Daily SBIR/STTR
briefing.

Two days to reach a Release 5 topic author — and Monday is the last business day to do it

DoD Release 5 pre-released August 5 with 54 topics, reported as 44 SBIR and 7 STTR spanning the Air Force, Navy, DARPA, DTRA and DMEA. Topics are public now; submissions open Wednesday, August 26 and close September 23, 2026 at 12:00pm ET. Direct contact with topic authors is permitted only through Tuesday, August 25 — which makes Monday the last practical business day to get a question answered by the person who wrote the topic. After that, questions move to the written Topic Q&A, which itself closes September 9 at 12:00pm ET. Topic coverage runs across infrared sensing and imaging, radar and electronic warfare, autonomous underwater and aerial systems, quantum telemetry, directed energy and radiation-hardened power electronics, so this one release touches all four NM FAST sectors and stays the most time-sensitive item on this page.

NIH omnibus: 16 days to the first post-freeze receipt date

NIH reissued its small-business omnibus as a set of parent notices — PA-27-100 (parent SBIR, clinical trial optional), PA-27-102 (parent STTR), PA-27-101 (Phase IIB Strategic Breakthrough) and PAR-27-098 (Commercialization Readiness Pilot) — posted to Grants.gov May 28, 2026, reopening a pipeline reported at roughly $1.4 billion, with the reissued parent SBIR carrying a $3 million cap. The published September 5 standard receipt date effectively moves to Tuesday, September 8, 2026, because the 5th falls on a Saturday ahead of Labor Day; applications are due 5:00pm applicant-organization local time. Each parent notice runs three rolling intake cycles — September 5, 2026, January 5, 2027 and April 5, 2027 — so a firm that misses September is not shut out until next year. With 16 days left, the binding constraint for most New Mexico life-science firms is no longer the science but eRA Commons, SAM.gov and SBA Company Registry status; those clearances take weeks and a lapsed registration disqualifies more finished applications than weak science does.

DOE “Genesis Mission” pitch closes in 18 days — and there is no second door

DOE opened its FY26 Phase I SBIR/STTR Genesis Mission opportunity on July 22, 2026 under a mandatory pitch-first process run through its partnership intermediary ConnectWerx: no applicant may go straight to a full Phase I application, and only firms whose pitches are selected are invited to submit. Pitches are due Thursday, September 10, 2026 at 2:00pm ET through the DOE SBIR/STTR Application Hub, and the pitch itself is four questions with defined word limits — short enough to draft this week, decisive enough that a weak one ends the attempt. DOE expects roughly 40 Phase I awards, with awards of up to $250,000 for feasibility work. All four topic areas apply AI to accelerate science: scaling the biotechnology revolution, AI for quantum computing and networking, materials with predictable functionality, and AI-driven autonomous laboratories. That puts advanced energy, advanced computing and bioscience inside a single solicitation and maps unusually well onto national-lab spinout technology in New Mexico.

Genesis is DOE’s first release, not its only one — the broader Phase I is the one to plan around

The Genesis Mission competition covers four AI-for-science topic areas, which leaves most of DOE’s traditional small-business portfolio unaddressed so far this fiscal year. DOE has signalled a broader Phase I funding opportunity — wider than the four Genesis topics — later in the year, alongside Phase II opportunities for firms advancing existing work toward commercialization. For New Mexico companies in clean energy, grid, storage, advanced nuclear and scientific instrumentation, that second release matters more than Genesis does. DOE publishes topics roughly a month before the funding opportunity itself and then allows about three weeks for a two-page letter of intent, so the useful move now is to watch the DOE SBIR/STTR page for the topics drop rather than wait on the formal announcement — the LOI window is the part that catches firms short.

NSF’s November 4 deadline means the mandatory Project Pitch clock runs out this month

NSF restarted SBIR/STTR under solicitation NSF 26-510 with roughly $250 million across Phase I, Phase II, Fast-Track and Strategic Breakthrough awards. The first post-relaunch full-proposal deadline passed July 27; the next is Wednesday, November 4, 2026, followed by March 4, 2027. Phase I runs up to $305,000 over 6–18 months with no matching-funds requirement — among the most founder-friendly terms in the federal portfolio — and Phase II up to $1.25 million over 24 months. Because NSF is field-agnostic within deep tech, it reaches all four NM FAST sectors, and a companion instrumentation-focused solicitation runs a $40 million pilot on the same calendar. The catch is the gate: an invited Project Pitch is mandatory before any Phase I proposal, pitches reopened June 2, and NSF review takes about three weeks. A firm that has not yet pitched can still make November — but not if September passes first.

AFWERX now runs to the September 23 close — a little over four weeks of runway

Air Force and Space Force SBIR/STTR solicitations track the DoD component calendar, with published close dates of 08/19/2026 and 09/23/2026. The August window closed four days ago, so September 23 on the Release 5 schedule is the next component close. Four and a half weeks is enough to build a considered package rather than a rushed one, and the single strongest differentiator in an Air Force evaluation remains a documented end-user relationship — Kirtland AFB, AFRL and the Space Rapid Capabilities Office put those end users within driving distance of most New Mexico firms, which is a structural advantage worth spending this week on. Confirm current topic sets and dates against the AFWERX and SpaceWERX portals and DSIP before committing.

DARPA’s Release 5 topics: seafloor concrete printing, semantic ISR, species-agnostic cell culture

DARPA’s share of Release 5 is five SBIR topics and one STTR topic, covering underwater 3D concrete printing, semantic ISR communications, species-agnostic cell culture, open-architecture autonomous underwater vehicles and algorithm-discovery tooling — an unusually wide spread that reaches computing, autonomy and bioscience in one release. DARPA has also moved to a monthly rhythm for FY26, pre-releasing new topics on the first Wednesday of each month, so the next batch after Release 5 lands Wednesday, September 2, 2026. The practical consequence for New Mexico computing and autonomy firms is that a missed topic is no longer a year-long wait — but the compressed four-week submission window rewards firms that keep teaming agreements, past-performance narratives and cost volumes staged in advance rather than assembled after a topic appears.

NASA’s rolling BAA: Appendix 2026C is expected later this year, so registration is the whole game

NASA replaced its single annual solicitation window with a Broad Agency Announcement issued April 17, 2026 and valid through September 30, 2027, releasing Phase I subtopics through phased appendices instead. The PY2026 Phase I appendices — 2026A SBIR, 2026B SBIR and 2026B STTR — closed May 21, 2026, and Appendix 2026C is expected later this year. Usefully, NASA limits proposals per appendix and resets the count at the next one, so a firm that submitted to 2026B is not locked out of 2026C. Maximum award values rose 50% under the new structure: Phase I now tops out at $225,000 and Phase II at $1,275,000 — a material change to the competitive math for New Mexico space and sensing companies. With a rolling BAA the announcement-to-deadline window is short, so finishing ProSAMS registration now, rather than when 2026C drops, is the difference between competing and watching.

NCI’s Innovative Concept Award is a lower-barrier Phase I lane closing September 21

Beyond the September 8 omnibus receipt date, the National Cancer Institute’s SBIR Innovative Concept Award Phase I program carries its own September 21, 2026 deadline. The concept-award route is built for earlier-stage, higher-risk ideas than a standard Phase I, which makes it a reasonable first federal application for a New Mexico bioscience firm not yet ready to compete against the full omnibus pool — and its later date gives a firm that slips past September 8 somewhere to land. Confirm the current notice text and eligibility directly with NCI before building to that date, since concept-award terms differ from the parent SBIR.

Thirty-eight days to the end of FY2026 — and the submission caps that arrive with FY2027

The Small Business Innovation and Economic Security Act of 2026 (S. 3971) cleared the Senate March 3 by voice vote and the House March 17 by 345–41, and was signed into law April 13, 2026, extending SBIR and STTR through September 30, 2031 — the longest authorization in program history — and ending a six-month lapse that had halted new awards across federal agencies. The law authorizes roughly $6 billion. With FY2026 ending September 30, agencies are compressing solicitations to obligate funds, which is precisely why the deadlines on this page stack into the next five weeks.

Three provisions matter most for planning. A new Phase II “Strategic Breakthrough” funding vehicle carries a $30 million ceiling and applies to agencies whose annual required SBIR expenditures exceed $100 million. Enhanced foreign-risk screening now applies to every application, covering ownership, patents, employee backgrounds and financial ties to countries of concern — agencies must state the basis for any security-based denial, and waivers are capped at 5% of an agency’s topics per year with congressional notification inside 30 days. And beginning in FY2027, each agency sets its own proposal caps limiting how many Phase I and Phase II proposals a company may submit, on a per-company, per-solicitation or per-topic basis; those initial limits were due no later than July 3, 2026. Firms with foreign investors or offshore development should get ahead of the disclosure now rather than at award, and firms that have relied on submission volume need a different strategy starting next October.