John Conafay, a United States Air Force veteran, has spent most of his career leading business development for public and private aerospace companies, including Spire, Astranis, and ABL Space Systems.
Conafay encountered the same software hurdles at every company. Collaborating on government contracts was logistically confusing, forcing his team and their federal counterparts to rely on tedious exchanges of PDFs and Excel files. The bottleneck was always the same. Most project management tools, such as Atlassian’s Jira and Asana, were not secure enough to meet stringent government security standards.
So, in early 2022, Conafay launched Integrate, a collaboration platform specifically designed to enable private companies, the U.S. Department of Defense, and other government agencies to collaborate on sensitive, multi-party projects. Last year, the Seattle-based startup won a $25 million, five-year contract from the U.S. Space Force.
This recognition from a major agency was one of the reasons why Wesley Chan, co-founder and managing partner of FPV Ventures, led Integrate’s $17 million Series A. Chan, known for his early bets on Canva, Robinhood, Plaid, and more than 20 other unicorns, told TechCrunch that he invested in Integrate because it solves a big problem for governments and the private companies that serve them.
Until recently, the technology industry avoided selling to the U.S. Department of Defense, believing it immoral to make products for the military. But that sentiment changed after Russia invaded Ukraine and China began to be seen as an adversary.
The change also means other project management companies may want to sell their products to governments, but Konafei claims it will be technically difficult for them to catch up with Integrate.
“If you don’t build something from scratch according to government requirements, you can’t go back and rebuild software that exists for government purposes,” he told TechCrunch.
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What sets Integrate apart from its private-sector competitors, Conafey said, is the ability for different organizations to collaborate on large project schedules simultaneously and securely, while keeping sensitive information hidden from other participants.
Integrate is designed to handle the coordination of huge, multi-year megaprojects, such as the F-35 Lightning II program and the James Webb Space Telescope, where thousands of partners need to stay in sync, Conafey explained.
While he was careful not to reveal too much about customers beyond the Space Force, he said some of the work the startup does for branches of the U.S. military includes deploying large rockets.
“They need to coordinate dozens of satellites in one launch, across dozens of missions,” Conafei said. “The complexity is so extreme that they are using us to orchestrate them.”
Integrate intends to grow by selling its software to other branches of the U.S. military, such as the Navy, Army and intelligence agencies, as well as private companies that serve them.
