The weather in Las Vegas is not looking good. That plan already has that every employee YC-supported Ember Robotics will bring part of the booth in the trunk to the 2026 Consumer Electronics Show. But CEO and founder Matt Puchalski doesn’t want to take any chances that one (or all) of the flights will be delayed. So he rented a Hyundai Santa Fe and packed up.
“It’s… it’s tight,” he said with a laugh on the show floor.
It took 12 hours of driving in the rain, but the move – and Puchalski – made it safe for Las Vegas, and since the first CES of the young company.
San Francisco-based Bucket Robotics is just one of thousands of companies exhibiting at the annual tech conference, a speck of sand on a beach full of products and promise. But despite the modest setup in the Automotive-focused Hall West, Puchalski said the trip was worth it.
Part of that is a willingness to be tireless, cautious, and always ready to pitch.
An engineer by trade, Puchalski has spent the last decade working on autonomous vehicles at Uber, Argo AI, a subsidiary of Ford’s Latitude AI, and SoftBank-backed Stack AV.
In the project, Puchalski developed deep connections in the automotive industry, and we crossed paths all week.
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There he was at an industry networking party one night. The other night, in my hotel lobby at 10pm, he was debating how to balance quality and manufacturing results with Sanjay Dastoor – the founder of mobility startups Skip and Boosted, both of whom are also down at YC.
But I first ran into Puchalski during breakfast at the hotel. Sitting at the table next to me, he and sales associate Max Joseph were walking through the preparations for the “Media Day” conference over (allegedly) cage-free eggs.
Puchalski’s love caught my attention, and after making an intro, he told me what Bucket Robotics does. Before I knew it, he had opened the bright yellow Pelican case and I was holding a small plastic one.
Started as part of YC’s Spring 2024 batch, Bucket Robotics is all about using advanced vision systems to perform quality inspections, specifically for surfaces. The goal is to automate the menial tasks that Puchalski jokes are usually done by “guys in Wisconsin,” and streamline multi-industry efforts to land manufacturing.
One example Puchalski offers is a car door handle. These are the parts that customers touch every day, so they have to be structurally sound, and that kind of quality inspection is done.
But it can be a challenge to ensure that the surface is not perfect. Is the color correct? Are there any burn or scuff marks? These are the questions Bucket Robotics wants to answer.
“It is deeply hard to automate this type of challenge without a huge volume of data, so car manufacturers just throw their friends in Wisconsin on this problem,” he said.
Bucket Robotics solves these data problems by working with CAD files for specific parts. It then generates a large number of simulated defects – burn marks, bumps, breaks – so that the vision software can detect these problems quickly on the production line.
There’s no need for manual labeling, and the company says the model can be installed “in minutes” while also adapting if the product or production line changes. One of its biggest selling points so far is that Bucket Robotics can integrate into existing production lines without adding new hardware, Puchalski said.
It has attracted customers in the automotive and defense industries, setting up Robotics Bucket 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 start table, plucked orange stickers with the Bucket Robotics logo, and quizzed employees about technology.
More importantly, Puchalski said interest rates remained consistent throughout the week. They have “real technical discussions” with people from the world of manufacturing, robotics, and automation. He said Friday that he has spent the week since the event on follow-up calls with potential customers and investors.
CES may have been a slog, but Bucket Robotics survived. Now comes the really hard part: building the business, scaling, fundraising, and good commercial deals.
As for the “guys in Wisconsin,” Puchalski does not see the company as a threat to their livelihoods. The work is just as much about recognizing defects as it is about understanding the root cause of the problem, he said.
Additionally, Puchalski added, automating surface quality inspections is something the manufacturing industry has been doing for decades.
“So when we go to customers, it’s incredibly exciting,” he said.