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AF203-DCSO1
Department of Defense · 96 awards from 2021 to 2025 · 82 distinct firms
Awards in this topic include: “High Mach Airbreathing Target (HMAT)” · “Parraid Outsourcing Workload (O.W.L) Linux Power and Data Hub” · “NASIC GXK STRATFI Proposal - OCR enabled intelligence”
This is a Direct-to-Phase-II topic. There is no Phase I stage — all 96 awards are Phase II, so there is no Phase I award size or conversion rate to report.
What awards in this topic are actually worth
Middle half fell between $748,742 and $750,000 (96 Phase II awards). The largest was $30,000,000 — the upper tail here includes multi-year instruments such as STRATFI and Sequential Phase II, which run to eight figures and are not comparable to a standard Phase II.
Award values are as reported by the agency to sbir.gov. For contract awards that is the value of the award, which for multi-year instruments covers several years rather than a single year's funding.
Who wins here
Across 96 awards.
The single biggest winner, AEROCINE VENTURES, INC., holds 4.2% (4 of 96). That is a wide-open topic — no firm has a lock on it.
of 82 firms had no prior Department of Defense award before winning here (64 were returning winners). This is the closest honest answer to “can a newcomer win in this topic”.
Most awards in this topic
| Firm | Awards | Share |
|---|---|---|
| AEROCINE VENTURES, INC. | 4 | 4.2% |
| FGC Plasma Solutions, Inc. | 2 | 2.1% |
| PARRAID LLC | 2 | 2.1% |
| VANNEVAR LABS INC | 2 | 2.1% |
| AMERICAN LITHIUM ENERGY CORP. | 2 | 2.1% |
Firms are counted by federal UEI where available. sbir.gov has backfilled UEIs to 99.5% coverage for 2025 awards; a company that re-registered may appear more than once in older years, which would understate concentration slightly.
Quarterly-ish, and only when something's actually new — a new SBA report year, a new stat, a dataset update. The weekly refresh alone never triggers an email. No account, one-click unsubscribe, and every number on this page stays free and open either way.
Sourced vs computed: Phase I/II selection rates (applications → awards) come from the SBA's SBIR/STTR Annual Report — FY2022 is the latest published edition, and SBA itself calls the rates estimates because proposal cohorts span fiscal years. Phase I→II conversion and first-timer shares are computed by us from sbir.gov's public award records. Linked by firm + agency + topic code where topic codes carry (suffix-tolerant for DOE's phase renumbering), with a title-similarity fallback elsewhere. 70% of links match on topic, 30% on title; each pair's match_tier is in the downloadable CSV, so you can recompute under stricter rules. Firms are identified by federal UEI where available (99.5% of 2025 awards, down to 54% for 2001), with a normalized-name fallback for older records.
Fast-track and Direct-to-Phase-II: no agency publishes a fast-track flag, so we derive it — HHS/NIH: a Phase I record carrying a Phase II activity code (R44/R42/U44) plus its linked Phase II; NSF: the 2024 Fast-Track pilot solicitation (NSF 24-582). Where fast-track exists, conversion is shown both organic (fast-tracks excluded) and all-inclusive, because a fast-track Phase II was committed at award time, not competed. DoD's Direct-to-Phase-II share is different in kind: there is no marker at all, so our number is an inference (Phase IIs with no same-firm DoD Phase I in the prior 3 years), always labeled an estimate and kept visually separate from measured stats.
What nobody publishes: per-topic application counts are published by no one — not the agencies, and not the $500–$42,000-a-year intelligence platforms either; the data simply isn't public. Any per-topic number on this site is award-side only (who won, how often winners repeat), never your odds of selection.
Sources: sbir.gov award data · SBA FY22 Annual Report. Free to use; verify anything critical against the originals.