How did YC-backed Bucket Robotics survive its first CES?

The weather in Las Vegas wasn’t looking good. the plan king Every employee of YC has been supported Bucket robots They’ll be carrying parts of their booth in their luggage to the 2026 Consumer Electronics Show. But CEO and founder Matt Puchalski didn’t want to take a chance on postponing one (or all) of their trips. So he rented a Hyundai Santa Fe and packed it up.

“It was… it was tight,” he said, laughing on the show floor.

It took 12 hours of driving in the rain, but the equipment — and Puchalski — arrived safely in Las Vegas, and thus began the startup’s first CES.

San Francisco-based Bucket Robotics was just one of thousands of companies participating in the annual technology conference, a speck of sand on a beach filled with products and promises. But despite its modest setting in the car-focused West Hall, Puchalski said the trip was worth it.

Part of that was the desire to be tireless, committed, and always ready to give the show.

As an engineer, Puchalski has spent much of the past decade working on self-driving vehicles at Uber, Argo AI, Ford’s Latitude AI, and SoftBank-backed Stack AV.

In those jobs, Puchalski developed deep relationships in the auto industry, and we communicated throughout the week.

He was there at an industry party one night. Another night, in the hotel lobby at 10 p.m., he was discussing how to balance quality and manufacturing yield with Sanjay Dastur — founder of mobility startups Skip and Boosted, both of which also launched at YC.

But I first met Puchalski over breakfast at the hotel. He and sales associate Max Joseph, sitting at the table next to me, were making preparations for the conference’s “media day” about (allegedly) cage-free eggs.

Puchalski’s energy piqued my interest, and after making an introduction, he told me what Bucket Robotics was up to. Before I knew it, he had opened a bright yellow pelican box and I was holding a small piece of plastic.

Launched as part of YC’s Spring 2024 portfolio, Bucket Robotics is all about using advanced vision systems to perform quality inspections, especially of surfaces. The goal is to automate a menial task that Puchalski joked would normally be done by “guys in Wisconsin,” and accelerate a broad, multi-industry effort at onshore manufacturing.

One example given by Puchalski is car door handles. It is a part that customers touch every day, so it must be structurally sound, and this type of quality inspection is basically solved.

But it can be difficult to ensure that the surface is flawless. Is the color appropriate? Are there any signs of burning or scuffing? These are the questions Bucket Robotics wants to answer.

“It’s very difficult to automate these types of challenges without massive amounts of data, so automakers are ignoring the guys in Wisconsin on this issue,” he said.

Bucket Robotics solves this data problem by working from CAD files for a specific part. It then creates a set of simulated defects — burn marks, bumps, fractures — so its vision software can quickly spot those problems on the production line.

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

This has already attracted customers in the automotive and defense industries, leading to the creation of Bucket Robotics to follow the increasingly popular path of becoming a “dual-use” company.

When the showroom opened, the first two hours were “intense,” Puchalski said. Suit-clad attendees snooped around the startup’s tables, took orange stickers bearing the Bucket Robotics logo, and quizzed employees about their technology.

More importantly, Puchalski said the level of interest remained consistent throughout the week. He has had “real technical discussions” with people from the manufacturing, robotics and automation fields. He said Friday that he had spent the week since the show making follow-up calls with clients and potential investors.

CES can be tough, but Bucket Robotics survived. Now comes the actual hard part: building the business, scaling it, raising money, and closing business deals.

As for the “guys in Wisconsin,” Puchalski doesn’t see his company as a threat to their livelihoods. These jobs are as much about discovering defects as they are about identifying the root cause of the problem, he said.

In addition, 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 very exciting,” he said.