Technology News, Cybersecurity

$200M DOE fund targets energy and national security innovation

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October 30, 2026 by Ivy Delaney

More than $200 million in federal funding will become available this fall to small businesses focused on energy and national security technologies through the Department of Energy’s Small Business Innovation Research and Small Business Technology Transfer programs. The Fall 2026 funding release represents a milestone for the restructured programs, now managed by the DOE’s Office of Technology Commercialization and streamlined through its Partnership Intermediary, ConnectWerx.

“Under President Trump’s leadership, we’ve fundamentally redesigned the SBIR/STTR programs,” said Anthony Pugliese, DOE Chief Commercialization Officer and Director of the Office of Technology Commercialization, “to make them more accessible, more dynamic, and more productive.” The programs prioritize projects demonstrating both technical merit and commercial viability, aiming to accelerate innovation from research to market.

DOE Restructures SBIR/STTR Programs for Enhanced Commercialization

This new approach is embedded within the Fall 2026 Phase I funding cycle, which provides over $200 million for American small businesses pursuing technologies in areas like grid innovation and nuclear detonation detection. Phase I now functions as the initial screening stage, with companies first submitting pitches to prove the feasibility of their concepts before competing for subsequent funding rounds. ConnectWerx, DOE’s designated Partnership Intermediary, is central to these changes, streamlining the application process and reducing administrative burdens for applicants.

The programs’ restructuring reflects an effort to accelerate the translation of research into practical applications, with decisions to continue funding made between phases based on both technical progress and potential market impact. This tiered system ensures that only projects demonstrating strong potential receive continued federal investment, maximizing the return on each dollar allocated.

Prospective applicants have until December 16, 2026, to submit their Phase I pitches through the DOE SBIR/STTR Application Hub, with the topics spanning a range of critical areas beyond energy, including cybersecurity solutions. The restructuring of the SBIR/STTR programs aligns with broader priorities to bolster U.S. technological leadership and national security, according to the Department. By prioritizing commercial potential alongside technical feasibility, the DOE intends to bridge the gap between early-stage research and the marketplace, supporting a more dynamic and productive innovation ecosystem for American small businesses.

Under President Trump’s leadership, we’ve fundamentally redesigned the SBIR/STTR programs from the ground up to make them more accessible, more dynamic, and much more productive.

Anthony Pugliese, DOE Chief Commercialization Officer and Director of the Office of Technology Commercialization
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Ivy Delaney

Ivy Delaney has been working with neural networks and machine learning since the mid-nineties, back when a couple of hidden layers and a long afternoon of training counted as ambitious. She has watched the field go from academic curiosity to the thing quietly running underneath everything, and she brings that long view to quantum computing. For Quantum Zeitgeist she covers the ground where the two fields meet. That means quantum machine learning and the variational algorithms it leans on, and it also means the less glamorous but more interesting story of classical machine learning already doing real work inside quantum machines, decoding error-correcting codes, calibrating noisy hardware and learning the error models that simulators depend on. She writes about the hardware those algorithms have to run on too, and about the post-quantum cryptography scramble that the same hardware has set off. Her stories typically start with the paper, whether that is peer-reviewed work, conference proceedings or an arXiv preprint, with the source linked so you can hold a claim up against the research it came from. She is unimpressed by benchmarks that will not say what they beat, and by demonstrations that only work in the press release.

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