The $50 Million Club: Inside SBIR Success Stories
There are actually 2 types of SBIR Overachievers.
Defense Scoop recently kicked this topic back into the spotlight with a powerful op-ed about “Multi Award Winners” (MAWs). “SBIR Mills are draining America’s innovation fund”
They are spot-on about the disproportionate amount of SBIR dollars going to a small number of research firms. Those companies excel at capturing awards from any and all types of SBIR solicitations. They are a prime example of how refined proposal writing and understanding the SBIR process gives companies a massive edge.
This is why it’s so critical to get professional help if you want to win SBIR contracts.
Check out the top performers by total award value over the last 5 years
Here are the top 26 (of 9,000+) companies that won a SBIR contract over the time period. These 26 companies averaged around $50M over just 5 years.
Just 1.5% of companies make up the top 25% of SBIR dollars.
By contrast, the median Total Award Value of all 9,287 companies is too small to even show up on this graph.
This sounds like it’s all bad news for the average small business, but not so fast.
Next, let’s break down the total award value by Year:
This graph breaks out the total award values by year and reveals something VERY interesting.
Now we can see that there are at least 2 major categories of overachievers in terms of SBIR funding.
While most of the top tier won a relatively consistent number of awards over 5 years, 20% of the top companies by SBIR award value have 1 massive award year. These are all due to a single TACFI or STRATFI award. You can learn all about that program from AFWERX here.
20% of the top performers in the SBIR program are companies that won a STRATFI or TACFI contract.
This program is offered by the Air Force and Space Force and it will catapult any company into the top 1% of all companies that have ever won a SBIR.
These companies are the ultimate success stories of the SBIR program with a clear path to commercial transition and new contracts with the War Department, outside of the SBIR program. This also means that these are some of the most competitive SBIR-related programs, and worth investing significantly in proposal development.
Below you can see a handful of the standout award winners. This visual isn’t fully up to date, due to delays in reporting to sbir.gov.
This graph only includes contract awards over $3M, eliminating all normal SBIR Phase I and Phase IIs.