John Conafay, a veteran of the US Air Force, 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 was always the same—most project management tools like Atlassian’s Jira and Asana simply weren’t secure enough to meet the government’s strict security standards. So, in early 2022, Conafay launched Integrate, a collaboration platform designed specifically to allow private companies, the US Department of Defense, and other government agencies to work jointly on classified, multi-entity projects. Last year, the Seattle-based startup won a $25 million, five-year contract from the US Space Force. That validation from a major agency was one of the reasons Wesley Chan, co-founder and managing partner at FPV Ventures, just led Integrate’s $17 million Series A. Chan, known for early bets on …