The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is establishing five new technology accelerator centers that it says will facilitate the commercialization and scaling of new defense technologies.

In a Announcement from August 22According to DARPA, the accelerators are located at the following sites: Capital Factory in Austin, Texas; CIMIT at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston; FedTech in Arlington, Virginia; SRI International in Menlo Park, California; and Wireless Research Center of North Carolina based in Wake Forest, North Carolina

The accelerators will work with qualified companies that receive DARPA funding to develop early-stage technologies that DARPA says have “the potential for significant impact” by connecting them with commercial talent, private investment and corporate networks, while also providing financial analysis and deal sourcing.

The accelerators will leverage regional resources – including universities and laboratories – to “minimize” business challenges and ensure rapid scaling of technology for the benefit of national security and the economy.

“DARPA’s mission continues to push the boundaries of science and technology to prevent and create technological surprises,” said Sha-Chelle Manning, DARPA’s director of commercial strategy, in a statement.

“With these regional accelerators, we can ensure that more DARPA-funded teams can recruit the best talent, develop robust go-to-market strategies, raise capital and scale operations to transform breakthrough technologies into high value with national, economic and societal impact,” said Manning.

The accelerators also scale the Embedded Entrepreneur Initiative (EEI)a pilot program that provides funding, mentoring and contacts to connect an artist’s technical team with commercial experts.

The initiative “provides DARPA teams with access to techno-economic market analysis to understand the commercial market” and has raised over $1 billion in private investment capital and brought over 21 new products and services to market, according to DARPA.

EEI teams have worked on projects such as regenerative medical devices and therapeutics, quantum AI, bioanalyte detection platforms, and on-demand blood collection devices.

The DARPA accelerator plan follows similar recent initiatives by the Department of Defense, including the Office of Strategic Capital’s Investment strategy 2024 In it, it announced the Department of Defense and Small Business Administration’s Small Business Investment Company Critical Technologies (SBICCT) initiative, which “combines private capital with government-guaranteed loans to increase investment in the Department of Defense’s critical technology areas.”