STEP – Investment – Development and Production of Critical Technologies (OP TAK)

NEXTCHAIN – Building Europe's Future Value Chains is a grant-adjacent program from Enterprise Europe Network that connects tech providers, businesses, and research institutions for cross-border innovation and collaboration across Europe. The initiative is organized within the Enterprise Europe Network framework and facilitates matchmaking events to spark partnerships focused on building Europe's future value chains. Registration is open through October 9, 2026. Eligible participants include technology providers, businesses, and research institutions. The program aims to foster collaborative projects that strengthen European industrial competitiveness and support the development of sustainable, innovative value chains.

GeoPEX is AFRL's standing open broad agency announcement for geospatial intelligence processing and exploitation, and it is one of the more practical routes into Air Force AI funding for teams working on imagery and sensor analytics. The announcement covers research, development, integration, test and evaluation of technologies providing geospatial intelligence in all its forms and from any source - imagery, imagery intelligence, or geospatial data and information. The AI-relevant content sits in its emphasis on full-spectrum GEOINT, AI and machine learning techniques for imagery exploitation, multi-source data integration and sensor fusion, autonomous geospatial reasoning, intelligent processing pipelines, cloud-based high-performance computing and photogrammetry. The mechanics are what distinguish it from a conventional solicitation. It is an open, two-step BAA effective until 30 September 2026: initial submissions are white papers only, and full proposals are accepted by invitation. That structure is a significant advantage for smaller teams, because the cost of entry is a white paper rather than a full proposal package, and AFRL uses the white paper stage to steer effort toward technically relevant work before anyone invests in a formal proposal. Submissions are accepted on a rolling basis rather than against a single closing date, so timing against AFRL fiscal-year funding cycles matters more than any published deadline. Individual awards normally run 250,000 to 10,000,000 dollars over up to 24 months, against approximately 99.9 million dollars of total BAA funding. The full announcement and submission instructions are posted on SAM.gov.

ONR's Long Range BAA is the standing front door to Navy and Marine Corps science and technology funding, and it is the vehicle most AI and autonomy researchers should be using rather than waiting for a topic-specific call. It accepts proposals on a rolling basis - the FY25 announcement, N00014-25-S-B001, runs through 30 September 2026 at 2:00 PM EST - and covers the full ONR portfolio, with AI-relevant priorities concentrated in autonomous maritime systems, human-machine teaming, and machine learning for sensor fusion and decision support. ONR's 2026 science and technology strategy tied programs to explicit transition paths, which changes what a competitive proposal looks like: the naval-unique problem underneath the AI method now has to be legible, and a general-purpose ML advance with a thin naval framing reads poorly. Firms with commercially mature AI, autonomy or sensing products are often better served by acquisition and rapid-fielding vehicles, reserving LRBAA proposals for genuine research questions. Practically, the process runs white paper first then full proposal on invitation, and identifying the right ONR program officer before writing anything is the single highest-leverage step - the BAA lists technical points of contact by division and proposals that arrive without prior program officer contact rarely advance. Seven amendments to the FY25 BAA were issued, so working from the current amended document matters.