Industrial Next Pairs With BMW on Foundation-Model Factory Robots

Industrial Next, a San Francisco startup founded in 2021 by two ex-Tesla engineers, said on stage that it will put its AI-driven robotic stations in front of BMW's Group Technology Office, which will evaluate the system's dexterous manipulation for manufacturing applications, according to TechCrunch.

The pitch is that proprietary foundation models trained in a high-fidelity simulation engine can retool a line in minutes rather than weeks, without the traditional reprogramming cycle. Current demos run on phones, not cars: threading a delicate flex cable, snapping a tiny connector cap into place, and peeling protective film from camera modules and buttons at human speed with what the company calls 100% accuracy across different handset models.

Co-founder Lukas Pankau, previously lead electrical architect at Tesla and later chief architect at Waymo, framed the company as a direct answer to the limits he hit on the factory floor. "We started this company because that is the kind of performance that we wish we had at Tesla, where we were bypassing robot stations because we couldn't program them effectively enough using traditional technologies," he said. His co-founder Allen Pan led Tesla's autonomous factory efforts before serving as chief architect at Neolix.

TechCrunch did not report financial terms, deployment timelines, or which BMW facility would run the evaluation. The founders say the ultimate goal is to automate complete vehicle assembly without human intervention, which is a long way from the smartphone-scale demos the pilot currently rests on.