DARPA designates 5 firms as 'Commercial Accelerators'

Five companies have won positions on a three-year, $25 million contract vehicle that puts them at the heart of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's mission of keeping the military's innovation engine running.

In that sense, the contract's size does not cover the entirety of its scope and specs. DARPA said Thursday that it enlisted these companies as Commercial Accelerators to facilitate the rapid commercialization and scale of technologies funded by the agency.

Capital Factory, CIMIT, FedTech, SRI International and Wireless Research Center will work with qualified DARPA-funded companies developing early-stage technologies the agency sees as having potentially significant impacts.

That group of five primes will be responsible for connecting the companies they work with to entrepreneurial talent and investor networks, providing them additional mentoring and other early-stage company building support, and developing strategies for ensuring the technologies can be scaled quickly.

DARPA has also tasked the awardees to help figure out what market inefficiencies and business risks stand in the way of bringing those technologies to the forefront of economic and national security.

DARPA received 39 bids in total for the contract, the Pentagon said in its Thursday awards digest.