Cubrc, Inc.

Cubrc, Inc., a Buffalo, New York–based nonprofit research and development organization, serves federal agencies as a prime contractor on an extensive portfolio of defense research and development, testing, and engineering services, with 90% of recent awards issued to Cubrc as prime. The organization competes full-and-open across all awards with no set-aside designations, positioning itself as a specialized technology provider to defense and civilian agencies across 47 distinct customer organizations. Cubrc operates the Aerothermal Aero-Optics Evaluation Center, a specialized facility conducting experimental and computational research in aerodynamics, hypersonics, and high-speed flight dynamics, and maintains two named subsidiaries: Ahmic Aerospace LLC (veteran-owned, service-disabled veteran-owned small business) and Avarint, LLC.

Cubrc's customer concentration is dominated by defense research agencies and the Navy. The top five funding agencies by potential value account for 99% of the combined award base, led decisively by the Department of the Navy Naval Sea Systems Command (5 awards, $76.55 billion combined potential value, anchored by a $4 billion SEAPORT-NXG multiple-award IDIQ awarded January 2, 2025, through January 1, 2029), followed by the Department of the Army Materiel Command Research Development and Engineering Command (37 awards, $8.55 billion combined potential value). The Office of the Secretary of Defense (9 awards, $256 million), the Department of the Army Materiel Command Aviation and Missile Life Cycle Management Command (10 awards, $150.7 million), and the Department of the Air Force Materiel Command Research Laboratory (25 awards, $81.3 million) round out the principal customers. A tension exists between award count and dollars: RDECOM dominates volume (37 awards) but ranks second in potential value, while NAVSEA holds only five awards but commands the bulk of the portfolio's combined potential value through its large IDIQ vehicle.

Cubrc's core capability portfolio spans hypersonic missile development, artificial intelligence and machine learning, aerothermal analysis, autonomous vehicle technologies, and threat emulation research. Representative prime work includes a $27.3 million Other Transaction Agreement awarded by the Air Force on September 18, 2025, for the Cross Domain Advisor program (multi-intelligence data fusion and pattern-of-life analysis), a $24.1 million Naval Office of Naval Research definitive contract for Battlespace Operations Watcher (tactical AI for Marine Corps operations with Covan Group LLC, a veteran-owned small business, as a named subcontractor), and a $10.5 million Army RDECOM delivery order issued September 23, 2025, for continued AAEC operations. Cubrc also holds a $249 million Basic Ordering Agreement through the Office of the Secretary of Defense's Joint Artificial Intelligence Center, awarded July 14, 2022, through March 10, 2027, supporting AI data readiness, data science, and engineering services. On the narrower technical end, Cubrc recently delivered small quantities of NIST-traceable coaxial thermocouples (five delivery orders totaling under $100 thousand across early 2026 for Air Force hypersonic testing) and supplies support to the Aerodynamic Validation contract through subcontract work. The Food and Drug Administration awarded Cubrc a $2.16 million contract on August 16, 2024, for universal control peptide development for T-cell assays, demonstrating reach into civilian life-sciences research.

Activity has grown incrementally across the past five years, moving from 10 awards in 2022 to 18 in 2025, with 8 awards recorded in 2026 year-to-date (reflecting a partial-year sample). Combined potential value across all prime and sub awards totals $86.12 billion, although only $594.4 million (1% of the ceiling value) has been obligated to date, a typical posture for research vehicles with high ceilings and multi-year call schedules. Nine awards with ultimate completion dates within the next twenty-four months carry combined potential value of $52.5 million and face recompete. Cubrc's top parent vehicles by task-order volume are four Army Research, Development and Engineering Command IDIQs — Contract W31P4Q20D0047 ($71 million single-award for AAEC operations, 28 task orders, $113.8 million combined potential value), Contract W31P4Q15D0015 (17 task orders, $43.5 million), Contract W31P4Q08D0059 (15 task orders, $21.3 million), and Contract NNJ11HB71C, likely a NASA vehicle (14 task orders, $10.4 million). The SEAPORT-NXG $4 billion vehicle, while small in task-order count (5 orders), dominates by dollars. Cubrc also appears on the newly awarded Scalable Homeland Innovative Enterprise Layered Defense (SHIELD) multiple-award IDIQ through the Missile Defense Agency (December 29, 2025, through December 28, 2035, $151 billion ceiling) with a minimum-guarantee $500 delivery order.

Across SCI-reportable federal service contracts above $150 thousand between FY2022 and FY2024, Cubrc invoiced $418 thousand in prime-contract work, a negligible subset of its full federal footprint — this reflects the reality that most Cubrc work is classified, goods-based (thermocouples), or performed outside the SCI threshold. SCI workforce tracking shows 4.0 FTEs in FY2022 and 5.4 FTEs in FY2024 across reported prime and sub records. Median government-paid hourly rates on SCI-reportable prime contracts run $126.64 per hour. Across SCI-reportable prime contracts, an average of 45% of contractor hours are performed by subcontractors, indicating a hybrid model blending internal delivery with subcontractor leverage; Cubrc named one subcontractor in SCI records, though its broader prime contracts regularly engage academic institutions such as the University of Notre Dame and specialized research partners including Raytheon, the Charles Stark Draper Laboratory, Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, Kratos Defense & Rocket Support Services, and Parsons Government Services on intelligence and systems-integration efforts. Cubrc also subcontracts to primes including BAE Systems Space & Mission Systems, Beyond New Horizons LLC, Valkyrie Enterprises LLC, and RTX Corporation on hypersonic seeker windows, test operations, guidance systems, and ontology development work, positioning Cubrc as a valued subcontractor for defense prime integrators as well as a significant prime in its own right. Recent sub-prime work on the Army's common core ontologies effort and the Air Force's Hypersonic Attack Cruise Missile program underscores depth in advanced technology domains across the defense industrial base.