Florida Institute Of Technology Inc.

Florida Institute of Technology Inc., doing business as Florida TECH, is a private non-profit research university headquartered in Melbourne, Florida, that acts as a prime recipient on federal research grants and education contracts across civilian and defense agencies, with a smaller footprint as a subcontractor on NASA and defense prime awards. The institution competes predominantly through full-and-open competition with no set-aside designations; it is not an 8(a), HUBZone, SDVOSB, or other federally designated small or disadvantaged business.

Florida TECH's federal footprint spans research, education, and technical services. As a prime grant recipient, the institution delivers federally funded research across space sciences, heliophysics, materials engineering, biomedical research, and climate science. Representative recent awards include a $1.99 million NASA Aeronautics cooperative agreement (University Leadership Initiative) to lead a multi-institutional consortium on safety assurance for learning-enabled autonomous systems in aviation; a $439,974 National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences project grant on genetic determinants of insecticide response variation; a $406,221 National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute grant for machine learning-based wearable monitoring of heart failure parameters; and a $2.32 million National Institute of Standards and Technology appropriated-funds grant to accelerate cyber resiliency and resilience engineering education through high-performance computing infrastructure. On the contract side, Florida TECH holds a $1 million Department of the Navy Basic Ordering Agreement with the Naval Education and Training Command (running through July 2031) under which it places delivery orders for tuition and fees supporting Navy personnel education in engineering, aviation, cybersecurity, and technical disciplines. Recent Navy delivery orders include $11,454 (January 2026) and $12,147 (July 2025) awards for personnel training. The institution also executes specialized research contracts—a $228,340 Naval Sea Systems Command purchase order for laboratory and field biofouling assessment supporting SSN(x) submarine development (base year plus four option years through October 2029), awarded on a sole-source basis citing Florida TECH's exclusive expertise in pressure chamber testing and warm water biofouling investigations.

Customer concentration is distributed across civilian research and defense agencies. The National Science Foundation leads by award count (109 awards), followed by NASA's Shared Services Center (103 awards, $19.3 million combined potential value) and the Department of the Army (79 awards). The top five customers by award count cover 49% of recent awards; by dollar value, NASA's Shared Services Center, the Air Force Research Laboratory ($4.7 million combined potential value across 12 awards), and NASA Headquarters ($2.2 million across 7 awards) anchor the top tier. Most awards cluster in the $100,000 to $500,000 range; the institution does not dominate any single agency's budget but maintains a broad, diversified customer base across federal research, education, and development initiatives.

Activity has grown from 28 awards in 2022 to a peak of 51 in 2024, with 41 awards in 2025 and 16 recorded in 2026 to date. Forty-eight awards are set to complete within the next twenty-four months, carrying combined potential value of $6.7 million and representing recompete exposure. Recent year-over-year trajectory shows sustained engagement across civilian agencies (NSF, NASA, NOAA, NIH, EPA) and military branches (Navy, Air Force, Army); no cliff is evident in the source data for the primary customer base.

Florida TECH's award portfolio is overwhelmingly prime (93% of total), with only 53 sub-awards (7%) spanning contract sub-work and grant sub-recipient roles. As a subcontractor, the institution performs technical roles on prime awards held by Triad National Security (Los Alamos National Laboratory competition work in AI model development), The Boeing Company (Commercial Crew Program spacecraft work leveraging computer vision for SPHERES-Slosh experiment data), Creare LLC (3D reconstruction of space systems using machine learning), and General Dynamics (small goods and services sub-award). On the grant side, Florida TECH acts as sub-recipient to prime grantees including University of Florida (biochar and seagrass restoration work), University of Illinois (OUTATIME timing technology), Cornell University (CMS Detector Upgrade for the High-Luminosity Large Hadron Collider), and others. Sub-engagement is minimal; the institution does not position itself as a feeder subcontractor but rather uses sub-roles to extend research partnerships.

SCI (Service Contract Inventory) captures only a narrow slice of Florida TECH's federal activity. Two SCI records show $2.2 million in invoiced revenue in FY2022 across 0.3 FTEs at the contract level. Median government-paid hourly rates on prime SCI contracts ran around $3,727/hr, with rates ranging from $2,664/hr (10th percentile) to $4,791/hr (90th percentile), reflecting professional and technical labor. The institution did not use subcontractors on those SCI-reportable prime records. SCI data represent a small subset of Florida TECH's actual federal engagement; the majority of the institution's federal revenue flows through research grants, cooperative agreements, and education contracts that fall outside SCI's $150,000-and-above service-contract reporting scope.

Florida TECH operates two named subsidiaries: F I T Aviation LLC and Florida TECH Research Institute LLC (a private university, non-profit, and educational entity). The Research Institute subsidiary likely houses some grant and research administration functions, though the source does not detail subsidiary-level revenue, staffing, or operational split from the parent institution.

The institution's competitive posture is full-and-open, merit-based. It does not hold seats on government-wide acquisition contracts (GWACs) or broad-based indefinite delivery vehicles; instead, it competes for awards directly from agencies and through agency-specific contract vehicles (Basic Ordering Agreements with Navy, indefinite delivery contracts with Army) on a task-order basis. Recent BPA and BOA activity shows steady utilization by Navy and Army, indicating established working relationships but no exclusive or dominant vehicle position. Florida TECH's capability framing across awards centers on research execution (space sciences, heliophysics, biomedical innovation), engineering education, and specialized testing (biofouling, combustion, materials science), with emerging strength in machine learning, data science, and AI applications. The institution functions as an academic research partner to federal agencies rather than as a systems integrator or prime contractor in the traditional defense or IT outsourcing sense.