The weather in Las Vegas didn’t look very good. The plan was for each YC-backed Bucket Robotics employee to take a piece of the booth in their luggage to the 2026 Consumer Electronics Show. But CEO and founder Matt Puchalski didn’t want to risk one (or all) of his company’s flights being delayed. So he rented a Hyundai Santa Fe and packed his bags.
“That was…tough,” he said with a laugh on the show floor.
It took 12 hours of driving in the rain, but the equipment and Puchalski arrived safely in Las Vegas, where the young company’s first CES began.
San Francisco-based Bucket Robotics is just one of the thousands of companies exhibiting at the annual technology conference, a grain of sand on a beach full of products and promises. But despite the modest setup in West Hall, which focuses on cars, Puchalski said it’s worth the trip.
Part of that was the drive to be tireless, observant and always ready to pitch.
An engineer by trade, Puchalski has spent much of the past decade developing self-driving cars at Uber, Argo AI, Ford subsidiary Latitude AI, and SoftBank-backed Stack AV.
Through these jobs, Puchalski developed deep connections in the auto industry, and we passed each other this past week.
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So one night he was attending an industry networking party. Another night, at 10pm in the lobby of my hotel, he was having a discussion with Sanjay Dastall about how to balance quality and manufacturing yield. Sanjay Dastoor is the founder of mobility startups Skip and Boosted, both of which got their start at YC.
But I first met Puchalski at breakfast at my hotel. Sitting at the table next to me, he and sales representative Max Joseph were (allegedly) rushing to prepare for the conference’s “media day” around cage-free eggs.
Puchalski’s enthusiasm piqued my interest, and after some introductions, he told me what Bucket Robotics was up to. Before I knew it, he had cracked open the bright yellow Pelican case and I was holding a small piece of plastic in my hand.
Launched as part of YC’s Spring 2024 batch, Bucket Robotics focuses specifically on surface quality inspection using advanced vision systems. The goal is to automate menial tasks that Puchalski joked are typically done by “Wisconsin dudes” and accelerate a broader, multi-industry push toward domestic manufacturing.
One example suggested by Puchalski is car door handles. Since these parts are touched by customers every day, they must be structurally sound, and these quality inspections are basically passed.
But making sure the surface is perfect can be difficult. Do the colors match? Are there any burns or scratches? Bucket Robotics wants to answer these questions.
“Automakers are just posing this problem to the people of Wisconsin because it’s very difficult to automate these kinds of challenges without a huge amount of data,” he says.
Bucket Robotics solves that data problem by working from the CAD file of a specific part. It then generates a number of simulated defects, such as burn marks, bumps, and breaks, allowing vision software to quickly detect these issues on the production line.
There is no need for manual labeling, and the company claims its model can be deployed in “minutes” while being adaptable if products or production lines change. One of the big selling points so far has been Bucket Robotics’ ability to integrate into existing production lines without adding new hardware, Puchalski said.
This has already attracted customers in the automotive and defense sectors, and has set up Bucket Robotics to pursue the increasingly popular path of becoming a “dual-use” company.
When the show floor opened, the first two hours were “intense,” Puchalski said. Attendees in suits peered into startup tables, peeled off orange stickers with the Bucket Robotics logo, and quizzed employees about their company’s technology.
More importantly, Puchalski said the level of interest was consistent throughout the week. He had “real-life technical discussions” with people in the world of manufacturing, robotics, and automation. He said Friday that he had spent the week since the show on follow-up calls with potential clients and investors.
CES may be a disaster, but Bucket Robotics survived. Now comes the real difficult part. That means building your business, expanding it, raising capital, and closing commercial deals.
As for the “Wisconsin men,” Puchalski doesn’t see his company as a threat to their livelihoods. These jobs are as much about finding flaws as they are about identifying the root cause of problems, he said.
Puchalski added that automating surface quality inspection is something the manufacturing industry has been trying to do for decades.
“So when I go to a customer, I get incredibly excited,” he said.
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