Any award occurring after a company’s first AFVentures award is tagged as potential Phase III impact. All awards a company received prior to working with AFVentures are excluded from consideration. This data collection approach returns $1.42 billion in government funding following an award through the Open Topic. Exploring this data further, we find that companies’ receiving their first Air Force SBIR/STTR award through the Open Topic represent 53% of all post-award government funding.
The Open Topic has supported 538 testing or prototyping projects with over 300 offices or units across all Air Force major commands as well as the US Space Force. The diversity of organizations participating is a strong validation of the Open Topic’s user need driven, decentralized model, and has directly contributed to the $1.4B in follow-on non-SBIR/STTR DoD contracts.
That was a nice AFVentures Impact Report for 2018-2020 presented by former Acquisition Talk guest, Jason Rathje. Basically, AFVentures provided $710M in SBIR/STTR Phase I and II funding, while partner organizations in the Air Force provided roughly double that amount in follow-on work for those companies. Moreover, the companies received $2.2B in private funding following their award from AFVentures. So private follow-on investment provided three dollars for every two dollars DoD brought.
Looking at the chart above, I’m surprised that all the government follow on funding came from Air Force elements. None of the companies were able to break into Navy, Army, SOCOM, or other agencies? The way the report was written, it looks like they captured all FPDS obligations data, not just for the Air Force.
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