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X224-ODCSO2

Department of Defense · 30 awards from 2023 to 2024 · 25 distinct firms

Awards in this topic include: “Wildstar LLC Ubiquitous Communications TACFI Effort” · “TACFI Proposal for MAREVL-Booster” · “Space Armor - The Best Micrometeorite, Orbital Debris and Kinetic Energy Protection This S”

This is a Direct-to-Phase-II topic. There is no Phase I stage — all 30 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

Median Phase II award $1,249,738

Middle half fell between $1,248,866 and $1,249,986 (30 Phase II awards). The largest was $59,814,874 — 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

Distinct firms that have won 25

Across 30 awards.

Share held by the top 3 firms 20.0%

The single biggest winner, WILDSTAR LLC, holds 6.7% (2 of 30).

First-time winners at Department of Defense 7

of 25 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”.

Most awards in this topic

FirmAwardsShare
WILDSTAR LLC2 6.7%
BLUSHIFT AEROSPACE INC2 6.7%
Atomic-6, Inc.2 6.7%
Sedaro Corporation2 6.7%
EO VISTA, LLC2 6.7%

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.

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Sources and caveats (the honest part)

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.