iScout
iScout Opportunity Page with expanded modal providing direct links to related innovations
iScout: Delivering Actionable Insight to Drive Your Success.
Ever feel like you are missing out on key opportunities to grow your business?
Tired of wasting countless hours on sifting through vast quantities of irrelevant information when conducting tech scouting or market research?
iScout is an innovation-centric, market intelligence platform that employs a fusion of LLMs, an expansive knowledge graph, and an enterprise data platform to provide you with instant access to highly relevant opportunities, innovators, and innovations. iScout handles the hard work involved in ingesting, curating, disambiguating, classifying, and relating millions of businesses, hundreds of thousands of opportunities and awards, and tens of thousands of faculty and innovations so that you can find the information you need in a fraction of the time required with other solutions.
iScout: Fostering Ecosystems to Accelerate Innovation.
A Record of Success in Building Innovation Ecosystems. Third Coast Federal excels at teaming with key stakeholders to drive the growth of the technology and industrial base. In FY 2016, small businesses in Indiana’s South Bend–Elkhart (SBE) Region received no SBIR | STTR awards. Beginning in FY 2017, we led a coordinated effort to educate companies about these critical programs and provide hands-on assistance to help them compete and win. Through this effort, we created our SBIR | STTR Accelerator and the iScout AI platform, enabling us to recruit, train, and support net-new entrants into the defense industrial base at scale.
Over the past five years, SBE Region businesses have captured more than $58.6 million in Phase I and II SBIR | STTR awards, plus tens of millions more in STRATFI and Phase III contracts. In FY 2023 alone, the region earned $22 million—nearly 45% of all Indiana-based Phase I and II awards.
The Next Step: Navy Maritime & Microelectronics Innovation Ecosystems. Building on this success, the Department of the Navy awarded Third Coast Federal and the University of Notre Dame a $2 million Phase II STTR to extend iScout and to launch connected Navy Innovation Ecosystems focused on maritime and microelectronics production. We are partnering with leading defense organizations, research institutions, and accelerators to deploy these ecosystems in 2026, beginning with a soft launch at the Heartland Maritime & Defense Innovation Forum on December 9–10, 2025, in South Bend, Indiana.
This two-day forum will convene defense, industry, and academic leaders to address opportunities and challenges in on-shoring U.S. microelectronics production and strengthening maritime sustainment capacity.