In most factories, automation is fixed: robots and machines are programmed for one specific task and product. Changing a line means reprogramming and physical retooling, or swapping out equipment, which can take weeks or months. San Francisco-based Industrial Next says it’s changing that.
The startup, which presented today 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 production line be retooled in minutes rather than weeks without traditional programming. The goal is to let manufacturers automate complex and delicate tasks that traditionally require human labor.
The company announced on stage that 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, both of whom previously worked at Tesla. Pankau served as a lead electrical architect at Tesla before moving on to Waymo.
Pan led Tesla’s autonomous factory efforts and later became a chief architect at autonomous driving company Neolix. The pair came up with the idea for Industrial Next while working together at Tesla. Pankau’s first encounter with Pan was literally tripping over him as Pan was asleep on a factory catwalk after pulling an all-nighter.
Although the two didn’t get along at first, they soon realized they shared an obsession with getting things done and had complementary skills. After years of watching cutting-edge vehicle and self-driving technology get held back by decades-old factory equipment, the founders realized that manufacturing needed to be rebuilt. I could run machine learning algorithms to design a car for me.
But I couldn’t figure out how to program a robot, and this was pretty common for engineers at Tesla,” Pankau said. You had people who are really good at what they’re doing–designing cars and designing self-driving systems–and then you had them effectively stumped at the factory looking at this equipment from the 1980s. And so we started rethinking what this should look like using the technology that we have today and using everything that we know today.” The two kept thinking about their frustrations with industrial equipment even after moving on to their next jobs.
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