DARPA's MMoMA BAA Wants One Beam to Replace a Materials Lab — Abstracts Due July 8

SBIR/STTR small business founders working in materials analysis have a fresh DARPA opening: Defense Sciences Office Broad Agency Announcement HR001126S0013 — Multi Modal Materials Analysis (MMoMA) — went live on grants.gov on June 17, with abstracts due July 8, 2026.

The BAA is short-fuse, narrowly scoped, and unusually concrete about what DARPA wants built. For founders who have spent the last two years pitching multimodal sensor stacks into LOIs that never converted, this is the kind of programmatic anchor that turns a hardware roadmap into a Phase I-style contract. The proposers day registration window has already closed — registration ended at 4 p.m. ET on June 9 — but the abstract submission window has not. Read the program description carefully, decide whether your stack maps to "one beam, lots of different sensors," and write fast.

What HR001126S0013 actually says

The primary posting is on grants.gov at search-results-detail/362859, with the DARPA program page at darpa.mil/research/programs/multi-modal-materials-analysis carrying the technical pitch. MMoMA sits inside DSO under program manager Thomas Schenkel, who joined DARPA in May 2024 from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, where he ran a portfolio spanning accelerator physics, qubits, and fusion in the Accelerator Technology and Applied Physics Division. Schenkel also runs MARRS (a fusion-rates program) and QuSeN (quantum sensing), which is a useful signal: his BAAs tend to fund teams that can move between accelerator hardware, beam physics, and detector electronics without dropping the baton.

The MMoMA goal, stripped of agency boilerplate: build a device that can interrogate any sample — organic, inorganic, or special nuclear material — at ambient conditions, with zero sample preparation, using a single excitation source whose intensity can be tuned continuously and a suite of detectors that catch whatever comes off the sample. DARPA frames the program around three questions: what can we actually measure today with beams and sensors that can be adapted from existing hardware; how can those components be integrated so the whole exceeds the sum of its parts; and how does data fusion across simultaneous modalities yield insights that sequential, separated measurements never produce.

The near-term thesis is fundamental research. The longer-term thesis is field-deployable hardware — a single, portable instrument that replaces a wall of XRF, Raman, mass spec, and neutron-activation gear with one box. The use cases DARPA names openly include manufacturing quality assurance, supply chain integrity, attribution of unknown samples, and CBRN environmental screening. The unstated use case is the one customs inspectors, IAEA monitors, and forward-deployed troops have been asking for since the early 2000s.

Why this matters for small businesses

MMoMA is not labeled an SBIR topic, and DSO BAAs typically award procurement contracts or Other Transaction Agreements rather than SBIR Phase I/II grants. That has two implications founders should internalize before drafting an abstract.

First, eligibility is broad. DSO office-wide and program BAAs are open to companies of any size, universities, FFRDCs, and non-traditional defense contractors. Small businesses are not advantaged — but they are not disadvantaged either, and DSO has a multi-decade track record of funding seed-stage hardware teams that came in with a credible PI and a defensible technical approach. If you are a two-physicist startup with a working bench prototype, your odds against a national-lab proposal are real.

Second, the dollar mechanics are different from a standard SBIR. Procurement contracts and OTs have no statutory ceiling the way SBIR Phase I does, but they also do not come with the SBIR sole-source Phase III bridge. If your commercialization plan depends on a Phase III sole-source pathway into a DOD program of record, you should plan to chase a DARPA SBIR topic in parallel rather than treating MMoMA as a substitute. The DARPA SBIR/STTR program releases topics monthly; MMoMA-adjacent topics from DSO and the Microsystems Technology Office have appeared in prior solicitations and are worth watching at grantedai.com/blog for the next release cadence.

The abstract bar

DSO BAAs generally treat abstracts as strongly encouraged but not formally required, and the abstract phase exists primarily so DARPA can issue a "not of interest" letter before proposers spend three months on a full proposal. For MMoMA, with a July 8 abstract deadline and the BAA itself only posted on June 17, you have roughly three weeks. That is not enough time to design new hardware. It is enough time to map an existing capability onto MMoMA's framework and write a credible 3-to-5 page concept paper.

The abstract should answer four questions concretely:

1. What excitation source are you proposing, and what is its intensity-tunability range? MMoMA explicitly wants continuously variable intensity from a single source. If your team is proposing electron beams, neutron generators, X-ray tubes, lasers, or any hybrid, the BAA wants the dynamic range characterized, not asserted.
2. Which detection modalities does that source enable simultaneously? This is the "lots of different sensors" half of the pitch. The point is not breadth for its own sake — it is which modalities are physically coherent with a single beam at the same sample point and time window.
3. What does your data-fusion approach add? Schenkel's framing — "the whole exceeds the sum of its parts" — is a tell. Proposals that bolt a generic ML model onto separately calibrated channels will not score well. Proposals that show why joint inference across modalities recovers material attributes that no single channel can resolve will.
4. What is your path to ambient operation with zero sample prep? This is the operational constraint that distinguishes a lab instrument from a deployable one, and it is where most accelerator-based proposals will fail review. If your beamline needs vacuum, you need to explain how the sample interface handles that without prep.

Do not waste the abstract on team credentials, facilities, or commercialization narrative. DSO reviewers know how to look those up. They are reading the abstract to decide whether the physics is sound and whether your team understands what DARPA is actually asking for.

Timeline and process

• June 17, 2026: BAA HR001126S0013 posted to grants.gov and SAM.gov.
• June 23, 2026: Virtual proposers day, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. ET. Registration closed June 9; recordings may be made available through DARPA's BAA tool.
• July 8, 2026: Abstract submission deadline. This is the next active gate for founders who did not make the proposers day cutoff.
• Following abstracts: DARPA issues "of interest" or "not of interest" feedback. Teams encouraged to proceed submit full proposals on a schedule the BAA will specify.

Founders who missed proposers day registration should still submit an abstract. DSO does not require proposers day attendance, and the program description and the BAA document together contain the substantive scope. The proposers day is a useful Q&A forum, not a gating step.

What to do this week

If you are running a hardware startup with any of: tunable X-ray or electron-beam source IP, novel detector arrays (silicon drift, micro-calorimeter, gas-filled, scintillator-with-novel-readout), neutron-active interrogation capability, or multimodal data-fusion software validated against real spectral data — pull the BAA from grants.gov today and start a concept-paper draft. Three weeks is tight but tractable for a focused team. If you do not have an in-house PI with publications in the relevant physics, find a university collaborator now; DSO weights PI credibility heavily, and the abstract phase is where unfamiliar names get filtered.

For founders who want to see whether MMoMA-adjacent SBIR topics are open elsewhere in DOD, run a targeted search on Granted: grants?q=materials+analysis+SBIR&utm_source=newsjack-curated will surface active solicitations across DARPA, Army, Navy, and Air Force where your hardware stack may fit a parallel funding path. Stacking a DSO contract with an SBIR Phase II from a service component is how most successful DARPA hardware spinouts have funded the bridge from TRL 4 to TRL 6.

The MMoMA BAA is not the largest defense materials-science opportunity of 2026, but it is one of the few that names a buildable instrument rather than a research theme. For founders who have been waiting for DARPA to ask the question their hardware already answers, this is the abstract worth writing this month.