San Francisco startup Industrial Next says it can retool a factory production line in minutes instead of weeks. The company presented its technology on the Startup Battlefield stage at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 on October 13.
The startup builds self-contained robotic stations powered by AI. Its own foundation models connect vision, task context and motion, so the robots can be set up without traditional programming.
Why Factory Robots Are Hard to Change
In most factories, robots are programmed for one product and one task. Changing a line usually means reprogramming, physical retooling or swapping equipment. That process can take weeks or months.
Co-founder Lukas Pankau said even a small change in a product can make a traditional robot fail. This can lead to costly downtime and pushes manufacturers to keep their products simple.
Flexible robots need large amounts of training data. Unlike AI models trained on the internet, robotics lacks big datasets for complex physical tasks.
Industrial Next uses a high-fidelity simulation engine that closely matches real-world physics. Robots practice in this virtual world, then learn new tasks through simulation and demonstration instead of hard-coded scripts.
“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 company’s stations can be reconfigured, combined and moved across different product lines.
Founded by Former Tesla Engineers
Pankau and Allen Pan founded the company in 2021. Both previously worked at Tesla.
Pankau was a lead electrical architect at Tesla before joining Waymo. Pan led Tesla’s autonomous factory efforts and later became chief architect at self-driving company Neolix. He also worked at Momenta, a self-driving developer in China.
The pair said they grew frustrated watching advanced car technology held back by factory equipment from the 1980s. Pankau said engineers who could design cars with machine learning were often unable to program a factory robot.
Pankau said some Industrial Next stations are already used to make one of the world’s most popular smartphones. He did not name the customer.
The robots thread a delicate flex cable and snap a tiny connector cap into place. Pankau said manufacturers had tried and failed to automate these tasks for years.
A “film peeling” station strips protective film from camera modules and buttons. Pankau said it works at or above human speed with 100% accuracy, even on new phone models and production lines it has not seen before.
The founders said their long-term goal is to build a full car from start to finish without any human touching it.
On stage at Disrupt, Industrial Next announced a partnership with BMW Group Technology Office. The two companies will evaluate the startup’s AI-powered dexterous manipulation technology for manufacturing.
