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 ran into the same software hurdle: collaborating on government contracts was a logistical mess that forced his teams and their federal counterparts to rely on a tedious back-and-forth of PDFs and Excel files. The bottleneck is always the same — most project management tools like Atlassian’s Jira and Asana aren’t secure enough to meet stringent government security standards.

So, in early 2022, Conafay launched Integrate, a collaboration platform designed to allow 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 a $25 millionfive-year contract from the US Space Force.

That validation from a major agency is one of the reasons Wesley Chan, co-founder and managing partner of FPV Ventures, just led $17 million Series A. Chan in Integrate, known for early bet of Canva, Robinhood, Plaid, and more than 20 other unicorns, told TechCrunch that he invested because Integrate solves a big problem for the government and the private companies that serve it.

Until recently, the tech sector avoided selling to the US Department of Defense, feeling it was immoral to make products for the military. But that sentiment changed after Russia invaded Ukraine and China began to be seen as an enemy.

This shift also means that other project management companies may now want to sell their products to the government, but Conafay admits that technically it will be difficult for them to catch up with Integrate.

“If you don’t build something from the ground up with government requirements, you can never go back and re-architect existing software for government purposes,” he told TechCrunch.

According to Conafay, what differentiates Integrate from civilian-focused competitors is its ability to allow different organizations to simultaneously and securely collaborate on multiple project schedules while hiding sensitive details from other participants.

Integrate was designed to manage the coordination of mammoth, multi-year mega-projects, such as the F-35 Lightning II program or the James Webb Space Telescope, where thousands of partners must stay in sync, explained Conafay.

While he was careful not to reveal too much about customers outside the Space Force, he said some of the work the startup does for that branch of the US military involves deploying large rockets.

“They have to coordinate ten satellites in one launch of several missions,” said Conafay. “The complexity is extreme, and they use us to coordinate things.”

Integrate intends to grow by selling its software to other branches of the US military, including the Navy, Army, and the intelligence community, as well as to private companies that serve them.