Scicrunch

Scicrunch, a woman-owned small business based in San Diego, California, provides research resource identifier development, curation, and metadata infrastructure services to federal research agencies as a prime contractor on NIH and NSF grants and purchase orders. The vendor competes predominantly under set-asides, with recent work split between Woman-Owned Small Business (WOSB) and full-and-open awards.

Scicrunch's concrete capability portfolio centers on Research Resource Identifier (RRID) systems — persistent identifiers for biomedical research resources including model organisms, cell lines, and scientific instruments — combined with metadata standardization, ontology development, and impact assessment methods for research infrastructure. Representative recent work includes a $6.975 million firm-fixed-price purchase order from NIH's Office of Logistics and Acquisition Operations awarded August 30, 2026 (a WOSB set-aside running through August 2031 with four optional one-year extension periods) for development, maintenance, and distribution of RRIDs serving ORIP-supported model resources, improvement of search capabilities using ontological models, and annual curation of one to three new resource types; a $1.5 million purchase order from the National Library of Medicine awarded September 29, 2021 for critical analyses, need assessment, unique identification tagging, and impact evaluation of Division of Comparative Medicine funded resources; and a sub-award from the University of Massachusetts Medical School on a February 2026 federal grant in which Scicrunch serves as the integrated identification authority for next-generation metadata frameworks, developing linked-data representations, hardware description schemas, and vendor onboarding processes to enable machine-readable export of instrument metadata in FAIR-compliant form.

Customer concentration is extremely high within HHS. Five distinct customer sub-agencies and two external agencies account for the full award footprint; NIH components dominate by dollar value, with the Office of Logistics and Acquisition Operations anchoring $7 million and the National Library of Medicine holding $2.1 million in combined potential value across two awards. A single grant sub-award to a university prime rounds out the portfolio. Activity is sparse and episodic — three awards in 2017, one in 2019, one in 2021, and two in 2026 — with a total of $9 million in combined potential value across seven awards (prime and sub combined). One award ($1.5 million, the National Library of Medicine purchase order) reaches ultimate completion within the next twenty-four months and faces potential recompete.

Scicrunch operates as a prime on 86% of recent awards and rarely subcontracts; SCI-reported invoiced revenue across federal services contracts captured in the Service Contract Inventory totaled $300 thousand in FY2022 and $300 thousand in FY2023, supporting roughly 2 FTEs in each year, with zero SCI-reportable invoicing in FY2024. Government-paid hourly rates on these SCI-reportable service contracts ran at a median of approximately $71.44 per hour, with a narrow range ($69.58 to $73.30 per hour across the tenth to ninetieth percentile). The vendor reports minimal subcontractor engagement across its prime contracts — 8% of total hours performed by named subs, with only one named subcontractor appearing in the SCI dataset.