Industrial Next Pitches AI Robotic Stations That Retool in Minutes, Announces BMW Evaluation

Industrial Next says the stations are powered by proprietary foundation models that connect vision, task context and motion. The company says this allows a production line to be retooled without traditional programming. Its goal is to let manufacturers automate complex and delicate tasks that traditionally require human labor.

The startup was founded in 2021 by Lukas Pankau and Allen Pan, both of whom previously worked at Tesla. Pankau served as a lead electrical architect at Tesla before moving to Waymo. Pan led Tesla’s autonomous factory efforts and later became chief architect at autonomous driving company Neolix.

The founders came up with the idea while working together at Tesla. Pankau first met Pan when he tripped over him as Pan slept on a factory catwalk after pulling an all-nighter. Although the two did not get along at first, they soon realized they shared an obsession with getting things done and had complementary skills.

After years of watching cutting-edge vehicle and self-driving technology get held back by decades-old factory equipment, the founders concluded that manufacturing needed to be rebuilt. Pankau said, “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.” He described a divide between people skilled at designing cars and self-driving systems and those “effectively stumped at the factory looking at this equipment from the 1980s.”

The two kept discussing their frustrations after moving to other jobs. Pankau said he was at Waymo and was “kind of bored out of my mind because I was missing that pace of Tesla.” Pan, he added, was in a similar position at Momenta, a developer of self-driving systems in China. Pan recalled their conclusion: “We’re like, we’re not getting any younger, and we’re still obviously passionate about it. We still keep complaining about industrial technology. Like, this is three years later, we should start the company.”

Pankau says traditional industrial robots are typically programmed to perform highly specific, repeatable tasks. Even a small change in the process or product can cause the robot to fail or trigger costly downtime, which forces manufacturers to simplify their products for repeatability. Making robots truly flexible presents a different challenge: they need enormous amounts of training data, and robotics lacks the vast datasets that internet-trained AI models can use.

Pankau explained, “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.” He said Industrial Next has made progress using simulated environments for high-precision and high-dexterity tasks. “The secret sauce for the robots that we have 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.”

The company says its robotic stations can be reconfigured, combined and redeployed across product lines. New tasks are taught through simulation and demonstration, rather than hard-coded scripts.

Pankau said some of the startup’s workstations are already used in making one of the world’s most popular smartphones. They handle tasks that manufacturers had tried and failed to automate for years, such as threading a delicate flex cable and snapping a tiny connector cap into place. He was not at liberty to disclose the customer.