After a few months off, DTS is back with another company profile. This week we look at Integrate, a Seattle software company developing a shared program schedule to accelerate procurement timelines

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Integrate Space Corporation is a Seattle-based software company building a multi-organization program-management platform. Instead of every program office, prime, and supplier maintaining its own version of the schedule, the software enables real-time cross-organizational schedule synchronization with granular task-level permission controls so collaborators see only intended information.

Founded in 2022 by John Conafay, Andrew Sloan, Kellie Higa, and Paul Reesman, Integrate Space Corporation began as a project-management software for commercial space hardware builders.  Conafay served in the Air Force, then worked at Spire, Astranis, Spaceflight Inc., and ABL Space Systems, where he worked on launch business tied to Amazon's Kuiper constellation. Sloan came from product and design, including Momentus. Higa came from full-stack software development.

In July 2023, Space Systems Command (SSC) signed a roughly $1.25 million SBIR Phase II contract.  The software supported launch-management workflows associated with Tactically Responsive Space and Firefly's Victus Nox mission, with Conafay describing the product as "Google Docs for project management."

Integrate spent heavily, relative to its size, to get the product into classified environments and deployed through Second Front Systems' Game Warden platform onto IL6 in less than a year.  SSC then signed a follow-on sole-source SBIR Phase III contract in April of 2025.

In February 2026, the company raised a $17 million Series A and in August 2026, they announced a $6 million venture debt facility from J.P. Morgan. The company now describes its mission more broadly as orchestrating critical programs across land, maritime, air, space, and cyber and is supporting Space Systems Integration Office (SSIO) integration of the rapidly growing national security space systems portfolio.

Integrate replaces contractor-specific systems, spreadsheets, and periodic IMS submissions, reconciled by hand with one synchronized schedule.  Tasks, dependencies, milestones, and status changes propagate through one underlying program structure, and permissions decide what each organization or user sees. It's delivered as software as a service through Game Warden. 

On November 8, 1955, the Navy named Rear Adm. William "Red" Raborn director of its new Special Projects Office. His task was a submarine-launched ballistic missile that would reach interim capability by early 1963 and full capability by early 1965.

The program required a new submarine, a solid-fuel missile, inertial navigation, and fire control, all developed at once by thousands of contractors, racing against the Soviets.

To manage it, the office worked with Lockheed and Booz Allen Hamilton to build the Program Evaluation and Review Technique (PERT). PERT modeled the program as a network of interdependent events, estimated how long each would take, and computed the critical path.

USS George Washington (SSBN-598) was commissioned December 30, 1959, made the first submerged Polaris launch on July 20, 1960, and left on the Navy's first deterrent patrol that November 15, more than two years ahead of the interim target.

By the early 1960s, PERT-style networks had spread across DoD and NASA, and the Integrated Master Schedule every program office maintains today descends from that work.

[[In 1972, political scientist Harvey Sapolsky found that PERT may have contributed little to the technical result. Its value was political: the charts gave Polaris the appearance of complete control, which kept Congress and OSD from interfering, and the autonomy let the Special Projects Office solve the actual problems.]]

PERT's descendants haven’t solved the problem. GAO says the average major defense program now takes more than 12 years to deliver a capability, and the IMS arrives as periodic submissions from each contractor, reconciled by hand against everything that changed in between. 

Sixty-six years to the day after George Washington's Polaris launch, the President signed an executive order on defense supply chains. Section 3 directs the Pentagon to require contractors at every tier to map critical supply chains, vet suppliers, and report significant risks, followed by corrective action plans with "a strict projected timeline" and mitigations tracked until closure.

Mapping the supply chain shows where a program is exposed. It doesn't show which milestones a failing supplier threatens, who owns the fix, or whether recovery is on track.

Integrate's shared schedule could connect the supplier, prime, and program office around that recovery plan: assign an accountable owner, re-sequence work, track dependencies, and keep mitigation actions visible through completion.

They would still need other data and tools to support supplier vetting or raw-material traceability but Its and opportunity to help managers turn identified risks into decisions before delays cascade.

The Navy built PERT because no one could see Polaris whole. The Space Force now has the same problem across nine portfolios, and Integrate is a textbook example of the SBIR transition: a Phase II prototype that became a sole-source Phase III SAAS contract.

In an April DefenseScoop op-ed, Integrate's head of Washington operations made the broader case: the Pentagon's business systems are no different from any large company's, and it should buy mature commercial software built with AI from the start and deployable on classified networks, rather than funding custom builds and GOTS solutions.

PERT spread from one program to the whole department. Integrate is making the case that its kind of software should too.