SRC Inc

What It Is

SRC Inc is an independent not-for-profit research and development corporation chartered by the State of New York and headquartered in Syracuse. It was founded in 1957 as a research arm of Syracuse University, separated fully in the mid-1970s, and dropped the name Syracuse Research Corporation in 2008. It works in defense, environmental science and intelligence, and its manufacturing subsidiary SRCTec builds the hardware the research side designs. Customers are almost entirely federal: the Air Force, Army, Navy and Marine Corps, DHS, the EPA, the CDC and the intelligence community.

The not-for-profit structure is genuine — there is no equity, no venture funding and no ticker — but it is a tax and governance arrangement, not a firewall. SRC designs, manufactures and sells its own systems and competes for the same programmes as commercial vendors. What the structure changes is where the surplus goes, not whose hardware SRC recommends.

Products

Silent Archer is the counter-UAS system SRC is best known for. The company describes it as an integrated stack of air surveillance radar, an electronic warfare system, a direction-finding unit, an EO/IR camera and a common user display, offered in on-the-move, expeditionary, fixed-site and fly-away kit configurations. It underpins the US Army’s Low, Slow, Small Unmanned Aircraft Integrated Defeat System (LIDS) family.

LCMR counterfire radars — the AN/TPQ-48, AN/TPQ-49 and AN/TPQ-50 — are the long-running programme that pays for a great deal else.

CREW Duke (AN/VLQ-12) is a vehicle-mounted counter-IED jammer.

Ghost Mantis is SRC’s multi-function electronic warfare family; the company announced a third-generation multi-function array within it in June 2026. In May 2026 it was awarded an Army contract to prototype the Electromagnetic Warfare Rapid Integration System.

SR Hawk is a ground surveillance radar; SRC announced additional orders for US border surveillance in July 2026.

Finances

SRC files an IRS Form 990 rather than reporting to shareholders. For the fiscal year ended September 2024 it reported total revenue of $326.5 million against total expenses of $329.1 million — a small operating deficit — with net assets of $299.8 million. Revenue in the fiscal year ended September 2023 was $311.5 million.

Named awards give a sense of the programme base: a $425.9 million US Army contract in July 2020 for development, production, deployment and support of the Expeditionary-LIDS counter-UAS system; a $90 million eight-year sole-source Air Force IDIQ for counter-small-UAS equipment and sustainment, awarded the following month; and a $24 million Air Force contract in January 2026 for next-generation embedded computing.

Why It Matters

SRC got into counter-drone work before it was a market and turned that into a durable position inside Army and Air Force programmes of record — a harder thing to displace than a demonstration win. It is also small. At roughly $326 million of annual revenue it is an order of magnitude below the primes, and the counter-UAS niche it helped define is now being bought into by far larger and better-capitalised acquirers. A research corporation that must fund its own product development out of a thin operating margin has limited room to answer that.