John Conafay's Integrate says it will support the Space Systems Integration Office and has secured a $6 million debt facility from J.P. Morgan, six months after FPV Ventures led its $17 million Series A.
By RuntimeWire Staff · Published
Primary source: PR Newswire
Why it matters #
Integrate says it is moving from one Space Force launch workflow into an office that coordinates engineering and integration across much of the service's acquisition portfolio, testing whether secure project software can become acquisition infrastructure.
Integrate, the Seattle defense-software company co-founded by John Conafay, announced a new U.S. Space Force contract on August 24, six months after a $17 million Series A led by FPV Ventures. Integrate also said it secured a $6 million debt facility from J.P. Morgan to scale its product; the facility's terms were not disclosed. Both developments were disclosed in Integrate's company-issued release.
According to Integrate, the contract puts the company inside the Space Systems Integration Office, or SSIO, which coordinates engineering and integration across much of the Space Force's acquisition portfolio. Its value, duration and procurement vehicle were not disclosed in Integrate's announcement.
Conafay arrived at this problem after serving in the U.S. Air Force and working at Spire Global, Spaceflight, Astranis and ABL Space Systems. He was Astranis employee No. 6. Integrate's other co-founders brought complementary product experience: Andrew Sloan previously ran brand at Momentus and advised aerospace businesses through Cosma Schema, while Kellie Higa worked in software and product design before becoming Integrate's senior full-stack engineer.
From launch operations to portfolio integration
Integrate says the SSIO contract broadens its position inside the Space Force. In a June 2025 announcement, Integrate said it received a five-year, $25 million contract with the service's Mission Manifest Office. The work supports launch operations by coordinating schedules, external dependencies and commercial partners.
SSIO has a wider remit. The office conducts system-of-systems engineering, defines interfaces across programs and coordinates technical governance across the Space Force's acquisition portfolio. Integrate says the new deployment will give leaders a current view of schedules, dependencies and risks spanning multiple programs.
That would be a meaningful expansion for Conafay. Integrate began with a narrower focus on launch operations, coordinating schedules, external dependencies and commercial partners. It is now selling its scheduling layer to an office responsible for making separately acquired systems work together.
Helen Ying said in the Integrate announcement that Integrate would help leaders track both program details and wider objectives. Conafay described the existing alternative more bluntly as "hand-jammed slides utilizing stale information."
The size of the new award remains important. A contract with a strategically placed office can validate Integrate's product without producing revenue comparable to the earlier $25 million ceiling. Its financial weight remains unclear.
The founder's spreadsheet problem
Conafay and Sloan were describing this problem years before Integrate had a major defense contract. In a 2022 interview with Payload, Sloan said space programs were being coordinated through inboxes, spreadsheets, improvised Salesforce installations and even Post-it notes.
Conafay had seen the same fragmentation from inside launch and satellite businesses.
Integrate has since adapted that idea to classified defense work. According to Integrate's defense product page, the platform runs on NIPR at IL5, SIPR at IL6 and JWICS for Top Secret programs through Second Front Systems' Game Warden infrastructure. Integrate says its permission system can restrict access down to an individual task while keeping authorized users on one synchronized schedule. Its claims of being the first or only project-management platform with certain classified capabilities have not been independently established.
The underlying bet is easy to understand. General-purpose tools such as Jira, Smartsheet and Microsoft Project typically organize work inside one business. A classified defense program can involve a government office, prime contractors, subcontractors and commercial suppliers, each operating with different permissions and networks. Integrate is trying to keep the schedule connected even when the participants and data cannot be treated equally.
Six months after the Series A
Integrate's February 11 Series A was led by FPV Ventures with participation from Fuse VC and Rsquared VC. New Vista, Hyperplane and Riot Ventures returned for the round. Integrate said the $17 million equity financing would fund new product capabilities for government customers and expansion of its go-to-market strategy.
Including a $970,000 pre-seed round announced in June 2022 and a $3.4 million seed round led by Hyperplane in 2023, Integrate has announced about $21.37 million in equity financing.
The scope described in Integrate's SSIO announcement gives Conafay another test of whether the company can move beyond a single Space Force workflow and support programs closer to the center of the service's acquisition portfolio.
AI reaches the classified schedule
Integrate describes its current product as an agentic project-management system. Its public materials list automated risk discovery, dependency tracking, resource , scenario modeling and the ability to generate a project from a prompt. Integrate has not attached performance data to those features or identified the models used in classified environments.
The FY2026 funding plan includes agentic-AI pilots for warfighting and business processes, creating policy context for Integrate's positioning. The plan is available in the department's FY2026 funding document. For program-management buyers, the practical tests will be narrower than the agentic label: whether AI-generated warnings are reproducible, whether actions are recorded in an audit trail and whether permissions survive every automated workflow.
Integrate is entering a well-funded market for software that replaces military planning and acquisition workflows. Onebrief, which focuses on command planning and decision support, closed a $200 million Series D in January and acquired Battle Road Digital. Procurement-software developer Pryzm raised $12.2 million in December 2025, while Sabel Systems launched 97Helix for defense digital engineering in June.
Conafay's wedge remains the live program schedule: one record that can span contractors, government offices and classified networks without exposing every task to every participant. Integrate says the SSIO contract moves that thesis closer to the center of Space Force acquisition, where Integrate will have to prove it can support the resulting deployment at scale.