Vae, Inc.

Vae, Inc., doing business as VAE, a minority-owned, woman-owned small business headquartered in Springfield, Virginia, is a commercial off-the-shelf IT hardware distributor and reseller competing predominantly under total small business and woman-owned small business set-asides on federal indefinite delivery contracts, particularly the NASA-administered Solutions for Enterprise Wide Procurement V (SEWP V) GWAC. The company operates as a prime contractor on 94% of its recent awards, delivering Cisco networking switches, routers, and firewalls; Palo Alto Networks security appliances; NetApp and Nutanix storage systems; and related enterprise IT equipment to the federal government across defense, civilian, and diplomatic sectors.

Vae's federal footprint centers on hardware procurement and resale. Recent representative work includes a $6.3 billion delivery order from Naval Sea Systems Command for secure firewall threat defense equipment under SEWP V (awarded December 2024, completion December 2027); a $6.5 billion delivery order from the Air Force Electronic Systems Center for Palo Alto software license support (awarded December 2024, completion November 2025); a $4.2 million delivery order from Naval Sea Systems Command for option year 1 exercise on SEWP V networking and security products (awarded December 2025, completion December 2026); and a $10 billion multiple-award Indefinite Delivery contract under the Information Technology Enterprise Solutions - 4 Hardware (ITES-4H) program with the Army's Program Executive Office for Enterprise Information Systems (awarded September 2025, through September 2035). The company has also received a $5 million Blanket Purchase Agreement with the Naval Air Warfare Center extending through December 2029. Vae maintains prime contractor status on Solutions for Enterprise Wide Procurement V, the dominant vehicle in its portfolio, with 1,023 task orders valued at $777 million.

Customer concentration is heavily weighted toward the Department of the Navy and civilian IT procurement offices. The top five customers account for 49% of awards by count: Naval Sea Systems Command leads with 157 awards ($43.8 million potential value), Naval Information Warfare Systems Command with 146 awards ($30.1 million), Defense Information Systems Agency with 125 awards ($574.2 million), the State Department's Bureau of Information Resource Management with 118 awards ($47.2 million), and Naval Air Warfare Center with 59 awards ($18.4 million). By potential value, DISA anchors the portfolio at $574.2 million across 125 awards, reflecting large software licensing and security solution delivery orders, while the remaining four customers in the top five cluster around $30–48 million each. This divergence signals that Vae receives numerous smaller orders from Navy commands but larger, higher-value security and enterprise-wide licensing orders from DISA.

Activity has remained relatively stable across the past five years—172 awards in 2022, peaking at 224 in 2023, declining to 209 in 2024, then 163 in 2025, with 17 awards recorded in 2026 through early May. Forty-eight awards (combined potential value $137.8 million) reach completion within the next twenty-four months, representing significant recompete exposure, concentrated on SEWP V delivery orders and smaller DISA task orders. SCI-reported invoicing data, which captures federal service contracts above $150,000, shows $23.3 million in prime invoicing across FY2022–FY2023, with 90.7 FTEs in FY2022 and 46.0 FTEs in FY2024. The median government-paid rate on SCI-reportable prime work runs at $189.35 per hour—a mid-tier labor rate consistent with vendor-managed hardware procurement and field support roles rather than high-end engineering or consulting.

Vae operates predominantly through direct procurement and resale of third-party equipment rather than through subcontractor labor leverage. Across SCI-reportable prime contracts, the subcontractor hours share is 0%, indicating Vae delivers work with its own internal staff rather than passing through sub labor costs. However, the company appears regularly as a named subcontractor to major systems integrators: Noblis MSD LLC, General Dynamics Information Technology, Leidos, Booz Allen Hamilton, CACI Inc., and Smartronix have all engaged Vae as a sub on Navy engineering, enterprise transport management, and IT support service work. The split reveals Vae's dual role—it acts as a prime hardware vendor on SEWP V and Army ITES-4H for direct equipment delivery, and as a subcontractor to larger primes on integration and support efforts where hardware procurement is embedded in broader systems work. The source identifies Techfirst, Inc., a minority-owned, service-disabled veteran-owned business, as a subsidiary, though no additional detail on that entity's operational scope or relationship to Vae's prime contracts is provided.

Primary NAICS concentration is 541512 (Other Computer Related Services), capturing 1,095 of 1,224 awards and reflecting the hardware resale and IT infrastructure commodity supply mission. Top PSC categories are "IT and Telecom - Network: Digital Network Products" (119 awards), "IT and Telecom - Business Application Software" (113 awards), and "IT and Telecom - Compute: Servers" (92 awards). Nearly all work is routed through SEWP V or agency IDIQs; no evidence of GSA Schedule or commercial contracting is present in the source. Vae competes across full-and-open and set-aside vehicles but shows strong concentration on total small business and woman-owned small business set-asides, particularly on SEWP V delivery orders issued after 2023. The company's competitive posture leverages rapid procurement cycles enabled by GWAC and IDIQ vehicles rather than system integration, labor scale, or technical depth in cybersecurity or cloud engineering.

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