About $2.10M for an SBIR Phase III on AI/ML-enabled data fabric — the stage where a research award becomes ordinary procurement, and only 5 records here reach it (Shipcom Federal Solutions)

1What Phase III signifies

SBIR proceeds in stages: Phase I examines whether an idea is feasible, Phase II builds and demonstrates a prototype. Phase III comes after, leaving behind the character of a research award for procurement of something the government will actually use. Mechanisms exist allowing Phase III awards without the usual competition, so technology that reaches it has travelled from a small research effort into government procurement.

Of the 222 federal spending records this site holds as of 2026-08-31, only five touch Phase III.

1. 1Phase IExamining whether an idea can be made to work
2. 2Phase IIBuilding and demonstrating a prototype
3. 3Phase IIILeaving research funding behind, procured for the government to use

2Data fabric as the subject

What the description names is a data fabric — the idea of connecting data held by separate systems scattered across an organization so it can be used without being moved. What an organization wanting to use AI first runs into is not model performance but data that does not line up, and the foundation for fixing that has become the subject of procurement.

The records this site holds include other contracts covering automated data-quality correction and data preparation, so contracts to buy AI and contracts to make AI usable sit side by side.

3The same topic reaching two companies

The records this site holds contain one more contract referencing the same SBIR topic AF221-DCSO1: an award of about $3.00 million to Illumination Works, described as a sequential Phase II. One topic has produced contracts for multiple companies at different stages. Without grouping by topic number, the two simply sit as unrelated small awards.

Whether Phase I and other Phase II contracts fall within the range of these records has not been confirmed.