Two Ex-Tesla Engineers Built Robots That Retool a Factory Line in Minutes - and BMW Just Signed Up to Test Them

In most factories, automation is frozen in place: robots are programmed for one task on one product, and changing a line means weeks or months of reprogramming, retooling or swapping equipment. A San Francisco startup called Industrial Next thinks that is a software problem — and on the Startup Battlefield stage at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026, it showed a different model, along with a new evaluation partnership with BMW Group Technology Office.

Industrial Next builds AI-driven, self-contained robotic stations powered by proprietary foundation models that connect vision, task context and motion. The stations can be reconfigured, combined and redeployed across product lines, and new tasks are taught through simulation and demonstration rather than hard-coded scripts. The company says this lets a production line be retooled in minutes rather than weeks, without traditional programming. On stage, it announced that BMW Group Technology Office will evaluate its AI-powered dexterous manipulation for manufacturing.

The founders come straight out of the factory-automation trenches. Lukas Pankau was a lead electrical architect at Tesla before moving to Waymo; Allen Pan led Tesla's autonomous factory efforts and later became chief architect at autonomous driving company Neolix, with a stint at Chinese self-driving developer Momenta along the way. The two met at Tesla — Pankau's first encounter with Pan was literally tripping over him, asleep on a factory catwalk after an all-nighter — and bonded over a shared frustration.

"We had all these fancy things that we could do on cars. 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."

The hard part is data. Robots need enormous amounts of training data, and unlike language models, there is no internet-scale corpus of high-precision assembly. Industrial Next's answer is simulation: "We can make robots do all these cool things like dance around, because there's data for that, but we can't make them assemble high-precision things," Pankau said. "The secret sauce is that we have given them an understanding of the process in general, but we build that understanding using an extremely high-fidelity simulation engine that is close to the real dynamics — to where we can let the robot do these kinds of high precision tasks almost without seeing the parts at all."

This is not a lab demo. Some of the startup's workstations are already used in making one of the world's most popular smartphones — a customer it cannot name — handling tasks manufacturers had tried and 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 off camera modules and buttons at or above human speed with 100 percent accuracy, even when moved to a new phone model and production line it has never seen.

Next, the company wants to scale from phones to cars. "Now we want to take this to more complicated tasks than just building a phone. We ultimately want to take this to building a full car end-to-end without any human touching ever," Pankau said — a nod to the Tesla lines where the founders say whole robot stations were bypassed because they could not be programmed effectively. The BMW evaluation is the first step in that direction.

The broader bet is about changeover economics. If a robot station can learn a new task in minutes instead of weeks, high-mix, small-batch manufacturing — the kind of delicate, low-volume work still done by hand — becomes automatable for the first time. The performance figures are company-reported, and third-party validation will matter; but with ex-Tesla and Waymo talent, a live smartphone line and a BMW evaluation underway, Industrial Next has assembled an unusually credible pitch for rebuilding the factory floor.