IARPA Seedling BAA
Offers United States teams continuous-entry opportunities for early research ideas in AI, quantum, and cyber fields.
The IARPA-Wide Seedling Broad Agency Announcement (BAA) is a continuously open solicitation maintained by the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA), a U.S. government agency operating under the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. IARPA's stated mission is to deliver high-risk, high-payoff research for future intelligence advantage. The Seedling BAA is the agency's standing mechanism for early-stage exploratory research: projects funded as seedlings are typically 9–12 months in duration and cost less than $1 million. The program is explicitly intended for early-stage ideas that may eventually develop into larger, focused multi-year IARPA programs. Topics must fall within IARPA's published areas of interest, which span artificial intelligence and machine learning, quantum computing, superconducting computing, synthetic biology, forecasting and predictive analytics, video and imagery analysis, and multilingual speech recognition.
Eligibility is broad: academic institutions, commercial companies, and nonprofits in the U.S. and, with restrictions, from foreign countries may apply. Government agencies, FFRDCs, and UARCs are typically ineligible as prime contractors. Awards are issued as traditional contracts or grants — not OTAs — distinguishing the Seedling BAA from IARPA's ETA-framework programs. The award ceiling is approximately $1 million per the solicitation's language, though the formal ceiling should be verified against the current SAM.gov posting before submitting a proposal. There is no fixed application deadline: proposals are accepted year-round on a rolling basis.
The application process follows a white-paper-first sequence: proposers submit a white paper responsive to one of IARPA's published topics of interest, and only those with invited full-proposal instructions proceed to the complete submission stage. Proposals are evaluated on innovation, technical merit, and potential high payoff. The Seedling BAA is posted on SAM.gov; IARPA's contact for inquiries is dni-iarpa-contact@iarpa.gov. Organizations new to IARPA frequently use a successful seedling as the pathway to competing for a larger, program-specific BAA.
Early-stage exploratory research (9–12 months, typically under $1M) addressing highly innovative, high-risk ideas within IARPA's published topics of interest that have high-payoff potential.
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