RecompetedWho Came Back First From the xTech Cohort?
In January the Army signed ten Direct to Phase II contracts out of xTechOverwatch, every one of them inside a $3,153 band. Tern AI's was the smallest of the ten. Last Friday's board carried its follow-on at $11,263,793, one bid solicited and one received.
On Jan. 19 the Army signed ten contracts within $3,153 of each other.
Same topic number, same open-topic solicitation, same week, ten different companies.
Nine of them landed between $1,999,062 and $1,999,951. The tenth, Tern AI Inc. of Austin, came in at $1,996,798.48, the smallest of the group.
That is what a Direct to Phase II cohort looks like coming out of a competition rather than a requirement. Everybody gets the ceiling.
"Which one of the ten comes back for more, and how long does it take?"
Last Friday the board answered it for the first time. Tern's follow-on is $11,263,793 (chart below).
The Wall of Ten
xTechOverwatch ran on a funnel most capture shops never touch.
640 companies applied, 40 were selected, and 37 showed up to compete on the ground at the Bush Combat Development Complex on the Texas A&M-RELLIS campus in Bryan, Oct. 27 to 29 of last year. Twenty advanced.
Each of the twenty took $20,000 in cash and, more to the point, eligibility for a Direct to Phase II SBIR worth up to $2 million, plus a slot in a First Cavalry Division rotation at the National Training Center. Army Futures Command, the xTech office, T2COM and the Fuze Program all had their names on it.
Ten of those contracts are visible in the award record today, all under topic A254-P030, all reading "XTECHOVERWATCH OPEN TOPIC" in the description field. Together they are worth $19,992,753.58.
Tern's own entry is worth reading closely. Signed Jan. 15, 21 offers received, total small business set-aside, full and open after exclusion of sources, under solicitation N6893624R0044, NAICS 541715, running to July 19, 2027.
So the way in was a real competition with a field of twenty-one.
What Tern Sells
IDPS, the Independently Derived Positioning System, works out a vehicle's position from base maps, the sensors already bolted to that vehicle, and a patented AI engine. No satellite, no cell signal, no beacon on the ground.
The company says it is the only positioning technology that can cold start, meaning fix its own position without being told roughly where it already is.
Co-founder and president Brett Harrison put the pitch in one line on the company's own site: "Treat positioning like oxygen: you don't notice it until it's gone, then everything dies fast." Shaun Moore is the other co-founder and the chief executive.
The recognition around it is heavy for a company this size. TIME gave IDPS a special mention in its Best Inventions of 2025, the World Economic Forum named Tern a 2026 Technology Pioneer, NATO took it into the DIANA cohort, and the company closed a $7.5 million seed extension last October.
The federal record before January was one line: a $51,780 Department of Transportation contract for complementary positioning, navigation and timing services in a field trial campaign, running June 2024 to June 2025.
221 Days
From the January signature to last Friday's award is 221 days.
The follow-on is $11,263,793, firm fixed price, W51701-26-C-A205, running to Aug. 19, 2027, out of the Army FUZE Contracting Center at Arlington. One bid was solicited and one received.
All $11,263,793 of fiscal 2026 RDT&E was obligated at award, which is not how most announced numbers behave.
The scope grew as well. January bought positioning. August bought positioning plus a vehicle health and maintenance system, for PNT resilience and predictive sustainment.
Against the cohort, the size lands: 5.64x Tern's own Phase II, and 56% of what all ten Phase IIs were worth put together.
We named this contract once already, on Aug. 26, as one of three examples in a piece on how Phase III authority moves money without a solicitation. What is new is everything around it, including the fact that it ran on the board twice. The Aug. 19 board carried it as an award "under a Phase III Small Business Innovation Research award" and gave no award date. The Aug. 31 board carried the same contract number, the same dollars and the same end date, reworded the scope clause, dropped the Phase III sentence, and added "(Awarded Aug. 28, 2026)". Nine days between the announcement and the signature, which is the pattern we walked through on Aug. 22.
Final Thoughts
Write down the other nine names. Sherpa 6, Overland AI, Scout AI, Scientific Systems, Swarmbotics, Sandtable, Parry Labs, Novel Engineering, Terminal Autonomy. Every one of them holds a live Army contract running into 2027 with soldier feedback attached to it, and every one is now standing at the same door Tern just walked through a second time.
Frankly, the hard part is watching it happen. There is no SAM.gov notice for W51701-26-C-A205 and there never will be one. USAspending has not seen it either, and on our own measurement the record runs roughly three months behind the signature, so treat "first of the ten" as a statement about what is visible rather than a census. For seven months the only public evidence this cohort existed at all was ten nearly identical line items in a description field.
The daily board is where they surface. Tern surfaced first.
Thanks for reading.