Industrial Next Claims Minutes-Long Retooling, Names BMW Only as Evaluator

Industrial Next, a nine-person San Francisco robotics startup, told TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 that its robotic stations can switch a production line to a new task in minutes instead of weeks. The BMW Group Technology Office will evaluate the company's dexterous manipulation for manufacturing, TechCrunch reported on Oct. 13. The article gives no financial terms and no BMW plant.

The minutes-versus-weeks figure is the company's own, and TechCrunch does not describe an independent test of it.

What the stations do today

The stations run on what Industrial Next calls proprietary foundation models, which link vision, task context and motion. They need no conventional programming, the company says. TechCrunch lists three live tasks, all on phones:

Task	Claim	Customer
Threading a flex cable	Demonstrated	Unnamed
Snapping a connector cap into place	Demonstrated	Unnamed
Peeling film from camera modules and buttons	At or above human speed, 100% accuracy (company claim)	Unnamed

Some of the workstations already help make "one of the world's most popular smartphones," TechCrunch wrote, without naming the manufacturer or the line. The film-peeling claim covers, per the company, a new phone model and production line.

The gap is the denominator. A 100 percent accuracy figure means little without the number of cycles behind it, the defect definition and the time the station ran unattended. TechCrunch's account has none of the three.

Who is behind it

Co-founder Lukas Pankau was a lead electrical architect at Tesla and then at Waymo, according to TechCrunch. Y Combinator's company page says he also led electrical architecture at Ford, including work on the Model X, 3 and Y at Tesla, and spent three years at Waymo on sensor and communications design.

Co-founder Allen Pan led Tesla's autonomous factory work and was later chief architect at Neolix, an autonomous driving company, per TechCrunch. YC adds a stint as an advanced autonomous control engineer at GM.

The company was founded in 2021 and sits in YC's Winter 2022 batch, with a listed team of nine. YC names Khosla Ventures, Lenovo, AlphaX Partners and Plug and Play among its backers. Neither TechCrunch nor YC gives a current funding total, so this article does not either.

What the BMW arrangement is

The BMW Group Technology Office is evaluating the manipulation work. That is a trial. It is not an order, and the reports do not say how many stations BMW would test or when.

Pankau's aim is a full car built end to end "without any human touching ever." The current demonstrations are on phone parts that fit in a hand, with film and cable tasks, while car assembly involves heavier parts and far larger variation. For other factory-robot reporting, see our pieces on Mind Robotics and its new president and on industrial robot installations in China.

The figure that would settle the claim is a changeover time measured by someone other than the vendor. Until BMW or a customer publishes one, "minutes" stays a vendor number, and the first test of it is whatever the Technology Office reports back.