The weather in Las Vegas wasn’t looking good. The plan had been that each employee of YC-backed Bucket Robotics would carry parts of their booth in their luggage to the 2026 Consumer Electronics Show. But CEO and founder Matt Puchalski didn’t want to take the chance that one (or all) of their flights would be delayed. So he rented a Hyundai Santa Fe and packed it up. 

“It was… it was tight,” he said with a laugh on the show floor.  

It took 12 hours driving in the rain, but the gear – and Puchalski – made it safely to 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 tech conference, a speck of sand on a beach full of products and promises. But despite its modest setup in the automotive-focused West Hall, Puchalski said the trip was worth it.

Part of that was a willingness to be tireless, observant, and always ready to pitch.

An engineer by trade, Puchalski spent most of the last decade working on autonomous vehicles at Uber, Argo AI, Ford’s subsidiary Latitude AI, and SoftBank-backed Stack AV.

At those jobs, Puchalski developed deep connections in the automotive industry, and we crossed paths all week.

There he was at an industry networking party one night. On 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 also got off the ground at YC.

But I first ran into Puchalski during breakfast at the hotel. Seated at the table next to me, he and sales associate Max Joseph were running through preparations for the conference’s “Media Day” over (allegedly) cage-free eggs.

Puchalski’s verve piqued my interest, and after making an intro, he told me what Bucket Robotics is up to. Before I knew it, he had cracked open a bright yellow Pelican case and I was holding a small piece of plastic.

Started as part of YC’s Spring 2024 batch, Bucket Robotics is all about using advanced vision systems to do quality inspections, specifically for surfaces. The goal is to automate a menial task that Puchalski joked is usually done by “dudes in Wisconsin,” and to accelerate the broad, multi-industry effort to onshore manufacturing.

One example Puchalski offered was car door handles. It’s a part customers touch every day, so it needs to be structurally sound, and that kind of quality inspection is basically solved.

But it can be challenging to make sure the surface is flawless. Is the color right? Are there any burn or scuff marks? These are the questions Bucket Robotics wants to answer.

“It’s deeply hard to automate these types of challenges without huge volumes of data, so auto manufacturers just throw dudes in Wisconsin at this problem,” he said. 

Bucket Robotics solves that data problem by working from the CAD files for a particular part. It then generates a bunch of simulated defects – burn marks, bumps, breaks – so that its vision software can detect those problems quickly on a production line.

There’s no need for manual labeling, and the company claims its models can deploy “in minutes” while also adapting if products or production lines change. One of the big selling points to date is that Bucket Robotics can integrate into existing production lines without adding new hardware, Puchalski said. 

This has already attracted customers in automotive and in defense, setting 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 snooped around the startup’s tables, plucked orange stickers with the Bucket Robotics logo, and quizzed the employees about their tech.  

More importantly, Puchalski said the level of interest stayed consistent throughout the week. He had “real technical discussions” with people from the worlds of manufacturing, robotics, and automation. He said Friday that he’s spent the week since the show on follow-up calls with prospective customers and investors. 

CES can be a slog, but Bucket Robotics survived. Now comes the actual hard part: building a business, scaling, fundraising, and striking commercial deals.  

As for the “dudes in Wisconsin,” Puchalski doesn’t see his company as a threat to their livelihoods. Those jobs are just 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 that the manufacturing industry has been trying to do for decades.

“So when we go to our customers, it’s incredibly exciting,” he said.