John Conafay, a US Air Force veteran, 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 faced the same software hurdle: Collaboration on government contracts was a mess that forced his teams and their federal counterparts to rely on a tedious PDF and Excel file. The bottleneck has always been the same—most project management tools like Jira and Atlassian’s Asana simply weren’t secure enough to meet the government’s stringent security standards.
So, in early 2022, Conafay was launched Integratea collaboration platform specifically designed to enable private companies, the US Department of Defense and other government agencies to work together on classified multi-entity projects. Last year, the Seattle-based startup won one 25 million dollarsfive-year contract from the US Space Force.
That validation from a major company was one of the reasons Wesley Chan, co-founder and managing partner of 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 that he invested because the companies that Integrate serves are solving a big problem.
Until recently, the tech sector avoided sales to the US Department of Defense, seeing it as unethical to create products for the military. But that sentiment changed after Russia invaded Ukraine and China began to be seen as an adversary.
This shift also means that 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 reach Integrate.
“Unless you build something from the ground up with government requirements, you can’t really go back and rebuild software that exists for government purposes,” he told TechCrunch.
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According to Conafay, what sets Integrate apart from its citizen-focused competitors is its ability to allow different organizations to collaborate simultaneously and securely on massive project timelines, while keeping sensitive details hidden from other participants.
Integrate is designed to handle the coordination of large multi-year major 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 much about customers other than the Space Force, he said some of the work the startup does for that branch of the US military involves developing large rockets.
“They have to coordinate dozens of satellites into a single launch into dozens of missions,” Conafay said. “The complexity is quite extreme and they use us to coordinate these things.”
Integrate plans to grow by selling its software to other branches of the US military, including the Navy, Army and intelligence community, as well as the private companies that serve them.
