Noblis, Inc.

Noblis is a nonprofit, and that changes what it is for. The organisation was created in 1996 as Mitretek Systems, spun out of MITRE so that civilian research would sit apart from MITRE's defense federally funded work and the conflict of interest questions that arrangement raised, taking roughly 750 staff and $70 million of contracts with it. The name changed to Noblis in 2007. It files as a 501(c)(3) charitable organisation, reported revenue just above $614 million for the year ending October 2025, and employs somewhere around two thousand people from a Reston, Virginia base under chief executive Mile Corrigan. There are no shareholders waiting to be paid, so surplus goes back into internal work rather than out of the door.

Eight capability areas carry the technical side. Applied sciences covers laboratory work including a biosafety level two facility. Artificial intelligence and modeling and simulation supply the analytic muscle, autonomous systems has its own research centre, and cybersecurity and operations runs against a dedicated cyber and security test range. Digital engineering and digital transformation handle the systems and process work agencies buy most often, and energy and environment covers everything from wildfire prediction to infrastructure resilience. Research and development is treated as a named function rather than an overhead line, with an internal sponsored research programme, a patent portfolio and a collaboration centre in Reston. Noblis Ventures invests in outside companies, including a generative artificial intelligence firm backed in 2025.

Four mission areas organise the customer side: civil government, defense, homeland security, and intelligence and law enforcement. Two for profit subsidiaries sit under the nonprofit parent. Noblis ESI, built from ElanTech Systems after a 2012 acquisition, works intelligence engineering. Noblis MSD came from the 2021 purchase of McKean Defense, a Philadelphia naval readiness contractor bought alongside Cabrillo Technologies and Mikros Systems, the last of which kept its own name. An earlier subsidiary, Noblis NSP, was folded into the parent in 2018. In August 2026 Noblis agreed to buy FTS International, a mission engineering and intelligence analysis firm, extending the space and intelligence portfolio.

The contract record shows the spread. Noblis was the only nonprofit on the FBI's information technology supplies and support services agreement in 2024, a vehicle with an $8 billion ceiling. The Federal Aviation Administration awarded a $709 million air traffic engineering and programme support contract the same December. Naval Sea Systems Command put Noblis MSD on a $982 million unmanned surface vessel family of systems agreement. Homeland Security work runs through an $82 million science and technology task order and a $99 million prime with the countering weapons of mass destruction office, and the health research agency ARPA-H added a place on a $500 million talent support vehicle.