John Conafay, a veteran of the U.S. Air Force, has spent most of his career leading business development at public and private aerospace companies, including Spire, Astranis, and ABL Space Systems.
At each company, Conafay ran into the same software hurdle: Collaborating on government contracts was a logistical mess that forced his teams and their federal counterparts to rely on a tedious back-and-forth of PDFs and Excel files. The bottleneck was always the same — most project management tools like Atlassian’s Jira and Asana simply weren’t secure enough to meet the government’s strict security standards.
So, in early 2022, Conafay launched Integrate, a collaboration platform designed specifically to allow private companies, the U.S. Department of Defense, and other government agencies to work jointly on classified, multi-entity projects. Last year, the Seattle-based startup won a $25 million, five-year contract from the U.S. Space Force.
That validation from a major agency was one of the reasons Wesley Chan, co-founder and managing partner at FPV Ventures, just led Integrate’s $17 million Series A. Chan, known for early bets on Canva, Robinhood, Plaid, and more than 20 other unicorns, told TechCrunch he invested because Integrate solves a big problem for the government and the private companies that serve it.
Until recently, the tech sector shunned selling to the U.S. Department of Defense, feeling that it was immoral to create products for the military. But that sentiment changed after Russia invaded Ukraine and China began to be viewed as an adversary.
This shift also means other project management companies may now want to sell their products to the government, but Conafay claims it will be technically difficult for them to catch up to Integrate.
“If you don’t build something from the ground up with government requirements, you can’t really go back and re-architect software that exists for government purposes,” he told TechCrunch.
According to Conafay, what sets Integrate apart from its civilian-focused competitors is its ability to let different organizations simultaneously and securely collaborate on massive project schedules while keeping sensitive details hidden from other participants.
Integrate is designed to handle the coordination of mammoth, multi-year mega-projects, such as the F-35 Lightning II program or the James Webb Space Telescope, where thousands of partners must stay in sync, Conafay explained.
While he was careful not to reveal too much about customers besides the Space Force, he did say that some of the work the startup is doing for that branch of U.S. military involves deployments of large rockets.
“They have to coordinate tens of satellites on a single launch across dozens of missions,” Conafay said. “The complexity is pretty extreme, and they use us to coordinate those things.”
Integrate intends to grow by selling its software to other branches of the U.S. military, including the Navy, the Army, and the intelligence community, as well as to the private companies that serve them.