Industrial Next partners with BMW to evaluate AI robots for factory work

Industrial Next’s push to make factory robots easier to retrain now has a named automotive partner: BMW Group Technology Office. The startup announced the evaluation partnership on October 13, 2026, at TechCrunch Disrupt. The work will assess its AI-powered dexterous manipulation—robots handling complex, delicate manufacturing tasks—not launch a confirmed BMW production deployment.

Industrial Next’s pitch centers on flexibility: self-contained robotic stations that can be reconfigured, combined and moved across product lines. The company says a production line can be retooled in minutes rather than weeks, without traditional programming. That performance is a company claim, not a result from the BMW evaluation.

Teaching the task instead of scripting every move

Industrial Next says its stations use proprietary foundation models—AI models underpinning the system’s behavior—to connect vision, task context and motion. New jobs are taught through simulation and demonstration rather than hard-coded scripts.

Co-founder Lukas Pankau describes a detailed simulation engine that approximates real-world dynamics. Robots practice high-precision work in that virtual environment. He says this approach addresses a training-data problem: robotics lacks the vast datasets available to AI systems trained on internet content, particularly for intricate physical assembly.

The contrast is with conventional industrial robots programmed for specific, repeatable tasks. Pankau says even a small product or process change can cause failures or costly downtime, pushing manufacturers to simplify products for repeatability. Industrial Next’s goal is to automate complex and delicate work that traditionally requires people.

Phone assembly supplies the current examples

Pankau told TechCrunch that some Industrial Next workstations already help make one of the world’s most popular smartphones. He did not identify the customer. He described jobs manufacturers had unsuccessfully tried to automate for years:

• Threading a delicate flex cable.
• Snapping a tiny connector cap into place.

For a station that peels protective film from camera modules and buttons, Pankau claimed performance at or above human speed with 100% accuracy, including on an unfamiliar phone model and production line. Those are company-supplied results from smartphone manufacturing, not evidence of the same performance in automotive assembly.

“We ultimately want to take this to building a full car end-to-end without any human touching ever.”

Lukas Pankau, Industrial Next co-founder, speaking to TechCrunch

A factory frustration returns to cars

Industrial Next was founded in 2021 by Pankau and Allen Pan, former Tesla colleagues. Pankau was a lead electrical architect; Pan led autonomous factory efforts. Their frustration with equipment they struggled to program continued after leaving Tesla, eventually prompting them to start the company.

The BMW announcement identifies neither a production line nor a deployment timetable.