Integrate has secured $17 million to bring modern, secure collaboration to one of the most complex corners of the economy: defense project management. The Seattle startup builds software for programs that span multiple contractors and government teams, enabling classified work to move faster than email chains, PDF uploads, and brittle spreadsheets.
Founded in 2022 by Air Force veteran and aerospace operator John Conafay, Integrate targets a familiar pain point across the defense-industrial base: mainstream tools like Jira or Asana were never designed for environments that demand strict data segmentation, impact-level controls, and auditability across multiple organizations. The result has been coordination drag on programs that already have unforgiving schedules and thousands of moving parts.
The company’s credibility jumped last year when it won a $25 million, five-year contract with the U.S. Space Force. According to the company, one early use case involves planning large launch campaigns where dozens of missions must synchronize payloads, interfaces, and ground operations—work that historically sprawled across disconnected artifacts.
Why Defense Projects Need New Collaboration Tools
Big defense programs aren’t just big—they’re labyrinthine. Think of the F-35 fighter or the James Webb Space Telescope: thousands of suppliers, long certification chains, and interdependent milestones that can ripple across years. The Government Accountability Office has repeatedly documented how schedule slips and fragmented oversight compound risk on such efforts.
Add security to that complexity. Many projects require collaboration across companies that must never see each other’s proprietary data, while certain tasks shift between unclassified, controlled unclassified, and classified domains. The Department of Defense’s cloud security rules—such as Impact Levels 5 and 6—mean generic SaaS rarely qualifies out of the box. In practice, teams fall back to email, portals, and versioned files, which obscures dependencies and buries risk signals.
Inside Integrate’s Secure Collaboration Platform
Integrate’s core proposition is simultaneous, cross-organization planning with selective visibility. Program managers can build and maintain shared schedules and dependency graphs across multiple primes and subs, while attribute-based access controls hide details that specific participants aren’t cleared to see. The platform is designed to preserve a single source of truth without exposing proprietary data or classified content beyond need-to-know.
Under the hood, the software focuses on features defense programs actually use: critical-path scheduling across years-long timelines, change control and audit trails, risk registers linked to tasks, and evidence capture for reviews and milestones. Integrate says it can ingest data from existing tools inside cleared environments and apply consistent markings and permissions, helping teams avoid the “copy to another system” trap that often creates more risk than it removes.
The approach is tailored for operations that require strict governance—a practical necessity for programs seeking or maintaining authority to operate, complying with defense cyber standards, and preparing for vendor assessments such as CMMC. It aims to connect the program plan, the supply chain, and the compliance story in one place.
Traction With Space Programs and Expansion Beyond
Space is a natural proving ground: a single rideshare launch can involve scores of satellites, several integration facilities, and highly orchestrated logistics windows. Integrate says its software helps align those threads without forcing every participant onto the same network or into the same clearance bucket. The company is now targeting expansion to other branches of the military, the intelligence community, and the primes and startups that support them.
The timing is favorable. Industry sentiment toward national security work has shifted in recent years as geopolitical risks sharpened. Firms like Anduril and Shield AI have demonstrated that software-native approaches can compress timelines and improve responsiveness, while government initiatives through DIU and service-specific innovation units have tried to reduce barriers to entry.
Competitive Landscape And Barriers To Entry
Integrate isn’t competing with project tools on features alone; it’s competing on survivability in secure environments. Achieving the right impact levels, proving controls, segmenting multi-entity data, and supporting air-gapped or hybrid deployments are significant hurdles. Even if mainstream platforms pursue these accreditations, adapting to multi-organization permissions and defense acquisition workflows is a material rewrite, not a settings change.
Just as important, defense users expect verifiable lineage of decisions. Every dependency change, waiver, and risk disposition must be tracked and attributable. That kind of fidelity is overkill for civilian projects—but essential for programs that will be audited years later.
What the New Funding Will Fuel at Integrate
The $17 million raise will help Integrate deepen product capabilities, scale secure infrastructure, and hire cleared engineers and customer success teams who can operate inside government enclaves. Expect investment in integrations with engineering and logistics systems commonly found across the defense-industrial base, along with hardened deployment options for higher classification levels.
If the company executes, the payoff is straightforward: fewer blind spots between contractors and government leads, faster detection of schedule risk, and cleaner, auditable program baselines. With the Defense Department’s budget in the hundreds of billions and pressure mounting to deliver capability faster, tools that turn complex collaboration from a liability into an advantage have room to run.
