SBIR or STTR — which one your company actually qualifies for
They look like the same programme with one letter different. The distinction is about where your scientist works, and choosing wrong is a rejection rather than a lower score.
Founders treat SBIR and STTR as interchangeable pots of federal money. They are not. The difference is structural, it is decided before you write anything, and picking the wrong one gets your application screened out rather than scored badly.
Here is the distinction that actually matters.
SBIR: the work and the scientist live in your company
Under SBIR, the small business does the majority of the work, and the principal investigator's primary employment must be with the small business at the time of award. Primary employment means more than half their time.
If your scientific founder is a full-time faculty member, they usually cannot be the PI on an SBIR. That is the single most common structural mistake early biotech makes, because the person who understands the science best is often still in a university lab.
STTR: the work is shared with a research institution
STTR exists for exactly that situation. It requires a formal collaboration with a nonprofit research institution, mandates a minimum share of the work for each partner, and — critically — allows the principal investigator to be employed by either the company or the research institution.
If your platform came out of a university lab and the key expertise is still there, STTR is frequently the correct mechanism and SBIR is the wrong one.
The practical test
Ask two questions in this order:
- Where does your PI actually work more than half the time? If it is your
company, SBIR is open. If it is a university, look at STTR.
- Where does the work physically happen? If a substantial portion runs in a
collaborator's institution, STTR's structure fits and its work-split requirement may already describe what you were going to do anyway.
What people get wrong beyond the PI
- Assuming STTR is easier. It is not less competitive. It is differently
structured, and it adds a negotiation with your partner institution over intellectual property that you should start early, not in the final week.
- Assuming the agencies behave identically. Participation, budgets, and
review differ by agency. NIH, NSF, and DoD do not run these programmes the same way, and the solicitation in front of you is the authority.
- Assuming you can switch late. The PI arrangement, the partner agreement,
and the work split all take time to put in place. This is a decision to make in week one.
Why this is worth ten minutes now
Both mechanisms fund the same kind of early translational science. The choice between them is not about ambition or fit — it is about the shape of your team on paper. Ten minutes with your org chart saves you the version of this story where you find out in month two.
SixthGrant flags which mechanism a solicitation uses and checks the PI requirement against your profile, so the question is answered before the writing starts rather than after.
Stop finding out too late.
SixthGrant reads every federal solicitation daily, checks each one against your company, and tells you what changed.
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