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AFX20D-TCSO1
Department of Defense · 340 awards from 2021 to 2025 · 199 distinct firms
Awards in this topic include: “Extremely Lightweight and Ultra-Low Noise Isolated DC-DC Converters” · “Deployable Containerized LH2 Refueling System” · “Continuous Fiber Additive Manufacturing for Rapid Prototyping and Demonstration of Small U”
What awards in this topic are actually worth
Middle half of awards fell between $149,699 and $149,993 (233 Phase I awards).
Middle half fell between $749,816 and $749,999 (107 Phase II awards). The largest was $32,076,934 — 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 340 awards.
The single biggest winner, CORNERSTONE RESEARCH GROUP INC, holds 2.1% (7 of 340). That is a wide-open topic — no firm has a lock on it.
of 199 firms had no prior Department of Defense award before winning here (128 were returning winners). This is the closest honest answer to “can a newcomer win in this topic”.
Phase I → Phase II conversion (inferred)
44.6% of the 233 Phase I awards in this topic have a Phase II we could link to them (104 of 233).
This is our estimate, not an official figure. No agency publishes an award ID linking a Phase II back to its Phase I, so we match on firm, agency and topic code. It is also not your odds of winning — it is the share of Phase I winners who went on to a Phase II. How this is computed, and what it can't tell you.
Most awards in this topic
| Firm | Awards | Share |
|---|---|---|
| CORNERSTONE RESEARCH GROUP INC | 7 | 2.1% |
| PIASECKI AIRCRAFT CORP | 5 | 1.5% |
| ARCHER AVIATION INC | 4 | 1.2% |
| SCIENTIFIC SYSTEMS COMPANY, INC. | 4 | 1.2% |
| WHISPER AERO INC | 4 | 1.2% |
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.