Analysis · Medtech Funding · Market Data
Q3 SBIR/STTR medical device awards: 67 grants, $57.9M, and a six-month hole
NIH issued 67 SBIR/STTR medical device awards worth $57.9M in Q3 2026 through August 11, following two straight quarters with zero awards. Full breakdown.
NIH issued 67 SBIR/STTR medical device awards worth $57.9 million between July 1 and August 11, 2026. That follows two consecutive quarters in which the program issued none at all. Device work took 24.9% of all SBIR/STTR dollars-eligible awards in the window, almost exactly its long-run share, so the program's composition survived the interruption intact even though its volume did not.
This is a straight read of the data. Every figure below comes from NIH RePORTER, filtered to SBIR/STTR activity codes and grouped by award notice date. Company names are omitted throughout.
Across 64 unique companies in 26 states. 52 were Phase II, 15 were Phase I. SBIR outnumbered STTR 61 to 6.
The interruption
Two quarters at zero
The clearest feature in the data is an absence. Between October 1, 2025 and March 31, 2026, NIH noticed zero SBIR/STTR awards. Not a reduced number. Zero, across both quarters and all nine SBIR/STTR activity codes.
That absence is program-specific rather than agency-wide. Over the same six months NIH noticed 14,219 awards of all other types, against 17,626 in the equivalent window a year earlier. The rest of the agency ran at roughly four-fifths speed. The small-business program stopped.
The first SBIR/STTR award of the recovery was noticed in April 2026. A single award. May brought 109, June 126, July 208.
| Quarter | Device awards | All SBIR/STTR awards | Device share | Device dollars |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Q3 2024 | 311 | 1,090 | 28.5% | $215.2M |
| Q4 2024 | 13 | 67 | 19.4% | $9.5M |
| Q1 2025 | 34 | 165 | 20.6% | $24.1M |
| Q2 2025 | 94 | 384 | 24.5% | $64.3M |
| Q3 2025 | 307 | 1,135 | 27.0% | $228.8M |
| Q4 2025 | 0 | 0 | n/a | $0 |
| Q1 2026 | 0 | 0 | n/a | $0 |
| Q2 2026 | 65 | 236 | 27.5% | $60.0M |
| Q3 2026 (partial) | 67 | 269 | 24.9% | $57.9M |
Q3 2026 covers July 1 to August 11 only and will continue to accumulate. Q3 is the federal fiscal year-end quarter, which is why Q3 2024 and Q3 2025 tower over adjacent quarters.
Raw quarter-to-quarter comparison overstates the recovery, because Q3 is the federal fiscal year-end and always spikes. The like-for-like read is the same 42-day window in each year.
| Window | Device awards | Obligated | Phase I | Phase II | Phase I share |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Jul 1 to Aug 11, 2024 | 104 | $73.3M | 23 | 81 | 22% |
| Jul 1 to Aug 11, 2025 | 93 | $78.3M | 27 | 66 | 29% |
| Jul 1 to Aug 11, 2026 | 67 | $57.9M | 15 | 52 | 22% |
Award notice date basis. RePORTER continues to post awards for a given window after the fact, so the 2026 figures are a floor rather than a final count.
Against the same window in 2025, device award count is down 28% and obligated dollars are down 26%. Against 2024, count is down 36%. The program is issuing again, but it has not made up the backlog.
The share of SBIR/STTR going to devices barely moved. The number of awards moved a great deal.
| 24Q3 | 24Q4 | 25Q1 | 25Q2 | 25Q3 | 26Q2 | 26Q3 | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Device share | 28.5% | 19.4% | 20.6% | 24.5% | 27% | 27.5% | 24.9% |
Quarters with zero SBIR/STTR awards are omitted. Q4 2024 and Q1 2025 rest on small denominators of 67 and 165 awards.
Phase structure
Phase II awards keep getting bigger
Average Phase II device award size has risen in every measured quarter since Q3 2024, from $874,898 to $1,023,441. Phase I has not moved: it sat at $332,731 in Q3 2024 and $312,074 in Q3 2026, with quarter-to-quarter noise in between and no trend.
The gap between the two has widened from 2.6x to 3.3x over nine quarters. Median values tell the same story as the means. Q3 2026 median Phase II was $1,000,469 and median Phase I was $314,337, which indicates a program clustered tightly at the caps rather than a few large awards pulling an average.
| 24Q3 | 24Q4 | 25Q1 | 25Q2 | 25Q3 | 26Q2 | 26Q3 | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Phase I average | 333K | 364K | 226K | 272K | 338K | 337K | 312K |
| Phase II average | 875K | 839K | 858K | 939K | 969K | 1017K | 1023K |
Quarters with zero awards omitted. Phase I covers R43, R41, U43 and UT1. Phase II covers R44, R42, U44, UT2 and UB1.
The mix has shifted along with the size. Phase I ran at 34% to 38% of device awards through most of 2024 and 2025. It fell to 14% in Q2 2026, the first full quarter after the restart, and recovered only to 22% in Q3 2026. In the two quarters since the program resumed, NIH has funded 108 Phase II device awards against 24 Phase I.
| 24Q3 | 24Q4 | 25Q1 | 25Q2 | 25Q3 | 26Q2 | 26Q3 | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Phase I share | 34% | 23% | 24% | 38% | 36% | 14% | 22% |
Q4 2024 and Q1 2025 rest on 13 and 34 device awards respectively, so those points carry wide error.
Device categories
Diagnostics leads, neuro follows
Q3 2026 device awards break into fourteen categories. Diagnostics and IVD took 16 awards, neuro and neuromodulation took 10, and monitoring and wearables took 7. Those three account for half the quarter.
| Category | Awards | Share of quarter |
|---|---|---|
| Diagnostics & IVD | 16 | 24% |
| Neuro & neuromodulation | 10 | 15% |
| Monitoring & wearables | 7 | 10% |
| Cardiovascular & vascular | 6 | 9% |
| Urology, renal & women's health | 6 | 9% |
| Drug-delivery devices | 4 | 6% |
| Imaging & optics | 3 | 4% |
| Ophthalmic | 3 | 4% |
| Respiratory & airway | 3 | 4% |
| Surgical & implants | 3 | 4% |
| Organ preservation | 2 | 3% |
| Orthopedic & rehab | 2 | 3% |
| ENT & dental | 1 | 1% |
| Other medtech | 1 | 1% |
The ten categories with three or more awards. Four further categories hold six awards between them: organ preservation 2, orthopedic and rehab 2, ENT and dental 1, other 1. Switch to Data for the full fourteen-category breakdown. Categories assigned by keyword classification of project title and abstract; awards spanning two categories are assigned to the dominant one.
Across quarters the two leading categories are stable and the rest are noisy. Diagnostics and IVD has held between 12% and 31% of device awards in every measured quarter, neuro between 6% and 23%. Neither shows direction. What moves is the tail: respiratory ran at 18% in Q1 2025 and 0% in Q2 2026, surgical and implants at 14% in Q2 2026 and 4% in Q3 2026. Those swings sit on quarterly denominators between 13 and 311 awards, so most of the movement in the smaller categories is sample size rather than signal.
| 24Q3 | 24Q4 | 25Q1 | 25Q2 | 25Q3 | 26Q2 | 26Q3 | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Diagnostics & IVD | 16% | 31% | 18% | 26% | 19% | 12% | 24% |
| Neuro & neuromodulation | 19% | 15% | 6% | 15% | 18% | 23% | 15% |
| Cardiovascular & vascular | 9% | 15% | 18% | 11% | 8% | 15% | 9% |
| Monitoring & wearables | 7% | 15% | 6% | 12% | 11% | 9% | 10% |
Share of that quarter's device awards. Q4 2024 and Q1 2025 rest on small denominators.
Funding institute concentration follows the categories. NHLBI issued 14 of the 67 Q3 2026 device awards, NIAID 10, NIA 8 and NIDDK 5. Over the full nine quarters NHLBI leads with 157 device awards, ahead of NIA at 110 and NIDDK at 79.
Geography
Two states, one third of the awards
California and Massachusetts each took 10 of the 67 Q3 2026 device awards. Together that is 30% of the quarter from two states. New York took 6, Colorado and North Carolina 4 each.
| US state | Integer presence |
|---|---|
| MA | 10 |
| CA | 10 |
| NY | 6 |
| CO | 4 |
| NC | 4 |
| KY | 3 |
| MN | 3 |
| SC | 2 |
| NE | 2 |
| IA | 2 |
| PA | 2 |
| OH | 2 |
| IL | 2 |
| GA | 2 |
| MI | 2 |
67 awards across 26 states. States shown hold two or more awards. Eleven further states plus Puerto Rico hold one award each: MT, TX, CT, KS, WA, FL, VA, IN, OR, MD and PR.
The two-state concentration has been remarkably stable. California and Massachusetts combined took 32% of device awards in Q3 2024, 37% in Q3 2025, 38% in Q2 2026 and 30% in Q3 2026. The only quarter that broke the pattern was Q4 2024, when the pair took 46% of a 13-award quarter.
Breadth tracks volume rather than policy. Device awards reached 36 states in each of the two fiscal year-end quarters, 20 to 28 states in the mid-year quarters, and 9 states in the 13-award Q4 2024. Q3 2026 has reached 26 states with six weeks of the quarter still to run.
| State | Device awards | Share of period |
|---|---|---|
| California | 172 | 19.3% |
| Massachusetts | 131 | 14.7% |
| Minnesota | 43 | 4.8% |
| New York | 43 | 4.8% |
| North Carolina | 40 | 4.5% |
| Pennsylvania | 35 | 3.9% |
| Texas | 33 | 3.7% |
| Maryland | 32 | 3.6% |
Full period totals 891 device awards across 536 unique companies and $659.7 million, spanning the seven quarters in which awards were issued.
Method
How these were counted
Awards were pulled from the NIH RePORTER v2 API by award notice date, restricted to SBIR/STTR activity codes R41, R42, R43, R44, U43, U44, UT1, UT2 and UB1. Medical device classification is a rule-based pass over each project title and abstract, calibrated against a hand-labeled sample of 198 awards. On that sample it reached 83% precision and 100% recall, and because the classifier was tuned on that sample its true out-of-sample accuracy is lower. The same classifier was applied unchanged to all nine quarters, so period-over-period comparisons are consistent even where the absolute counts carry a few points of error.
Therapeutics, biologics, vaccines, cell and gene therapy, research reagents, laboratory instruments, pure software and non-clinical domains are excluded. Drug-device combination products are included. Software-as-a-medical-device with no hardware component is excluded, which means the device counts here run slightly below what a regulatory definition would produce.
The XO take
Two things in this data matter to anyone selling contract development or manufacturing.
The first is that the shutdown moved the phase mix, not just the volume. Phase I is where a company is still proving feasibility and usually has no manufacturing partner yet. Phase II is where a company is building units, chasing a design freeze and starting to think about a 510(k). In the two quarters since awards resumed, NIH has funded Phase II device work over Phase I by a ratio of roughly four and a half to one, against a historical ratio near two to one. The population that just got funded is unusually far along.
The second is that the backlog has not cleared. This window is running 28% below the same window last year. Either NIH catches up in the back half of the fiscal year, in which case September is going to be extraordinary, or a cohort of Phase I applicants simply lost a year. The first case produces a concentrated burst of newly funded device companies in a four-week span. Both cases are worth watching, and they point in the same direction for anyone whose pipeline depends on early-stage device companies with fresh non-dilutive money.
What has not changed is the shape of the opportunity. One in four SBIR/STTR awards goes to a device. Diagnostics and neuro lead every quarter. Two states hold a third of the volume. That has been true through a fiscal year-end surge, a six-month stoppage and a partial recovery.