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MDA04-020
Department of Defense · 35 awards from 2004 to 2021 · 23 distinct firms
Awards in this topic include: “VALT Hypersonic Flight Testbed / Booster” · “Design and Develoment of High Performace Microbolometer using VOx, CNT and Graphene for IR” · “Design and Development of High Performance Carbon Nanostructure based Multicolor Imagers”
What awards in this topic are actually worth
Middle half of awards fell between $99,888 and $99,996 (24 Phase I awards).
Middle half fell between $749,982 and $1,498,530 (11 Phase II awards). The largest was $7,027,758 — 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 35 awards.
The single biggest winner, Sierra Nevada Corporation, holds 14.3% (5 of 35).
of 23 firms had no prior Department of Defense award before winning here (18 were returning winners). This is the closest honest answer to “can a newcomer win in this topic”.
Phase I → Phase II conversion (inferred)
29.2% of the 24 Phase I awards in this topic have a Phase II we could link to them (7 of 24).
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 |
|---|---|---|
| Sierra Nevada Corporation | 5 | 14.3% |
| MAGNOLIA OPTICAL TECHNOLOGIES, INC. | 3 | 8.6% |
| Photonic Systems, Inc. | 3 | 8.6% |
| nLight Photonics | 2 | 5.7% |
| TECHNOLOGIES & DEVICES INTERNATIONAL, | 2 | 5.7% |
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.