San Francisco startup Industrial Next has announced a partnership with BMW Group Technology Office to evaluate its AI-powered dexterous manipulation for manufacturing. The company, which presented at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026, develops AI-driven, self-contained robotic stations.
These stations are powered by proprietary foundation models that integrate vision, task context, and motion. Industrial Next claims this technology enables production lines to be retooled in minutes, a significant reduction from the weeks or months typically required for reprogramming and physical retooling.
The company's goal is to automate complex and delicate tasks that have traditionally relied on human labour. Industrial Next was founded in 2021 by Lukas Pankau and Allen Pan, who previously worked at Tesla.
Pankau stated that some of the startup's workstations are already being used to manufacture a popular smartphone, handling tasks that manufacturers had previously struggled to automate. These include threading a delicate flex cable and snapping a tiny connector cap into place.
The robots are taught new tasks through simulation and demonstration, rather than hard-coded scripts. Pankau explained that progress has been made in using simulated environments for high-precision and high-dexterity tasks.