Veterans Affairs awards 10 seats on $2.4B user experience vehicle

The Veterans Affairs Department has awarded 10 companies positions on a five-year, $2.4 billion contract vehicle focused on the development of digital products for VA’s user experience initiatives.

Known by the acronym of SPRUCE, this contract will be used by VA to buy modern and commercial-like software development and operation services. VA is pushing to make those services available to both internal and external users.

SPRUCE, or the Secure Performant Reliable and User Centered Experiences vehicle, also covers areas such as technical advising and architecture planning, service design and user research studies, data science and data analytics, product support operations.

VA made these awards on Wednesday:

• Agile Six Applications (incumbent)
• Aquia Nava II
• AVB Digital II
• Bravo Communications Services
• Coforma (incumbent)
• Magnum Opus (incumbent)
• Oddball (incumbent)
• One Phoenix Solutions
• Peregrine Digital Services
• Rise8

SPRUCE is the successor to the current contract called CEDAR, short for Customer Experience DevOps and Agile Releases. Both are reserved for service-disabled, veteran-owned small businesses.

Each of the four CEDAR incumbents will continue onto SPRUCE. VA has obligated $233 million against CEDAR so far with March 28, 2026 as the last date to order, according to GovTribe data.

A total of 33 companies submitted proposals for SPRUCE, according to Federal Procurement Data System records.

To win a seat, awardees had to pay particular attention to this language on Page 14 and Section 3.1 of the final solicitation:

"The contractor’s support and solutions shall follow the practices described in the Digital Services Playbook (https://playbook.cio.gov/). The contractor shall be thoroughly familiar with the concepts in each play and implement them in its approaches and support."