Insider Brief
- NSF’s Directorate for Technology, Innovation and Partnerships has launched the Tech Labs initiative to support independent, full-time research teams tackling technical challenges that are difficult for universities or industry labs to address alone, and is seeking public input through a Request for Information.
- The initiative will provide operational autonomy and milestone-based, multi-year funding to interdisciplinary teams to advance technologies from early concepts toward commercially viable platforms, with significant awards anticipated beginning in FY 2026.
- NSF TIP is inviting feedback from academia, government, industry, investors, and other stakeholders, and plans to release details on a complementary Tech Accelerators initiative and host a public webinar on December 17, 2025.
- Image: U.S. National Science Foundation
PRESS RELEASE — The U.S. National Science Foundation Directorate for Technology, Innovation and Partnerships (NSF TIP) announced the launch of a new initiative designed to launch and scale a new generation of independent research organizations. These organizations will focus on technical challenges and bottlenecks that traditional university and industry labs cannot easily solve on their own. NSF seeks feedback on this initiative through a Request for Information (RFI).
“As scientific challenges have become more complex and dependent upon the work of cross-disciplinary teams of experts, our nation must expand its scientific funding toolkit to adapt,” said Erwin Gianchandani, NSF TIP Assistant Director. “Tech Labs will provide entrepreneurial teams of proven scientists the freedom and flexibility to pursue breakthrough science at breakneck speed, without needing to frequently stop and apply for additional grant funding with each new idea or development.”
The NSF TIP Tech Labs initiative is grounded in the recognition that many of the technology acceleration and translation challenges of today require new approaches with coordinated, interdisciplinary teams to achieve success. The Tech Labs initiative will support full-time teams of researchers, scientists, and engineers who will enjoy operational autonomy and milestone-based funding as they pursue technical breakthroughs that have the potential to reshape or create entire technology sectors. Tech Labs teams will move beyond traditional research outputs (e.g., publications and datasets), with sufficient resources, financial runway, and independence to transition critical technology from early concept or prototypes to commercially viable platforms ready for private investment to scale and deploy. NSF anticipates significant investment later in FY 2026, featuring large, multi-year awards for selected teams.
To help shape this initiative, TIP is inviting input from the broader community – including from academia, policymakers, nonprofits, philanthropy, state and local government, venture capital, the private sector and any other interested parties – through an RFI.
To learn more, read the RFI and plan to join a webinar on Wednesday, Dec. 17, 2025, at 11 a.m. EST. Please register in advance for the webinar.
In the coming weeks, NSF TIP will also release more information about a companion initiative, the NSF TIP Tech Accelerators Initiative, that will share many of the same core principles and a complementary mission focus with its Tech Labs Initiative. That program will provide a wider variety of entry points for teams to de-risk and accelerate technology translation into the market and society, focused on specific key technology areas critical to national priorities.
Both new initiatives are guided by the ambition of President Trump’s mandate to revitalize and strengthen America’s science and technology ecosystem by exploring innovative models for funding and sharing high-value scientific research infrastructure and results. 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 scientific entrepreneurs.
