tasks manufacturers had tried and failed to automate for years, such as threading a delicate flex cable and snapping a tiny connector cap into place; he declined to disclose the customer. He also described a “film peeling” station, where the robots strip protective film off camera modules and buttons at or above human speed with 100% accuracy, even when moved to a new phone model and production line they had never seen.

Pankau said the company ultimately wants to extend the approach to building a full car end-to-end without any human ever touching it.

Why it matters

An automaker evaluation alongside live deployment in high-volume smartphone assembly suggests flexible, AI-taught robotics could extend from niche precision tasks toward broader factory automation — though the BMW agreement is still a test, not a deployment.