Defense Sciences Office (DSO) Office-wide BAA

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Defense Sciences Office is soliciting proposals for innovative research approaches enabling revolutionary advances in science, devices, or systems for national security applications, with proposals and abstracts due August 27, 2027. The BAA explicitly excludes research resulting in evolutionary improvements to existing state of practice or manufacturing scale-up efforts.

Proposals must address one or more of four technical thrust areas: Materials, Manufacturing, and Energy Systems; Sensing, Measuring, and Affecting; Math, Computation, and Processing; or Complex, Dynamic, and Intelligent Systems. The submission process requires a mandatory pre-proposal phase in which proposers submit either an executive summary or abstract on a rolling basis for DARPA evaluation; DARPA will respond within 30 calendar days and proposers may proceed to full proposal submission regardless of the pre-proposal recommendation. Proposers may submit only one pre-proposal at a time and must await DARPA's response before submitting additional submissions.

Multiple award types are available: Procurement Contracts, Cooperative Agreements, Other Transactions for Research, and Other Transactions for Prototype, with multiple awards anticipated. An accelerated award option is available for proposals not exceeding $2,000,000, with DARPA committing to execute the resulting contract or Other Transaction agreement within 30 days of selection notification. University prime proposers may optionally include a Fundamental Defense Research Talent Award component providing up to $150,000 per year for eligible U.S. citizen graduate students or postdoctoral researchers. NAICS code is 541715. FFRDCs, UARCs, and government entities are ineligible. All Procurement Contracts and Other Transactions must demonstrate Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification Level 1 compliance at minimum, with some proposals requiring Level 2; Cooperative Agreement proposers are not required to achieve CMMC compliance. Evaluation criteria are overall scientific and technical merit, potential contribution to DARPA mission and national security technology base, and cost and schedule realism.