Learning Happens Here Field Trip Fund

The Solutions Marketplace is IARPA's attempt to remove the single biggest barrier between a small AI company and the intelligence community: the multi-month proposal burden required before anyone in government even sees what you built. Instead of a written proposal against a specific BAA topic, innovators submit a five-minute unclassified video pitch and basic supporting information through an online portal. Submissions are reviewed by subject matter experts drawn from the IC, industry and academia; those judged awardable are tagged by strategic focus area and made visible to authorized government users across the community, who can then pursue the technology through their own acquisition vehicles. The mechanics matter for planning: the call is open on a rolling basis from August 1, 2026 through July 31, 2027, with assessments conducted monthly, so there is no single deadline to hit and a company can time a submission to when its capability is demonstrable rather than when a solicitation happens to open. Eligibility is deliberately wide - open to all U.S.-based companies traditional and nontraditional, large and small business, new entrants, universities, nonprofits and individuals - which makes it one of the lowest-friction federal entry points for an AI startup with no prior government past performance. The important caveat is what the Marketplace is not. It is not itself a grant or a funded award; being tagged awardable creates visibility and a rapid acquisition pathway, not money. Companies should treat a submission as business development into the IC with an unusually cheap cost of entry, and should be prepared for the follow-on contracting effort with whichever IC element expresses interest. Submissions go through iarpamarketplace.us, with program information at iarpa.gov/marketplace, and IARPA posted a corresponding solicitation notice on SAM.gov. Submitted material must be unclassified.

Learning Happens Here Field Trip Fund is sponsored by NC Department of Natural and Cultural Resources (DNCR). This fund reimburses public schools and public charter schools for field trips to over 100 educational sites managed by the NC Department of Natural and Cultural Resources, including state parks, historic sites, and museums.

The NSF Cyber-Physical Systems program funds research on engineered systems that tightly integrate computation with physical components, and it has become one of the more natural homes for AI work that has to operate in the physical world under real-time constraints. NSF names the relevant core areas directly: control, data analytics, and machine learning including real-time learning for control, autonomy, design, and the Internet of Things - and states that the integration of artificial intelligence with cyber-physical systems, especially for real-time operation, creates new research opportunities. That framing matters because it identifies the gap CPS is actually trying to fill. A great deal of modern AI research assumes offline training and unconstrained inference; CPS is interested in the case where learning and inference happen inside a control loop with hard timing, safety and physical-dynamics constraints, which is a genuinely different research problem and one that fits poorly into purely computational AI programmes. For anyone working on autonomous vehicles, robotic systems in infrastructure, medical devices, smart grid, or industrial autonomy, CPS is often a better fit than either a core AI program or a robotics program, because it welcomes the systems-integration and verification questions those programmes tend to treat as out of scope. The three-track structure is the other thing to understand: Small awards up to USD 600,000 over 3 years suit a focused investigator-led project, Medium awards from USD 600,001 to USD 1,200,000 over 3 years suit a small multi-investigator team, and Frontier awards from USD 1,200,001 to USD 7,000,000 over 4 to 5 years are centre-scale efforts with their own separate deadline. Small and Medium proposals are accepted in year-long annual windows. Applicants should confirm the current governing solicitation number, as the programme is periodically re-issued.