Most founders leave the biggest federal dollars on the table. Not because they don't qualify, but because they don't know the game
A $9.3M proposal submitted in a five week proposal window. A DARPA moonshot identified by someone else. This is what federal funding looks like when you're not navigating it alone
The companies winning the largest federal contracts aren't necessarily the best scientists, they're the ones who know how to navigate government procurement channels. The proposal isn't what trips founders up. It's the 900 pages around it
Most founders focused on healthcare innovation know the on-ramp to federal funding by heart: SBIR and STTR, the non-dilutive programs known collectively as America's Seed Fund that have launched thousands of early companies. And there's good news on that front: after a six-month lapse, Congress reauthorized both programs through 2031, and the agency solicitations are flowing again. Our team helps companies pursue these grants, guiding founders from opportunity identification through proposal development and into the Technical and Business Assistance (TABA) support that so many awardees leave on the table.
What fewer founders realize: SBIR/STTR funding is the floor, not the ceiling.
Above them sits a whole tier of federal funding. ARPA-H awards, BARDA contracts, DoD and CHIPS opportunities, cooperative agreements, other transaction authorities. The dollars are larger, the strategic upside is greater, and the door is effectively closed to any company trying to walk through it alone. These are the awards that can compress a decade of development into a few years. They are also, by almost any founder's account, opaque and resource-intensive, built for organizations with infrastructure most startups simply don't have.
Bon Ku of ARPA-H connects with attendees at the "AI Meets the Front Line" Think Tank, June 2025.
That gap between the opportunity and the ability to access it is exactly where the Science Center works.
The awards most startups never pursue — because they can't
A sophisticated federal proposal is not a grant application. The science is rarely what trips founders up. It's everything around the science: the proposal is closer to a government investment case, argued in the government's language, against its priorities, on its timeline. An ARPA-H submission can run to nearly a thousand pages. A DoD opportunity may require you to frame your technology in terms of national security and strategic competition rather than clinical benefit. Winning often hinges on a teaming agreement across multiple organizations, a hundred-page statement of work, a credible commercialization plan, and vendor documentation assembled under a five-week deadline. Running quietly underneath all of it is the same thing that shapes any industry: relationships, trust, and who you're working with matters. Federal grants and contracts are no exception.
The companies that reliably win large federal contracts tend to be the ones with in-house resources to navigate the process. For a startup with a breakthrough technology and a small team, the barrier isn't merit, it's access.
Rhythio: reframing the science to unlock a different kind of capital
Dr. Allison Post speaks during the panel with Dr. Kevin Baumlin, Dr. Rajan Jain, and Jeff O'Donnell at the Science Center's "From Innovation to Standard of Care" Think Tank
Led by founder and CEO Allison Post, PhD, Rhythio is developing a transformative approach to treating cardiac arrhythmias. The company offers a life-sustaining alternative to an existing option that is effective but painful and disruptive. That is the story that resonates with the clinical world.
Working with the Science Center opened a second, larger frame. Rhythio's underlying technology is, in effect, a human-machine interface that enables long-term electronic implants in the body, a capability that speaks directly to national priorities ranging from brain-computer interfaces to strategic technology competition. That reframing put an opportunity on the table Post wouldn't have identified on her own: a CHIPS award now under pursuit.
"I never would have found this opportunity by myself. My first reaction was, 'What do we possibly have to do with semiconductors?' But once we talked it through, it was obvious our platform had a role in enabling long-term implantable electronics. It just took someone who knew how to see it," she reflects.
Dr. Allison Post at the Science Center's "From Innovation to Standard of Care" Think Tank
For Post, it wasn't a pivot so much as an expansion. The cardiac application remains the beachhead; the technology underneath it simply speaks to a much wider set of priorities than one clinical market.
What made the pursuit possible was not a single service. It was the full stack of support around the science: strategic framing, a grant writer to translate the work into the language a federal investor expects, government affairs relationships that open siloed doors, and the administrative backbone to hold it all together.
"It's not just help writing a strong proposal. It's the advocacy, the compliance money management, the surge capacity, all of it. For an early-stage company, I need every one of those pieces."
For a scientist coming out of academia, that breadth mattered less than what it added up to: a guide through an entirely unfamiliar system.
"The Science Center has served as an interpreter of federal priorities, someone who knows the language, knows who to talk to, and knows what's a waste of time. As a scientist coming out of an academic setting, I could never have navigated this alone."
She is blunt about why that matters. These relationships took decades to build, and no founder can replicate them on a startup's timeline.
"These are 20-year relationships. I don't have 20 years to run around building that network myself. The Science Center already has, and I get to leverage all of it."
Hera Health Solutions: a DARPA moonshot, built on a relationship
Hera Health Solutions is an AI-enabled drug delivery platform company transforming existing medicines into long-acting therapies. By combining advanced nanofiber manufacturing with AI-driven formulation tools, the company helps pharmaceutical partners develop therapies that dose smarter and last longer — addressing one of healthcare's most persistent problems: effective medicines that fall short because of how frequently and inconsistently they have to be taken.
Co-Founder and CEO Idicula Mathew wasn't new to federal funding. The team had worked through SBIR programs and had previously held a Defense Health Agency contract applying their drug delivery technology to vaccine delivery. When the Science Center identified a DARPA opportunity, however, the door that opened was a different order of magnitude.
"The DARPA opportunity gave us a chance to think much bigger — beyond an individual drug program and toward an ambitious expansion of what our AI and manufacturing platform could potentially do," Mathew explains. "It's the kind of project where, if we can pull it off, the impact could be a real moonshot for both Hera and the broader field of advanced pharmaceutical manufacturing."
What made the difference wasn't just proposal support — it was the Science Center's existing knowledge of the company. As an alumnus of the Capital Readiness Program, the Science Center team already understood Hera's technology and commercialization strategy. That meant they could proactively surface the DARPA fit rather than waiting for Hera to bring them a solicitation to review.
Idicula Mathew of Hera Health Solutions networks with a fellow attendee, Capital Readiness Program Cohort 5
"The Science Center made a big difference throughout the process, starting with helping us identify an opportunity we may not otherwise have pursued," Mathew says. "They worked closely with us to interpret the agency's priorities, shape the positioning, and develop a proposal that connected our capabilities to what DARPA was seeking. They were a true collaborator throughout the process, and not simply a reviewer at the end."
The DARPA proposal also tested the team in a new way. Unlike the NIH-style proposals Hera's scientific team was accustomed to, where there is room to lay out detailed methodology and rationale, DARPA required communicating the big idea, why it matters, and why it could work, concisely. That shift, Mathew notes, was harder than they initially expected.
For Mathew, the Science Center's value was something a traditional grant consultant couldn't have replicated. "That combination of long-term company knowledge, commercialization perspective, and federal funding expertise is hard to replicate with a traditional grant consultant — and is a big part of why we've continued to value our relationship with the Science Center well beyond the Capital Readiness Program."
BioCurie: a nearly 1,000-page expedition, and a $9.3M ARPA-H award
The BioCurie Team
When BioCurie Co-founder and CEO Irene Rombel first encountered ARPA-H, the agency was barely a year old and few people understood how it worked. Her company had built an AI-powered platform designed to transform how cell and gene therapies are developed and manufactured—helping address the time, cost, and scalability barriers that can prevent these potentially life-changing medicines from reaching patients. What she didn't have was a map to the funding.
"We had the technology, we had people, but we just didn't know how to go from here to there to get that access to ARPA-H funding so we assumed it was a non-starter," she said.
It was the Science Center's Chief Medical Affairs Officer, Kevin Baumlin, who first suggested that she pursue ARPA-H funding and showed how the Science Center could help carry a proposal of that complexity. When the agency invited a full submission, BioCurie had roughly five weeks to produce what became nearly 1,000 pages of documentation: a technical plan with a 100-plus-page statement of work, a commercialization plan, a teaming agreement, and more. The Science Center's Federal Funding team, led by Heath Naquin, worked directly with Irene and her consortium to manage and coordinate the submission.
"We wouldn't have been able to submit that proposal within the constrained timeframe without the Science Center. It would have been a very different, slimmed-down version if we'd had to submit without their administrative and logistical support."
The result was a $9.3 million award from ARPA-H for ENGINE: Scalable AI-Driven Solutions for Gene Therapy Production. Work that Irene estimates would otherwise have taken up to a decade can now be pursued in less than three years.
That is the difference between having breakthrough technology and being able to access the capital needed to help translate it to an innovative product that helps solve big problems.
What it does for your next raise
The funding environment has tightened. The de-risking milestones that venture dollars used to cover — the expensive steps between a promising prototype and first-in-human — are increasingly ones investors want cleared before they will write a check. That leaves good companies with good science stranded in a widening "valley of death."
This is where a sophisticated federal award changes your position. Winning one lets you clear exactly those milestones on non-dilutive capital, so you walk into your next raise having retired the risk investors were most worried about. Instead of chasing incremental, capital-efficient steps one round at a time, you can run programs in parallel and compress your timeline to commercialization. Your runway extends, your valuation story strengthens, and you get there without giving up more of the company.
Mathew puts it plainly: "Non-dilutive funding allows us to pursue technically ambitious R&D, generate validation, and de-risk new capabilities without using equity capital for every stage of technology development. That allows us to be more thoughtful about using venture dollars for commercialization, infrastructure, and scaling the business."
It can reshape the raise itself. A federally validated company negotiates from a stronger position, often attracts a different class of investor, and tells a better story doing it. Federal backing is its own form of diligence, signaling that a rigorous funder already vetted the science and bet on it.
Non-dilutive does not mean no strings. These awards carry real compliance and management obligations. But for the right company, they change the math of everything that comes after.
What it takes, and who it's for
The Science Center's Federal Funding support exists for a specific reason. The companies with the most transformative technologies are often the least equipped to navigate the most sophisticated funding. We work with founders across the full arc: identifying the right opportunities, framing the technology in the funder's terms, developing and coordinating complex and consortium proposals, managing government affairs, and handling the post-award compliance and administration that trips up so many first-time awardees. For companies pursuing SBIR and STTR, we provide proposal development and TABA support there too.
You don't need to have won federal funding before. You don't need to be a Science Center alumnus. What you need is a technology with intellectual merit, real commercial potential, and strategic alignment – plus a readiness to engage a funding landscape that operates by its own rules.
As Allison put it, the hardest part isn't the solution. It's understanding the problem you're actually solving for.
Curious whether your technology has a path to federal funding? Learn more about our capabilities.
