Baltimore software firm Fearless is one of 10 companies selected for a five-year, $500 million federal contract to provide IT and business process services to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) awarded the contract as part of its Data Analytics Supporting Healthcare (DASH) pact, which seeks to acquire support for "initiatives aimed at bolstering quality of care through improved health outcomes and beneficiary experiences of care," according to release from Fearless on Thursday. The contract comes in the form of a blanket purchase agreement, which means Fearless can be called upon to provide technology services at any point during the five-year period of the agreement.
Fearless, which was founded in 2009 and is headquartered at Spark Baltimore downtown, specializes in building software tools for government agencies. The latest award comes after Fearless won a federal contract last summer worth up to $120 million that it said would create dozens of new jobs.
Fearless already works with a number of other government agencies and previously won a contract with CMS in 2019 to establish and integrate human-centered design into the agency's processes, according to Fearless' website.
With the DASH pact, CMS is now working to adopt "more agile delivery services" in areas such as IT management and governance, business process analysis, human-centered design, solution architecture and design, application development and configuration, analytics and reporting, and system integration, according to the release.
“The DASH contract aligns with our continuous growth in the Data Science field. Around 13 years ago we started working with intelligence agencies providing data-driven solutions, and our data skills have continued to grow since then,” said Greg Godbout, chief growth officer for Fearless, in a statement. “Today, we support projects where agencies are growing their internal Data Governance, Strategy, Management, and Adoption.”
As part of the DASH contract, Fearless will work in partnership with Analytica, a Washington, D.C.-based IT services management firm that also has a Baltimore office, through a Contractor Teaming Arrangement. This arrangement allows two contractors to pair up to compete for federal contracts.
The partnership puts Fearless in a prime contractor position and will allow the company to scale its data science and data engineering practices, Godbout said in the release.
In addition, Fearless has also been awarded an 8(a) Streamlined Technology Application Resource for Services (STARS) II contract that will run for five years through February 2027. This contract serves as a set-aside for Small Business Administration 8(a)-certified small businesses to compete for task orders to supply federal agencies with IT services and solutions. The General Services Administration raised the ceiling on this contract in 2020 to meet pandemic-created demand.
Fearless is led by CEO Delali Dzirasa and currently has nearly 200 employees and revenue of $42 million in 2021, according to the release. Last year, the company also opened new space downtown for Hutch, an incubator spun out of Fearless that aims to help women- and minority-led technology firms break into the federal contracting industry.
