DOE's Fall 2026 SBIR/STTR Call: 25 Topics, About 160 Awards, and a Pitch Due December 16

The Department of Energy is promoting its new small business call with a $200 million figure. The number that matters to an applicant is smaller: about 160 Phase I awards, each up to $300,000, adding up to no more than $50 million. The $200 million is DOE's estimate of what the cohort could draw across every phase it unlocks. The Phase II money exists only for companies that hit their Phase I milestones.

That distinction is the key to the Fall 2026 SBIR/STTR Phase I opportunity, which DOE announced on October 30, 2026. It is the department's first broad, multi-office solicitation since the Small Business Innovation and Economic Security Act reauthorized the programs through September 30, 2031. It is also the first full-scale test of a process DOE has rebuilt almost entirely. "We fundamentally redesigned the SBIR/STTR programs from the ground up," said Anthony Pugliese, DOE's Chief Commercialization Officer and Director of the Office of Technology Commercialization (OTC).

Pitches are due Wednesday, December 16, 2026, at 2:00 p.m. Eastern, through the DOE SBIR/STTR Application Hub run by ConnectWerx. DOE will not accept late submissions.

What Changed: One Door, a Pitch, and Fixed-Price Milestones

Until this year, a DOE SBIR applicant worked with the Office of Science's SBIR/STTR Programs Office. That meant twice-yearly topic releases, a mandatory letter of intent, a full Phase I proposal on a cost-reimbursement budget, and a separate Phase II competition a year later. DOE has replaced all of it.

The program now sits in OTC. Day-to-day management goes to ConnectWerx, DOE's partnership intermediary, which ATI operates. Submissions go through ATI's Acquisition Management Portal (AMP), not Grants.gov or PAMS. Four structural changes follow:

• Pitch first, then invitation. Each applicant submits a structured pitch: four narrative questions, three short-answer questions and seven structured selection questions, each with a word limit, plus an optional bibliography PDF of 5 MB or less. Screeners check topic alignment, compliance, technical promise, commercialization potential and team qualifications. Only invited pitches go on to a full proposal.
• Fast-Track by default. Awards are fixed-price, milestone-based instruments that combine Phase I and Phase II. Phase I is now the entry point to the whole pathway, not a stand-alone feasibility grant.
• Go/no-go gates in place of a second competition. At the end of Phase I, DOE decides whether to continue based on technical progress and commercial potential. Selected companies then negotiate Phase II milestones before money flows. DOE says only a subset will continue.
• No second chances on a pitch. Declined pitches get brief standardized feedback and cannot be resubmitted in this cycle.

A pilot preceded this process. The $10 million Genesis Mission Phase I round, which closed September 10, was the first DOE opportunity run through OTC and ConnectWerx, with about 40 awards across four AI-for-science areas. The Fall call puts the same model to work across 25 topics.

Where the 160 Awards Actually Are

DOE's program page lists 25 topics, and the announcement highlights grid innovation, nuclear detonation detection and cybersecurity. The per-topic award estimates in the solicitation materials, summarized by BW&CO, give a different picture. Those estimates add up to 155 awards, against a headline target of about 160:

Four patterns stand out.

The science-facility topics are the largest pool. More than half of the expected awards, about 80 of 155, sit in topics that used to belong to the Office of Science SBIR program. Bioengineering and quantum science-based sensors (16 awards), AI-driven materials and molecular systems discovery (13), novel X-ray and neutron instrumentation (12) and fusion fuel cycle technologies (12) are four of the five largest topics. A company building detectors, sensors, beamline hardware or scientific software is in the deepest part of the competition.

Hydrocarbons and geothermal is the largest applied topic by far. It expects 14 awards, nearly a third of the applied-energy pool, and close to three times the five awards each for batteries, transportation and power management. The split matches the administration's energy priorities. Companies working on subsurface sensing, drilling, enhanced geothermal or produced-water treatment should read that topic before anything else.

The highlighted topics are small. Cybersecurity, resilience and energy system risk mitigation expects one award, nuclear detonation detection two, and grid innovations three. A pitch in one of those topics is competing for a handful of slots, so pick it only if your technology fits the topic closely.

Nuclear energy is a steady middle tier. Each of the four nuclear topics expects about six awards. With reactor developers multiplying, supply-chain and enabling-technology companies (sensors, materials qualification, fuel handling, waste-form characterization) may find better odds here than in the crowded reactor-concepts space.

Eligibility Rules That Trip Up First-Time Applicants

The basics haven't changed: a for-profit firm with a U.S. place of business, 500 or fewer employees including affiliates, and at least 51 percent ownership and control by U.S. citizens or permanent residents (or by a qualifying small business). All R&D must take place in the United States. Some details matter more under the new model:

• No VC-majority firms. DOE does not accept companies majority-owned by multiple venture capital, hedge fund or private equity firms. Some agencies permit this under the statute's VC-majority authority. A heavily venture-backed startup should check its cap table before writing a pitch.
• SBIR versus STTR. Under SBIR, the PI's primary employment must be with the company, and the company must perform at least two-thirds of the Phase I work. Under STTR, the company needs a formal U.S. nonprofit research partner, which can be most national laboratories. The company must do at least 40 percent of the work and the partner at least 30 percent, under a written IP agreement.
• National lab partners need paperwork, but not yet. A DOE or NNSA FFRDC can join a project with written authorization from its cognizant DOE Agreements Officer. You don't need that authorization to submit, but the lab cannot start work without it. Starting the request in December avoids a delay at award time.
• Three pitches maximum. A company may submit up to three pitches, one topic each. If it submits more, only the last three count. Pitches can be edited until the deadline.

The reauthorization law also requires agencies to strengthen foreign-ownership and national-security due diligence before making awards. The Fall solicitation materials don't describe a separate DOE screening step, but applicants with foreign investors, foreign-national key personnel or overseas manufacturing partners should expect questions during full-proposal review.

How to Use the Next Six Weeks

The calendar is short and front-loaded. DOE is posting video topic summaries on November 13, then holding office hours on November 19 and December 1 (both at 3:00 p.m. ET). A workable sequence:

1. Request an AMP account now. The portal requires registration before you can respond, and account delays are a common way to miss a deadline.
2. Choose topics by award depth, not by headline. Use the table above. A strong pitch in a 12-to-16-award topic has better odds than an equally strong pitch in a one-award topic.
3. Write for the screener's five criteria. The pitch is scored on alignment, compliance, technical promise, commercialization and team. Each narrative answer should cover at least one of those directly. Leave out proprietary details, which the solicitation prohibits at the pitch stage.
4. Plan Phase I as milestones. Because awards are fixed-price and milestone-based, your full proposal will need verifiable deliverables, not just a list of tasks. Draft the milestones now, so the invitation doesn't leave you building them in a week.
5. Budget for the full $306,500. The $300,000 ceiling rises to $306,500 with Technical and Business Assistance (TABA). Most first-time awardees benefit from TABA-funded commercialization help, and it doesn't come out of the research budget.

Treat third-party summaries with care. At least one aggregator page about this opportunity currently says the deadline has already passed. The ConnectWerx hub and DOE's program page are the only authoritative sources for dates and topic text.

The redesign gives DOE more control over which companies advance, and gives applicants a cheaper first step: a structured pitch costs far less to write than the old full Phase I proposal. When that pitch turns into an invitation, Granted can help you turn the milestone plan and commercialization story into a full proposal on DOE's timeline.