Who Owns SAIC?

J. Robert Beyster, a physicist who had worked at Los Alamos National Laboratory and General Atomics, founded Science Applications Incorporated in La Jolla, California in 1969. The company's early work was scientific consulting for government clients, and Beyster built it on an unusual employee-ownership model: staff bought stock in the company and participated in profit sharing, an approach that made SAIC one of the largest employee-owned enterprises in the United States for decades.

Through the 1970s and 1980s, SAIC grew steadily on defense, intelligence, and energy contracts. The company became a fixture inside classified government work and expanded into systems engineering, software, and national security programs. By the late 1990s it employed tens of thousands and had become one of Washington's largest contractors, still privately held with broad employee ownership.

SAIC went public in 2006 in one of the year's larger IPOs, ending the pure employee-ownership era but keeping the technical-services focus. Growth continued through the post-9/11 contracting boom, with revenue peaking above $11 billion across the combined enterprise.

In September 2013, the company split in two. The national security, health, and engineering businesses became a new entity called Leidos, while the remaining IT services operation kept the SAIC name and ticker. The split was intended to resolve organizational conflicts of interest rules that limited the combined company from bidding certain contracts. SAIC emerged as the smaller half at roughly $4 billion in revenue, focused on IT services for defense, intelligence, and civilian agencies.

The company rebuilt scale through the 2019 acquisition of Engility for approximately $2.5 billion, which added intelligence community and defense IT work. Under CEOs Nazzic Keene and then Toni Townes-Whitley, SAIC pushed into AI, cloud migration, and digital transformation offerings for federal agencies. Jim Reagan took over as CEO in February 2026.

FY2026, ended January 30, 2026, showed the current pressure on the business: revenue of $7.26 billion declined about 3% organically, partly because SAIC deliberately walked away from roughly $200 million of low-margin Cloud One work. Adjusted diluted EPS rose 18% to $10.75 and free cash flow reached $577 million, up 16% year over year, as management emphasized margin discipline over top-line growth. The company returned $492 million to shareholders during the year.