Integrate

The Invisible Bottleneck in Defense Innovation

The U.S. government spends hundreds of billions of dollars each year on defense programs, a budget widely expected to exceed $1 trillion in the near term. These initiatives involve thousands of stakeholders, government agencies, prime contractors, subcontractors, and suppliers, operating across multiple classification levels. And yet, many of these programs are still managed using a patchwork of spreadsheets, email chains, legacy on-prem systems, and commercial tools never designed for classified collaboration.

Think of the scale: programs like the F-35 Lightning II or the James Webb Space Telescope require thousands of partners staying in sync across years-long timelines, long certification chains, and interdependent milestones that can ripple across entire portfolios. The Government Accountability Office has repeatedly documented how schedule slips and fragmented oversight compound risk on these kinds of efforts.

The result: fragmented communication, security tradeoffs, execution delays, and limited visibility across mission-critical programs.

Integrate exists to fix this.

Built for Classified Environments From Day One

John Conafay is a U.S. Air Force veteran who spent years leading business development at three aerospace unicorns, including Spire, Astranis, and ABL Space Systems. At each stop, he encountered the same problem: logistical chaos when teams relied on PDFs, spreadsheets, and project management tools that couldn’t meet the security requirements of federal contracts.

He founded Integrate to solve it, not by retrofitting enterprise SaaS for government use, but by architecting a platform from the ground up as an ultra-secure, AI-native collaboration system for classified programs.

The result is the first and only project management platform deployed on the Department of Defense’s top-secret Joint Worldwide Intelligence Communications System (JWICS), enabling real-time collaboration on billion-dollar projects involving hundreds of companies and stakeholders operating across multiple clearance levels. The platform provides simultaneous, cross-organization planning with selective visibility — so program managers can maintain a single source of truth without exposing proprietary data or classified content beyond need-to-know.

In 2025, Integrate secured a $25M multi-year contract with the U.S. Space Force, the fastest and largest Phase III SBIR award ever granted to a Seed-stage company. The platform has since become a requirement in key launch programs, where teams coordinate tens of satellites on a single launch across dozens of missions, and precision, coordination, and security are non-negotiable. As part of that contract, Integrate has already onboarded dozens of partners across aerospace and defense.

That level of adoption signals something important: modern defense capabilities don’t just depend on better hardware or breakthrough AI, they depend on better execution infrastructure.

This isn’t theoretical product-market fit. It’s validated at the highest levels.

At Hyperplane, we invest in companies building core infrastructure for complex systems. Integrate sits squarely in that category.

John's background gave him a firsthand understanding of how programs actually run and where they break. The team has paired that operational credibility with disciplined product execution, building software that works inside the constraints of classified environments while dramatically improving collaboration across agencies and contractors.

Since our Seed investment, we’ve watched Integrate move with exceptional velocity: expanding deployments within the Department of Defense, deepening its presence across mission-critical programs, building trust within one of the most demanding customer bases in the world, and hiring a world-class product, engineering, and government liaison team.

‍