A total on its own
decides nothing.
The same $100M means opposite things depending on whether it doubled from $50M or halved from $200M. Every figure here is paired with the immediately preceding period of equal length.
The total sums two different measures: what the government became obligated to pay, and what was sold as of a Form D filing. Because they are not the same kind of number, the split is shown alongside. Money recorded more than once is collapsed before counting.
Week by week
lit bars = current period (2026-07-20 – 2026-08-16)Partially ingested weeks are omitted. USAspending publishes with a lag, and showing the tail would read as a week when capital stopped.
Filters live in the URL — share this page's address and it opens with the same conditions. 14 complete weeks ingested (from 2026-05-11). A period-over-period figure needs twice the selected span.
What is accelerating, and what is pulling back.
Change against the prior period. Themes below $5.0M are excluded — at that size a single award flips the ranking.
Accelerating
- Defense Software$129K → $5.8M×45
- Cyber Defense$129K → $5.8M×45
- Nuclear Energy$47.9M → $744.1M×16
Pulling back
- Space Flight R&D$650.2M → $421.0M-35%
- Nuclear Security & Nonproliferation$12.6M → $10.6M-16%
- Space Science$61.0M → $75.2M+23%
Companies that were not here last period.
No award in the immediately preceding period, and at least one in this one. It does not mean the company is young — it means this funding relationship started, or restarted, in this window.
Companies drawing from both government and venture.
Government procurement and private rounds are normally tracked separately. Funding databases index rounds, so a government award never appears in the same table — a company drawing on both does not show up as one row anywhere.
| Company | Government | Venture | First | Gap |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Impulse Space, Inc. | $4.0M4 · 2026-03-27 | $499.8M1 · 2026-06-02 | Government | 67d |
| Apex Technology, Inc. | $01 · 2026-04-10 | $156.8M1 · 2026-07-22 | Government | 103d |
| Private Tech Inc. | $7K1 · 2026-04-10 | $105.0M1 · 2026-07-29 | Government | 110d |
| Firefly Aerospace Inc. | $42.7M3 · 2026-05-27 | $22.0M1 · 2026-07-08 | Government | 42d |
| Lunar Outpost Inc | $22.0M1 · 2026-08-10 | $32.1M1 · 2026-05-14 | Venture | 88d |
| Captura Corp. | $01 · 2026-06-17 | $53.5M1 · 2026-07-02 | Government | 15d |
| AMPeers, Inc. | $01 · 2026-08-11 | $11.0M1 · 2026-06-05 | Venture | 67d |
| Mentium Technologies Inc | $7K1 · 2026-07-16 | $7.5M1 · 2026-07-21 | Government | 5d |
| Channel Robotics | $305K1 · 2026-07-06 | $4.7M1 · 2026-06-03 | Venture | 33d |
| Exum Instruments, Inc. | $01 · 2026-05-11 | $3.4M1 · 2026-07-02 | Government | 52d |
| Oboro Labs, Inc. | $305K1 · 2026-06-17 | $1.3M1 · 2026-07-28 | Government | 41d |
| Optimeos Life Sciences, Inc. | $300K1 · 2026-07-23 | $1.0M1 · 2026-06-03 | Venture | 50d |
$0 does not mean no record. The award exists, but obligations and de-obligations within the window net to zero. The award count next to it shows the activity.
Matched across capital ingested between 2026-03-02 and 2026-08-20. The overlap is small because the tracking window is still short and most Form D filers are small issuers with no government business. This count grows with coverage.
We do not yet publish “did venture follow government into a theme.” Comparing themes needs a shared axis: the government side is classified from NAICS / PSC, while Form D carries only an SEC industry group whose most common values are Other Technology and Other. Mapping those onto Space or Energy would mean inventing a correspondence that does not exist. The numbers would compute; the basis would not.
Full analysisFunders, all themes, SBIR, stages, unspent capital and the retrospective
Every theme budgets are written at.
Assigned from the government's own industry and product classification codes. Awards spanning several themes are split, so the rows never sum above the headline figure.
“Unclassified” is what the government's own codes did not map to any theme we track — SBIR lands here often because it cuts across agencies and domains. The rows above plus unclassified equal the headline figure.
The first government money a small company wins.
Phase I proves feasibility, II builds the prototype, III is a follow-on contract the government competed and bought — the strongest commercialization evidence in this dataset.
Showing the top 40 of 193 companies
The same agency, aimed somewhere new.
Whose budget it came from tells you where the next one lands. Below: where each funder is currently aiming.
Dept. of Energy
+432%- Nuclear Energy$744.1M
- Basic Science$185.6M
- ARPA-E / High-risk Energy$99.3M
NASA
+12%- Space Flight R&D$421.0M
- Satellites & Payloads$267.9M
- Space$183.4M
National Institutes of Health
+13%Federal Acquisition Service
+88%- Defense Software$5.8M
- Cyber Defense$5.8M
- Autonomous Systems$1.4M
Department of Veterans Affairs
none in prior period- Operations & Ground Systems$0
Departmental Offices
flatImmediate Office of the Secretary of Transportation
-54%Today we can only see US government funders (NASA and DOE). Venture, corporate and M&A capital are not yet integrated — they will appear here when they are.
Who received it — all of them.
Universities, national labs and agencies are excluded — they rank high but are not investable. “Weeks” counts how many separate weeks the company won something.
Showing the top 60 of 992 companies
How far this money has actually travelled.
An announcement is not a payment. Committed means the government is obligated; Disbursed means the money has actually left. The gap between them is capital that has not moved.
Obligated but not yet disbursed
- Lockheed Martin Corporation$56.96B41
- The Boeing Company$43.46B17
- Electric Boat Corporation$31.26B2
- Northrop Grumman Systems Corporation$23.40B16
- Fluor Marine Propulsion, LLC$13.74B1
- Raytheon Company$8.85B13
- The Aerospace Corporation$8.54B20
- Bell Boeing Joint Project Office$6.61B1
Cumulative from contract start through 2026-08-17. This is a different measure from the period totals above — do not subtract one from the other. A large unspent figure is not automatically a problem: long contracts pay out over years. Read it as where scheduled payments still sit.
Agencies we cannot follow weekly, with the lag stated.
Agencies publish at different speeds. Mixing a slow one into the weekly series makes an unpublished week look like a week when capital stopped. This section holds those agencies as a monthly retrospective instead.
Dept. of Defense
~3 month lag · published through 2026-05Themes
- Manufacturing / Munitions$19.28B
- Defense Technology$10.28B
- Autonomous Systems$7.19B
- Drones / Counter-UAS$2.72B
- Logistics / Maintenance$2.57B
- Defense Software$1.57B
- Cyber Defense$353.7M
- Space Defense$65.6M
Not the full set. Transactions under these defense NAICS codes exceed 26,000 per month, so only the largest of each month are ingested. The smallest ingested award is $6K; anything below that is not in these figures.
This agency is excluded from the weekly totals above. Including it would make recent weeks look smaller than they are, purely because publication lags by three months.
Figures come from two places. Government awards are USAspending transaction records, counted as obligations — contract ceilings excluded. Venture rounds are Form D filings with the SEC, counted as the amount actually sold — offering ceilings excluded. Both follow the same rule: a ceiling never enters the inflow. Where the same money is recorded more than once, we collapse it before counting.
USAspending.gov