Merrick-Surdex Joint Venture LLP

Merrick-Surdex Joint Venture LLP, a for-profit limited liability partnership based in Greenwood Village, Colorado, provides geospatial data acquisition, processing, and analysis services exclusively to the U.S. Geological Survey as a prime contractor on full-and-open federal contracts, with no set-aside designations across its footprint.

The joint venture is a strategic partnership between Merrick & Company and Surdex Corporation specializing in orthomosaic and lidar data collection, magnetic and radiometric surveys, natural resource assessments, and geospatial data processing to support USGS mapping, charting, and environmental research missions. The vendor operates entirely as a prime contractor—100 percent of its 58 recent awards are prime contracts or IDVs with zero subcontractor work—and competes without leveraging small business set-asides, reflecting its market position as a standard commercial entity in the federal geospatial marketplace.

Customer concentration is absolute: the Department of the Interior's U.S. Geological Survey Office of Acquisitions and Grants represents 100 percent of all awards and combined potential value across the portfolio. This single-customer dependency anchors the vendor's federal revenue stream exclusively to USGS operations and removes any diversification across civilian or defense agencies.

Merrick-Surdex holds prime positions on two successive IDIQ vehicles. The Geospatial Products and Services IV (GPSC4) contract, awarded August 9, 2021, carries an $850 million ceiling and runs through August 8, 2026; the vendor has received 34 task orders under GPSC4 valued at $68.7 million combined potential value. Its predecessor, Geospatial Products and Services Contract V3 (GPSC3), generated 22 delivery orders valued at $37.1 million combined potential value. Representative recent work includes a $6.07 million firm-fixed-price delivery order (awarded August 5, 2025) for approximately 18,000 linear kilometers of magnetic and radiometric survey work in Montana (MT_PORPHYRYBELT_MAG_RAD_D25) with completion through May 31, 2028; a $3.99 million delivery order (May 21, 2026) for NE_SOUTHERN_D26 geospatial services in Nebraska completing June 30, 2029; a $5.99 million delivery order (September 7, 2023) for NE_STATEWIDE_D23 geospatial products and services in Nebraska completing December 1, 2025; and a $4.13 million delivery order (September 20, 2022) for UT_CENTRALGREATBASIN_MAG_RAD_D22 magnetic and radiometric surveys in Utah completing December 17, 2025.

Activity has remained relatively flat—six awards in 2022 to nine in 2023, declining to seven in 2024 and rebounding to eight in 2025, with two awards in 2026 through May. Sixteen awards (combined potential value $30.5 million) carry ultimate completion dates within the next twenty-four months, presenting significant recompete exposure for the vendor and recompete opportunity for competitors on the GPSC4 and GPSC3 vehicles. Combined obligated dollars across all awards total $102.5 million against $1.86 billion combined potential value, reflecting the firm-fixed-price, long-tail delivery-order structure typical of USGS geospatial procurements.

Across SCI-reportable service contracts above the $150,000 threshold, Merrick-Surdex invoiced $27.4 million in federal revenue over FY2022 through FY2024 ($2.6 million in FY2022, $5.7 million in FY2023, and $19.1 million in FY2024), with government-delivered FTE scale rising sharply from 3.5 FTEs in FY2022 to 34.3 FTEs in FY2024. SCI-captured hourly rates show a broad spectrum, ranging from a 10th percentile of $23.35/hr through a median of $168.46/hr and a 90th percentile of $554.34/hr. The vendor reported an average sub-hours share of 12 percent across its prime SCI contracts, drawing on seven named subcontractors for specialized components of delivery. SCI data represents a partial and bounded view: it captures only service contracts above $150,000 and excludes goods, products, and classified work, and does not reflect the vendor's total federal or enterprise revenue.