Before you spend a week writing an AFWERX proposal, confirm you're actually eligible. SBIR/STTR has firm statutory gates, and a company that misses one of them will have its proposal rejected regardless of technical merit. Here's the checklist for AFWERX and SpaceWERX.
You must be an organized-for-profit U.S. business with 500 or fewer employees, counting affiliates. Non-profits, universities (as prime), and large firms don't qualify as the SBIR awardee — though universities can partner on the STTR track. The company must have a place of business in the United States and perform the required share of work domestically.
For the standard SBIR path, the business must be more than 50% directly owned and controlled by U.S. citizens or permanent resident aliens. There is a separate pathway allowing majority ownership by multiple eligible U.S. venture capital, hedge fund, or private-equity firms (the VCOC rule), but heavy institutional ownership pushes you onto that track and adds disclosure requirements. If you're raising venture capital, model your cap table against these rules early — a single foreign or oversized owner can jeopardize eligibility.
Do this first: Registering in SAM.gov (for a Unique Entity ID) and DSIP can take weeks. Start both the moment you incorporate — a lapsed or incomplete registration is the most common reason a strong proposal can't even be submitted.
See if you qualify for an Ansys eval The MVP playbook →Foreign ties are the fastest-growing source of trouble. Any foreign ownership, foreign affiliations, or foreign nationals on your team must be disclosed — for Phase II and Direct-to-Phase II, a formal "Disclosures of Foreign Affiliations" document is mandatory, whether or not the topic is export-controlled. Green-card holders, dual citizens, and foreign-national employees all trigger disclosure, and eligibility may be verified during negotiations. Recent reauthorization tightened this due diligence considerably, so don't treat it as a formality.
You cannot submit as an idea on a napkin. You need to be a legally formed entity with: a Unique Entity ID from SAM.gov, an active SAM.gov registration, a registration in the DoD's DSIP portal where proposals are submitted, and identifiers like a SBIR company registration number. These take time — SAM.gov in particular can stall for weeks on entity validation — so incorporate and register before a solicitation opens, not during it.
Good news for early startups: you do not need prior revenue, past performance, an existing government contract, or a security clearance to win a Phase I. AFWERX Open Topic is deliberately open to first-time, pre-seed companies. A customer isn't strictly required to submit Phase I either, though you'll need a Customer Memorandum and TPOC by Phase II.
Run this checklist honestly before you invest in a proposal. The technical bar is real, but eligibility is binary — and the companies that get tripped up almost always fail on ownership, foreign-affiliation disclosure, or an incomplete registration rather than on the merits of their technology. Confirm each item against the current solicitation on AFWERX Get Funded before you submit.
Official sources: AFWERX Get Funded · AFWERX SBIR/STTR Program Overview. Figures change; confirm on the official page before relying on them.
