DOD to award $50M to accelerate development of emerging tech projects
SIMI VALLEY, Calif. — The Pentagon announced Saturday that it selected five small, non-traditional defense contractors to receive funding to help move their emerging technologies into production.
Each company will receive $10 million under the Accelerate the Procurement and Fielding of Innovative Technologies (APFIT) pilot program overseen by Heidi Shyu, undersecretary of defense for research and engineering. The awards mark the first batch of APFIT funding distributed in fiscal 2025 and they’re being bankrolled through continuing resolution appropriations.
“With the backing of APFIT, these companies have an opportunity to push their innovations over the finish line,” Shyu said in a statement. “We look forward to supporting additional projects important to warfighters as more funding is appropriated.”
APFIT is intended to steer existing innovation projects across the so-called “valley of death” — a phenomenon in which emerging technologies that have successful research-and-development efforts with the Defense Department fail to receive additional funding for production.
The Pentagon did not disclose which companies will receive funding in the latest tranche as it is still finalizing contracts for the selected programs, which include:
- U.S. Special Operations Command Advanced Tactical Flotation Systems
- The Air Force’s Athena – Counter Unmanned Aerial System (C-UAS) Fused Air Picture
- The Air Force’s Small Unmanned Aircraft Defense (SUADS)
- The Army’s Coral Drift
- The Marine Corps’ Software-defined Tactical Optical Modem for Performance and Ruggedization (STOMPeR)
During a meeting with reporters at the Reagan National Defense Forum on Saturday, Shyu said that choosing capabilities for APFIT is determined by the needs of combatant commands, the individual services and the Joint Staff.
“What we’re doing is we’re looking at the priorities by each of the services, map it to the programs to see which one is the highest set of priorities, and we fund those first,” she said.
Since it was created in fiscal 2022, Congress has tripled the initiative’s budget — allocating $300 million to the effort in FY24. Funding through the pilot program is used to mature production lines, initiate low-rate initial production or augment existing funds to scale production quantities.
The Pentagon has already awarded 17 projects for APFIT across two tranches in 2024 — four in February and 13 in April. Shyu noted that so far, the pilot program has helped deliver new capabilities to warfighters and demonstrated their effectiveness to the other services. For example, she highlighted that one technology that received funding through APFIT was delivered to the Navy, and since then the Marine Corps, Army and Air Force have all bought the same capability.
“I talk to some of these APFIT companies, and they tell me it is utterly a game-changer for them,” Shyu said. “It has helped them to break into the market [and] get into production, and now all the other services are banging on the door.”
