Integrate raises $17M to move defense project management into the 21st century

Integrate, a Seattle-based startup focused on secure collaboration for defence and aerospace projects, has raised $17 million in a Series A round aimed at transforming how government and private contractors manage complex initiatives.

The company was founded in early 2022 by John Conafay, a U.S. Air Force veteran who has spent much of his career leading business development efforts at aerospace firms including Spire, Astra, and ABL Space Systems. Across those roles, Conafay repeatedly encountered the same operational bottleneck: collaboration on government contracts was cumbersome and inefficient.

According to Conafay, teams on both the private and federal sides were often forced into a slow and frustrating workflow built around exchanging PDFs and Excel spreadsheets. The core issue was security. Popular project management platforms such as Atlassian’s Jira and Asana did not meet the stringent security standards required for government and defence-related work.

To address this persistent challenge, Conafay launched Integrate, a purpose-built collaboration platform tailored for classified and multi-entity government projects. The platform is designed to enable private contractors, the U.S. Department of Defence, and other federal agencies to securely collaborate on shared initiatives. The startup gained significant traction last year when it secured a $25 million, five-year contract with the U.S. Space Force. That major contract served as a strong validation of the company’s technology and market fit.

This traction was a key factor in the new funding round. The $17 million Series A was led by Wesley Chan, co-founder and managing partner at FPV Ventures. Chan, known for early investments in companies such as Canva, Robinhood, and Plaid, along with more than 20 other unicorn startups, said he backed Integrate because it addresses a critical need shared by government agencies and the companies that contract with them.

For years, many technology firms avoided working with the U.S. Department of Defence, viewing military-related projects as ethically controversial. However, attitudes began to shift following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and growing concerns about China as a strategic competitor. As geopolitical tensions increased, more technology companies began reconsidering their stance on defence contracts.

This evolving environment could encourage established project management software providers to pursue government clients. However, Conafay believes it will be technically challenging for those companies to adapt their existing platforms to meet federal requirements.

“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,” Conafay said.

He emphasised that what differentiates Integrate from civilian-focused tools is its ability to enable secure, simultaneous collaboration among multiple organisations on large-scale project schedules, while protecting sensitive information from unauthorised access by other participants. The platform is designed to coordinate extremely large, multi-year programs involving thousands of stakeholders. Conafay cited examples such as the F-35 Lightning II and the James Webb Space Telescope as complex initiatives that Integrate is built to support. In projects of that scale, ensuring that numerous partners remain aligned and synchronised is both critical and highly challenging.

While Conafay declined to disclose detailed information about additional customers beyond the Space Force, he noted that some of the startup’s work involves coordinating large rocket deployments. These missions require managing dozens of objectives simultaneously.

“They have to coordinate tens of satellites on a single launch across dozens of missions,” Conafay explained. “The complexity is pretty extreme, and they use us to coordinate those things.”

Looking ahead, Integrate plans to expand its footprint by marketing its software to other branches of the U.S. military, including the Navy, the Army, and elements of the intelligence community. The company also aims to sell directly to private aerospace and defence contractors that collaborate with these agencies. With fresh capital and a growing roster of government partnerships, Integrate is positioning itself as a next-generation solution for modernising how defence and aerospace projects are planned, coordinated, and executed in an increasingly complex security environment.