The weather in Las Vegas was not good. The plan had was that every YC employee is supported Bucket Robotics they would carry parts of their booth in their luggage at the Consumer Electronics Show 2026. But CEO and founder Matt Puchalski didn’t want to take the chance of delaying one (or all) of their flights. So he rented a Hyundai Santa Fe and packed it.
“It was… it was tight,” he said with a laugh on the show floor.
It took a 12-hour drive in the rain, but the equipment – and Puchalski – arrived safely in Las Vegas, and so began the new company’s first CES.
San Francisco-based Bucket Robotics was just one of thousands of companies pitching at the annual tech conference, a speck of sand on a beach full of products and promise. But despite his modest car-focused West Hall installation, Puchalski said the trip was worth it.
Part of that was a willingness to be tireless, observant and always ready to play.
An engineer by trade, Puchalski 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 relationships with the automotive industry, and we crossed paths throughout the week.
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There he was at an industry networking party one night. Another night, in my hotel lobby at 10pm, he was discussing how to balance quality and production efficiency with Sanjay Dastoor — founder of mobility startups Skip and Boosted, both of which also started at YC.
But first I bumped into Puchalski during breakfast at the hotel. Sitting at the table next to me, he and sales associate Max Joseph were running preparations for the conference’s “Media Day” over (supposedly) cage-free eggs.
Puchalski’s interest piqued my interest, and after giving an introduction, he told me what Bucket Robotics does. Before I knew it, a bright yellow Pelican case had been opened 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 for quality inspections, specifically for surfaces. The goal is to automate a menial task that Puchalski joked is usually done by “guys in Wisconsin” and speed up the broad, multi-industry effort for onshore production.
An example Puchalski offered was car door handles. It’s a part that customers touch every day, so it has to be structurally sound, and that kind of quality inspection is basically solved.
But it can be difficult to make sure the surface is flawless. Is the color right? Are there any burn or scratch marks? These are the questions that Bucket Robotics wants to answer.
“It’s very difficult to automate these kinds of challenges without massive amounts of data, so the automakers are just throwing the guys in Wisconsin at this problem,” he said.
Bucket Robotics solves this data problem by working from CAD files for a specific part. It then creates a bunch of simulated defects – burn marks, dents, breaks – so that its vision software can spot these problems quickly on a production line.
There’s no need for manual marking, and the company claims its models can be deployed “in minutes” while adapting if products or production lines change. One of the big selling points to date is that Bucket Robotics can be integrated into existing production lines without adding new hardware, Puchalski said.
This has already attracted customers in the automotive and defense sectors, setting up Bucket Robotics to follow the increasingly popular path of becoming a “dual-use” company.
When the show opened, the first two hours were “intense,” Puchalski said. Costumed attendees poked around the startup’s tables, plucked orange stickers with the Bucket Robotics logo and quizzed employees about their technology.
More importantly, Puchalski said the level of interest remained steady throughout the week. He had “real technical conversations” with people from the worlds of manufacturing, robotics and automation. He said Friday that he spent the week since the show on follow-up calls with prospective clients and investors.
CES can be a slog, but Bucket Robotics survived. Now comes the real hard part: building a business, scaling, raising capital and striking commercial deals.
As for the “guys in Wisconsin,” Puchalski doesn’t see his company as a threat to his livelihood. Those jobs are as much about finding defects as they are about finding the root cause of the problem, he said.
Additionally, 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.
