Kristen Smith 
- Five-year contract covers automated testing across FSA systems
- Work follows the joint venture’s 2026-27 FAFSA launch support
- The Potomac Officers Club will host the 2026 FedCiv Summit on Oct. 29
Focus-Nava JV I has won a five-year contract from the Department of Education to establish an automated testing team across Federal Student Aid systems, catching software defects before updates reach the roughly 18 million students who apply for aid each year.
The joint venture between Nava PBC and Focus Consulting announced the award Wednesday. CEO and co-founder Rohan Bhobe said students feel the effects first when a release goes wrong.
Federal civilian agencies continue to modernize the systems behind public-facing services. The Potomac Officers Club will host the 2026 FedCiv Summit on Oct. 29 at the Ritz-Carlton Pentagon City in Arlington, Virginia, where government and industry leaders will discuss AI, cloud technologies and enterprise modernization. Sign up now.
What Student Aid Work Has the Joint Venture Done?
Focus-Nava secured its first Education Department contract in August 2025: an 18-month, $4.3 million award providing engineering support for the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, or FAFSA. That work covered cross-system functionality, risk reduction, and delivery of features and bug fixes across the systems behind FAFSA.
The joint venture said it provided operational support for the 2026–2027 FAFSA deployment, which marked the earliest system release date in the federal program’s history.
What Else Does Nava Build for Government?
Nava is a public benefit corporation providing software development, DevSecOps, cloud implementation and IT support to federal, state and local agencies. Its education work extends beyond the Education Department: the company is finalizing a contract to modernize New York’s student aid processing platform and is serving higher-education customers, including the Washington Student Achievement Council and the Minnesota State University System, through its February acquisition of Beam.
The company secured a position on NASA’s Solutions for Enterprise-Wide Procurement VI vehicle in July under the enterprise-wide IT service solutions category. It holds a three-year Securities and Exchange Commission contract to modernize enterprise developer tools and is teaming with prime contractor Corbalt on a five-year Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services contract supporting Medicare payment system modernization.
