ARLINGTON, Va. – U.S. military researchers are asking industry for innovative ideas in math, computation, and processing; complex, dynamic, and intelligent systems; sensing, measuring, and affecting; and materials, manufacturing, and structures.
Officials of the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in Arlington, Va., issued a pitch-day solicitation (DARPA-PA-26-01) on Thursday asking for ideas with the potential to create strategic surprise in pursuit of national security goals. Companies submitting promising ideas will be asked to present them publicly on 14 Jan. 2026 in the Orlando, Fla., area.
The DARPA Defense Science Office (DSO) seeks to identify and sponsor technologies with the potential to grow into ground-breaking DARPA programs that involve first-time or non-traditional proposers. Pitch day briefings will be at the Drury Plaza Hotel Orlando-Disney Springs, 2000 Hotel Plaza Blvd., in Lake Buena Vista, Fla.
Materials, manufacturing, and structures seeks to break tensions between performance, size, weight, power, efficiency, and resiliency for materials, devices, critical parts, and production processes.
Convert and transfer energy
Of interest are new multiscale and multiphysics materials, structures, interfaces, and fabrication approaches to phonon-engineered, hybrid, and nonequilibrium states of matter; ways to convert or transfer energy; and material systems for sensing and processing.
This can involve energetics and propulsion technologies; new means for on-site production; and new means for achieving resilience against shock, blast, and other high-energy impulses.
Also sought are ways to enable rapid fabrication of structures, as well as and joining different materials like metals and ceramics; new approaches to rapid, scalable, and distributed manufacturing and testing; and new ways of handling radiation energy to mitigate or harness high-energy radiation.
Sensing, measuring, and affecting involves ways to improve sensing, measurement, communications; quantum sensing and clock technologies; sensing and modeling ocean systems, space-weather phenomena and anomalies; new ways to control of nuclear reactions and processes; and new imaging and sensing technologies for dynamic cellular, molecular, and nanoscale biological processes.
Quantum computing
Math, computation, and processing involves enabling quantum and other new forms of computing for new military capabilities. This could involve new forms of ultra-low-power and ultra-high-performance computational substrates and architectures like compositional and adaptive architectures that support non-volatile, analog, radiation-hardened, in-memory compute, and reversible computing.
This also could involve new qubit architectures such as DNA scaffolding and synthetic biomolecules for scalable quantum information processing; and nonlinear wave propagation and scattering models in oceanic environments.
Complex, dynamic, and intelligent systems able to evolve and adapt over time for which traditional reductionist, data-driven, and statistical methods fail. Systems that exhibit these features include multiscale, dynamic physical systems; foundations of intelligence; human-AI ecosystems; decision-support; homeostatic mechanisms; and global systems.
Complex systems
Also involved are new methods for measuring or characterizing complex systems, such as complex physical, biological, and collaborative hybrid or agentic systems. Also of interest are ways of characterizing and predicting vulnerabilities in complex collective systems; and new forms of measurement for determining what needs to be measured to characterize dynamic, homeostatic, and temporally sensitive biological processes for human or models of human function.
Companies interested should submit abstracts to the DARPA BAA Tool no later than 27 Oct. 2025 online at https://baa.darpa.mil. Invitations to present on Pitch Day should go out around 19 Nov. 2025.
Email questions or concerns to DARPA at [email protected]. More information is online at https://sam.gov/workspace/contract/opp/e129f520df1c4209b8bea123e271d2ec/view.
