NSF will catalyze a set of NSF Tech Accelerators across currently underfunded deep-tech areas, and these NSF Tech Accelerators will, in turn, invest in teams conducting research and early-stage technology development. With deep domain and commercialization expertise, the NSF Tech Accelerators will advance technology topic areas by removing commercialization barriers, addressing ecosystem and technology-specific gaps, and “crowding in” investment from venture capital and others to competitively position technologies for market adoption and uptake.
Traditional research often experiences challenges traversing the innovation enterprise and moving across the so-called “valley of death.” The NSF Tech Accelerators model positions the agency to concurrently pursue several translation efforts, including promising deep technologies that may have entry challenges or are otherwise riskier investments, with the goal of creating new markets for them or unlocking ventures across multiple high-priority sectors to advance the US technology ecosystem.
“The NSF Tech Accelerators initiative aims to ensure the US is positioned to accelerate the throughput of high-impact technology innovation into the market by pairing domain expertise with proven commercialization support,” said Brian Stone, performing the duties of the NSF director. “Through external feedback, including from private industry and investment, this initiative will strengthen our nation’s innovation enterprise by investing in new ideas, growing companies, unlocking matching commitments, particularly for scaling and ensuring US competitiveness on a global scale.”
As a first step to establishing the initiative, NSF has published a request for information (RFI) on SAM.gov to seek feedback on the NSF Tech Accelerators program model, the suitability of NSF’s proposed topics and additional topics ripe for the NSF Tech Accelerator framework, and identify prospective organizations to lead NSF Tech Accelerators aligned to the four proposed topics—agricultural technology (AgTech), materials technology (MaterialsTech), ocean technology (OceanTech) and scientific instrumentation (SciTech).
NSF will publicly announce selected NSF Tech Accelerators in each topic area, which will then seek proposals from individual research and innovation teams to accelerate their ideas from the lab to market. Awarded teams will be expected to meet fast-paced, clear milestones and deliver actionable outcomes and impacts, such as establishing patents, pilots, and demos, licensing, entity formation, and customer growth. NSF Tech Accelerator-funded teams will also benefit from a suite of entrepreneurial support and resources, including strategic partnerships, user discovery, market readiness, and mentorship from experts to help them take their technologies to the next level.
In mid-December 2025, NSF released information about a parallel effort, the NSF X-Labs (initially previewed as NSF Tech Labs), that also pilots a new institutional model designed to enable new forms of scientific work and encourage scientists to pursue novel lines of inquiry. The design choices underpinning these efforts are informed by thoughtful science policy scholarship and entrepreneurship from both emerging and established think tanks, metascience experts, congressionally chartered study commissions, and the broader scientific community. Together, these new initiatives position NSF to more effectively support the next generation of American scientists and entrepreneurs.
