Platform Subscription

The United States Department of Agriculture’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) intends to award a sole source firm-fixed-price contract to Whooster Inc for a five-year subscription to a real-time investigative data platform, with a base period from May 3, 2026, through May 2, 2027, and four one-year option periods extending through May 2, 2031. This acquisition is being conducted under FAR Part 12 procedures for commercial items and is designated as a Total Small Business Set-Aside, with Whooster Inc identified as a small business holding UEI V7HKESYDMJQ5. The platform provides aggregated, correlated intelligence across people, phones, vehicles, properties, criminal records, businesses, and social media databases, enabling APHIS to conduct critical investigations, identify violators, and support pathway analysis to protect U.S. agriculture and natural resources. Whooster is the sole proprietary provider of this capability and also supports batch processing of hundreds or thousands of simultaneous queries. The contract requires full compliance with Section 508 accessibility standards, including WCAG Level AA, and mandates adherence to USGv6 interoperability requirements. The platform must be delivered electronically, with no physical shipment involved, and performance occurs via cloud-based access. All responses to this presolicitation must be submitted electronically to Latisha Hollman at Latisha.A.Hollman@usda.gov by May 27, 2026, and may include capability statements from responsible sources even though the acquisition is intended to be non-competitive. The government retains sole discretion to determine whether to compete the requirement based on any submissions received. Contract administration will be handled via the Invoice Processing Platform (IPP), and invoices must be submitted electronically. Contractor personnel must comply with USDA Personal Identity Verification (PIV) policies under HSPD-12, and the contractor must designate a PIV compliance representative. The contract includes strict prohibitions on using government data to train AI models, transferring data outside the U.S., imposing unauthorized terms on the government, or using federal branding for marketing. Additional compliance obligations include adherence to the Contractor Code of Business Ethics and Conduct, whistleblower protections, anti-trafficking requirements, and the new AGAR clauses on anti-discrimination and DEI. The award will be made on a best value basis, prioritizing technical superiority, fair and reasonable pricing, and acceptable past performance, with no trade-offs permitted and no lowest price technically acceptable (LPTA)