California Institute Of Technology

California Institute of Technology, doing business as Caltech, a non-profit private research university headquartered in Pasadena, California, receives federal funding as a prime recipient for basic research grants and cooperative agreements across civilian science agencies—predominantly NASA, the National Science Foundation, and the Department of Health and Human Services—with no contract prime footprint and no set-aside designations. Caltech competes in full-and-open federal research funding and operates as the institutional recipient for over 4,900 federal awards totaling $13.2 billion in combined potential value, with $17.55 billion obligated across the portfolio.

Caltech's federal work centers on fundamental research and graduate fellowship support across space science, astrophysics, quantum technologies, materials science, biological and medical research, Earth sciences, and advanced computing. Recent representative awards include a $36.4 million cooperative agreement to operate and expand the Infrared Science Archive (IRSA) managing data from transformational space missions including Euclid, SPHEREx, and NeoRVeyor (NASA, through August 2030); a $20.6 million cooperative agreement to develop and operate astrophysics data archives for NASA mission data and NASA-funded researchers (NASA, through July 2030); a $3 million NSF Engineering grant for electron-enhanced atomic layer processing for revolutionary thin-film semiconductor technologies including superconducting qubit materials (NSF, through September 2028); and a $1.87 million NIGMS award for fundamental research on mammalian circadian clock mechanisms (NIH NIGMS, through February 2030). Caltech also holds a DARPA Other Transaction IDV valued at $1 million for chip-based photon addition and photon-efficient nanoscale optical metrology research.

Customer concentration anchors with NASA, which accounts for 254 awards valued at $5.09 billion in combined potential value—approximately 45% of the portfolio's total potential value. Within NASA, the Shared Services Center (NASA's administrative arm) is the top customer by award count at 764 grants, though at lower individual value. NASA Goddard Space Center places 83 awards worth $577.3 million. The National Science Foundation ranks second by award count with 737 grants across mathematical, physical, biological, and engineering sciences programs. The Department of the Navy (419 awards) and National Institutes of Health (260 awards) round out the top five. Together, these five customers account for 49% of recent awards by count.

Activity is stable: Caltech received 207 awards in 2025 and 69 through mid-2026, consistent with prior years' volume of 168–208 awards annually. The portfolio carries a 24-month recompete exposure of $522.6 million (277 awards with ultimate completion dates in the next twenty-four months), representing federal research grant agreements reaching end-of-performance and requiring renewal or recompete.

Caltech's prime footprint is nearly all direct-funded research—95% of awards are prime grants and cooperative agreements. The institution serves as a subrecipient on 256 awards (5% of portfolio), receiving sub-award funding from prime recipients including Johns Hopkins University, Stanford, MIT, Duke University, and other research universities on collaborative basic research initiatives in areas such as gravitational wave physics, computational biology, and materials science.

The SCI (Service Contract Inventory) dataset shows minimal activity: 910 total records with zero invoiced revenue across FY2022–FY2024, and 0.1–0.2 FTEs in those years. This reflects Caltech's research model—federal funding flows as research grants and cooperative agreements (not service contracts), which sit outside the $150,000 SCI reporting threshold. SCI coverage does not capture Caltech's primary federal funding streams or operational scale.

Caltech operates a Cooperative Agreement with USGS to maintain the Southern California Seismic Network (SCSN) and the Southern California Earthquake Data Center, providing real-time earthquake detection, magnitude estimation, and ShakeMap generation for emergency response and scientific research (through January 2030). The institution also manages the NASA/IPAC Extragalactic Database, a cooperative agreement worth $6.13 million (through July 2030) to ingest, catalog, and archive astrophysical data from NASA missions and make it accessible to the U.S. research community.

Caltech's research portfolio spans astrophysics, planetary science, quantum information science, computational methods, biomedical imaging, materials engineering, Earth and planetary sciences, and life sciences. The institution typically acts as a standalone prime rather than as a teaming partner or subcontractor to other federal contractors, reflecting its role as an anchor research institution rather than a service contractor or defense supplier.