Industrial Next partners with BMW to assess AI dexterous manipulation in manufacturing

At TechCrunch Disrupt 2026, San Francisco-based startup Industrial Next presented its AI-driven autonomous robot workcells on the Startup Battlefield stage and announced a partnership with the BMW Group Technology Office to evaluate the company's AI-powered dexterous manipulation for manufacturing.

Founded in 2021 by former Tesla engineers Lukas Pankau and Allen Pan, Industrial Next builds self-contained robotic stations powered by proprietary foundation models that connect vision, task context, and motion. The company says this allows a production line to be retooled in minutes rather than weeks or months, without traditional programming.

The founders said their experience at Tesla, where advanced vehicle and self-driving technology was often bottlenecked by decades-old factory equipment, drove them to rethink manufacturing. Pankau, a former lead electrical architect at Tesla who later worked at Waymo, and Pan, who led Tesla's autonomous factory efforts and later became chief architect at autonomous driving company Neolix, co-founded the startup after years of frustration with industrial equipment.

Industrial Next trains its robots in a high-fidelity simulation environment that closely mirrors real-world physics, enabling high-precision tasks. The company said some of its workstations are already used in making one of the world's most popular smartphones, handling tasks such as threading delicate flex cables and snapping tiny connector caps into place. It also described a "film peeling" station where AI-powered robots strip protective film off camera modules and buttons at or above human speed with 100% accuracy, even on phone models and production lines the robots had never seen.

According to Pankau, the company's long-term ambition is to extend this approach beyond phone manufacturing to building a complete car end-to-end without any human touching.