Supply is rushing in. The part that matters is still thin. Outside Moscone during Databricks Data + AI Summit, San Francisco, June 2026. The robots really are already here. I just got back from ten days in San Francisco, using Databricks Data + AI Summit as a base and working outward from there: robotics teams, frontier labs, voice companies, data infrastructure players, and the people building the data layer underneath all of it. A day down in Mountain View. A lot of side ev

23 Suppliers contacted across global markets 2 weeks Full sourcing assessment vs. a quarter of internal effort 1 qualified Optical marker supplier with inventory & price quote THE CHALLENGE A well-funded robotics company building foundation models for humanoid robots needed high-fidelity optical marker motion capture data at scale. Their data acquisition function had spent a quarter sourcing internally while managing other operational demands. The brief was technically narrow