The weather in Las Vegas was not looking good. The plan had been that every YC employee supported Bucket robotics would be carrying parts of their booth in their luggage to the Consumer Electronics Show 2026. But CEO and founder Matt Puchalski didn’t want to take the risk that one (or all) of their flights would be delayed. So he rented a Hyundai Santa Fe and packed it.
“It was… it was tight,” he said with a laugh in the showroom.
It took a 12-hour drive through the rain, but the equipment – and Puchalski – arrived safely in Las Vegas, and so began the young company’s first-ever CES.
San Francisco-based Bucket Robotics was just one of thousands of companies exhibiting at the annual technology conference, a grain of sand on a beach full of products and promise. But despite its modest setup in the auto-focused West Hall, Puchalski said the trip was worth it.
Part of it was a willingness to be tireless, observant and always ready to throw.
An engineer by training, Puchalski has spent most of the last decade working on autonomous vehicles at Uber, Argo AI, Ford subsidiary Latitude AI, and SoftBank-backed Stack AV.
In these jobs, Puchalski developed deep ties to the auto industry, and we crossed paths all week.
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One evening, he attended an industry networking party. Another night, in my hotel lobby at 10 p.m., he was debating how to balance quality and manufacturing yield with Sanjay Dastoor, founder of mobility startups Skip and Boosted, both of which started at YC.
But I first met Puchalski during breakfast at the hotel. Sitting at the table next to me, he and his salesman Max Joseph were planning the conference’s “Media Day” over (allegedly) free-range eggs.
Puchalski’s verve piqued my interest and after giving an introduction, he explained to me what Bucket Robotics did. Before I knew it, he had opened a bright yellow Pelican suitcase and I was holding a small piece of plastic.
Launched as part of YC’s Spring 2024 batch, Bucket Robotics is all about using advanced vision systems to perform quality inspections, especially for surfaces. The goal is to automate a menial task that Puchalski says is typically done by “dudes from Wisconsin” and accelerate the large, multi-industry effort to offshor manufacturing.
One example Puchalski offered was car door handles. This is a part that customers touch every day, so it must be structurally sound, and this type of quality inspection is fundamentally solved.
But it can be difficult to ensure the surface is spotless. Is the color good? Are there any signs of burns or scratches? These are the questions Bucket Robotics wants to answer.
“It’s very difficult to automate these types of challenges without huge volumes of data, which is why automakers are just throwing guys out of Wisconsin to solve this problem,” he said.
Bucket Robotics solves this data problem by working from the CAD files of a particular part. It then generates a set of simulated defects – burn marks, dents, breaks – so that its vision software can quickly detect these problems on a production line.
No manual labeling is required and the company says its models can be deployed “in minutes” while adapting if products or production lines change. One of the biggest selling points so far is that Bucket Robotics can integrate with existing production lines without adding new hardware, Puchalski said.
This has already attracted customers in automotive and defense, creating Bucket Robotics to continue the increasingly popular path of becoming a “dual-use” company.
When the salon opened, the first two hours were “intense,” Puchalski said. Costumed attendees rummaged around the startup’s tables, collecting orange stickers with the Bucket Robotics logo and asking employees about their technology.
Most importantly, Puchalski said the level of interest remained consistent throughout the week. He had “real technical discussions” with people from the world of manufacturing, robotics and automation. He said Friday that he has spent the week since the show making follow-up calls with potential clients and investors.
CES can be a tough task, but Bucket Robotics has survived. Now comes the hard part: starting a business, growing it, raising money and closing business deals.
As for the “Wisconsin guys,” Puchalski doesn’t see his business as a threat to their livelihoods. These tasks are as much about spotting defects as they are about identifying the root cause of the problem, he said.
And besides, Puchalski added, automating surface quality inspection is something the manufacturing industry has been trying to do for decades.
“So when we go to our customers, it’s incredibly exciting,” he said.
