Industrial Next says BMW Group Technology Office will evaluate its AI robotic manipulation technology as the startup targets faster factory retooling.
Industrial Next announced on October 13, 2026, that it is partnering with BMW Group Technology Office to evaluate the startup’s AI-driven robotic manipulation for manufacturing. The announcement came at TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco. It is an evaluation partnership, not a claim that BMW has adopted the system on a production line.
The San Francisco startup builds self-contained robotic workstations powered by proprietary foundation models. According to the company’s description, the models combine visual information, task context and motion, while new tasks are taught using simulation and demonstration rather than only hard-coded robot instructions. The aim is to let manufacturers reconfigure work for different products without the lengthy reprogramming and physical changes common in fixed automation.
Industrial Next says some of its stations are already used in smartphone manufacturing, though the customer was not identified in the report. Co-founder Lukas Pankau described tasks including threading delicate flexible cables and fitting small connector caps. He also said a station that removes protective film from camera modules and buttons worked at or above human speed with 100% accuracy after being moved to a phone model and production line it had not previously encountered. Those performance figures are company claims, not independently audited results.
The technology addresses a persistent factory constraint: conventional automation can be efficient for repeatable work but costly to adapt when products or assembly steps change. If flexible systems can reliably learn precision tasks with less bespoke programming, manufacturers could test automation on jobs that have remained manual or required frequent engineering work. The reported BMW evaluation offers a route to assess the approach in an automotive manufacturing context, but the companies have not disclosed its schedule, scope or intended production site.
Industrial Next was founded in 2021 by Pankau and Allen Pan, both of whom previously worked at Tesla. The next substantive signal will be evidence from the BMW evaluation or a disclosed deployment; the current announcement does not establish that the technology is in use at BMW plants.