YC-backed Bucket Robotics targets dual-use manufacturing market

San Francisco-based Bucket Robotics, a startup backed by the accelerator YC, made its debut at the 2026 Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas. The company, which was part of YC’s Spring 2024 batch, is focused on automating surface quality inspections. To get to the event, CEO and founder Matt Puchalski drove 12 hours in the rain in a rented Hyundai packed with booth gear. Despite the modest setup, the conference provided a platform to showcase their technology to the manufacturing and robotics sectors.

Bucket Robotics uses advanced vision systems to perform surface quality inspections, checking physical surfaces for defects like scuffs, scratches, or color inconsistencies. To train these systems, the startup bypasses the need for massive volumes of real-world physical data. Instead, Bucket Robotics works directly from CAD files—computer-aided design files used to model parts—to generate synthetic data. By simulating various defects such as burn marks, bumps, or breaks on the digital models, the company trains its vision software to recognize these issues on an active production line. This approach eliminates the need for manual data labeling. According to Bucket Robotics, its models can deploy in minutes and can adapt quickly if production lines or products change, integrating into existing lines without requiring new hardware.

The company’s dual-use strategy—developing technology applicable to both commercial and defense sectors—has already attracted customers in the automotive and defense industries. Founder and CEO Matt Puchalski, an engineer who previously worked on autonomous vehicles at Uber, Argo AI, Latitude AI, and Stack AV, conceived the startup to address long-standing manufacturing bottlenecks. Puchalski noted that automating surface quality inspection has been an industry challenge for decades. “Deeply hard to automate these types of challenges without huge volumes of data, so auto manufacturers just throw dudes in Wisconsin at this problem,” Puchalski said. During the conference, Puchalski was seen discussing manufacturing yields at 10 p.m. in a hotel lobby with Sanjay Dastoor, the founder of mobility startups Skip and Boosted, which were also backed by YC.

Why it matters

Bucket Robotics is attempting to automate surface quality inspections in manufacturing using vision systems and CAD-generated synthetic data, positioning itself as a dual-use company serving automotive and defense sectors.