Illumination Works, LLC

Illumination Works, LLC, headquartered in Beavercreek, Ohio, is a for-profit limited liability partnership delivering data analytics, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and digital transformation services to the Department of Defense as a prime contractor (86% of recent awards) across SBIR Phase I, II, and III programs and indefinite delivery contracts, with no set-aside designation applied to its largest vehicles and competing predominantly full-and-open.

The vendor's customer concentration is heavily skewed toward Air Force programs. The top five funding agencies account for 64% of recent awards by count and 98% by combined potential value, dominated by the Air Force Sustainment Center (6 awards, $186.4 million combined potential value) and the Air Force Research Laboratory (9 awards, $10.8 million), with the Office of the Secretary of Defense (2 awards, $18 million), the Air Force Defense Finance and Accounting Service (2 awards, $11.3 million), and the Department of the Army (5 awards, $3.8 million) rounding out the active set. The two rankings diverge sharply — AFSC anchors most of the dollars despite holding fewer awards than AFRL — reflecting the vehicle and delivery-order structure discussed below.

Illumination Works holds two flagship indefinite delivery contracts anchoring its Air Force footprint. The Air Force Sustainment Center awarded a $50 million single-award SBIR Phase III Data Analytics as a Service (DAaaS) contract on June 1, 2023, with completion May 31, 2028, under which six task orders have been issued totaling $33.5 million: Task Order 01 ($10.58 million) for core data analytics services; Task Order 02 PIC Fusion 20 ($9.58 million, completion March 31, 2029) for analytics capabilities at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base; Task Order 3 ($7.58 million, completion September 29, 2027) supporting the DIODE Solution Factory with subcontractor Sabel Systems Technology Solutions, LLC; Task Order 5 ($3.99 million, completion April 16, 2030) for enterprise information and asset management systems supporting the F-35 Joint Program Office, with subcontractor Maurice's Management Consulting MMC LLC; and Task Order 6 ($1.73 million, June 1, 2026) for security form incorporation at Wright-Patterson. More recently, the Air Force Sustainment Center awarded a $97 million single-award indefinite delivery contract on September 8, 2025, with completion August 31, 2035, leveraging data management, system integration, advanced analytics, machine learning, and digital twin generation for industrial modernization; the initial delivery order under this vehicle is Task Order 1 for the ATHENA (AFSC Technology Hosting Environment for NextGen Automation) program, valued at $17.3 million (completion August 31, 2028), with Sabel Systems Technology Solutions serving as the primary subcontractor for digital engineering and technology integration. Illumination Works also holds a $15 million Joint Artificial Intelligence Center Basic Ordering Agreement from the Office of the Secretary of Defense (awarded March 11, 2022, completion March 10, 2027) covering project and program management, data science, data engineering, data architecture, and software development services.

The vendor's SBIR program footprint spans multiple agencies and phases. Representative examples include a $2.999 million SBIR Phase II definitive contract from the Office of the Secretary of Defense (awarded April 6, 2026, completion December 6, 2027) for ODIN (AI Automation and Insight Generator) research; a $5.247 million SBIR Phase II Direct award from the Air Force Research Laboratory (awarded July 19, 2023, completion June 30, 2027) for ODIN Financial Management, an AI-enabled execution plan and budget capability; a $1.799 million SBIR Phase II contract from the Air Force Research Laboratory (awarded December 4, 2024, completion July 4, 2026) for generative AI in acquisition process acceleration; a $1.868 million SBIR Phase II contract from the Department of the Army (awarded May 9, 2024, completion November 9, 2025); and a $1.724 million Direct-to-Phase-II SBIR from the Air Force Research Laboratory (awarded September 11, 2023, completion April 11, 2025) for automated acquisition milestone documentation. The vendor's work spans applied research in physical and engineering sciences (20 awards), custom computer programming (9 awards), and software publishing (3 awards) under PSC codes dominated by DoD-military applied research (15 awards).

Activity has remained flat at five to nine awards per year over the past five years (2022 through 2026), with two awards recorded to date in 2026. Five awards representing $28.1 million in combined potential value reach ultimate completion inside the next twenty-four months, creating recompete exposure in that window. The vendor operates as a subcontractor to larger primes on Navy and Army programs; recent sub-award activity names Kearney & Company, P.C. (two awards in February 2025 for Personnel and Readiness Infrastructure Support Management and DEAMS Functional Management Office support), KBR Wyle Services, LLC (three awards through February 2025 for NAVAIR cyber security, logistics IT, and information systems modernization), and DDC It Services LLC (one award in January 2024 for logistics IT and data management support). Service Contract Inventory captures three sub-contractor records spanning FY2022–FY2024, representing 3.2 FTEs in FY2022 declining to 0.9 FTEs in FY2024, indicating minimal SCI-reportable subcontract footprint relative to the vendor's prime contract scale. Illumination Works holds one named subsidiary, Lifecycle Solutions JV, LLC, a small business joint venture for-profit limited liability company. The vendor's award portfolio reflects no grants and no participation in GWACs or GSA Schedules; work flows through prime SBIR vehicles, indefinite delivery contracts, and basic ordering agreements rather than government-wide acquisition vehicles.

Illuminations Works, founded in 2006, is a solution enablement company with expertise in designing and building powerful infrastructures for big data, advanced analytics, data warehousing and business intelligence solutions. ILW has expertise in the latest big data technologies with massive parallel processing, producing the predictive analytics and visualization capabilities. ILW specializes in aligning data solutions with new types of data and analytical processing workloads to keep up with the current data paradigm-behavioral, social, and spatial data sources. Our developers, architects, and data scientists are at the forefront of big data analytics with proven results ranging from agile development of a complex big data environment for a top 25 retailer to applying data science to Air Force maintenance data using modern text mining, advanced machine learning, and sounds statistics to analyze, mine, cleanse, merge, explore, and expose data for condition-based maintenance.