In most factories, robots are programmed for one task and one product, so changing a line can take weeks or months. San Francisco-based Industrial Next, which presented 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 line be retooled in minutes without traditional programming. Onstage, it also announced a partnership with BMW Group Technology Office to evaluate its AI-powered dexterous manipulation for manufacturing.
Lukas Pankau and Allen Pan founded Industrial Next in 2021 after working together at Tesla. Pankau was a lead electrical architect at Tesla before joining Waymo, and Pan led Tesla's autonomous factory efforts before becoming a chief architect at Neolix. After watching advanced vehicle technology get held back by factory equipment from the 1980s, the founders concluded that manufacturing needed to be rebuilt. Pankau said engineers who could design cars with machine learning were often stumped when it came to programming a robot.
Traditional industrial robots are programmed for highly specific, repeatable tasks. Even a small change can make them fail or cause costly downtime, which pushes manufacturers to simplify their products. Making robots flexible requires huge amounts of training data, and unlike internet-trained AI models, robotics lacks large datasets for complex physical tasks.
Pankau said the company's secret sauce is building the robots' understanding of the process with a high-fidelity simulation engine that stays close to real-world dynamics. This lets robots perform high-precision, high-dexterity tasks almost without seeing the parts. The stations can be reconfigured, combined, and redeployed across product lines, and new tasks are taught through simulation and demonstration instead of hard-coded scripts .
Some Industrial Next workstations already help make one of the world's most popular smartphones, though Pankau did not name the customer. They handle tasks manufacturers had failed to automate for years, such as threading a delicate flex cable and snapping a tiny connector cap into place. A film-peeling station strips protective film at or above human speed with 100% accuracy, even on phone models and lines it has never seen. The founders' long-term goal is to build a full car end-to-end without any human touching it.