Integrate, a Seattle-based space software startup, won a $25M Space Force contract—one of the largest awarded by the branch to a software company.
The contract, which was awarded by SSC’s mission manifest office, also shows the service is taking its “move fast” mandate to heart. It’s among the quickest the Space Force has awarded a Phase III contract to a software company.
Integrate 101: The startup’s software allows suppliers and customers to interact with each other to view their integrated master schedules (IMS). This allows “the government to seamlessly interact with commercial partners,” even in classified environments, CEO John Conafay told Payload.
Integrate’s platform also offers minute-by-minute updates to projects, allowing users to “get live updates and live context in a way that you’re not exactly capable of with sending files back and forth,” Conafay said.
So what? The speed and size of the contract award indicates a potential shift in the Space Force’s acquisition process, Conafay said. Streamlined acquisitions will be more critical as the Space Force begins working on more high-profile and complex missions, including Golden Dome.
“I think [the contract] speaks to the explicit need of being able to streamline operations, de-risk more complex, and a great cadence of missions,” Conafay said.
What’s next? Integrate is also seeking to build AI into future iterations of the software, using isolated LLM microservices that could help government customers operate in classified environments.
The AI would provide a summary of project changes—and which projects have not been updated. This would free up officials from having to sift through documents to determine a project status. “What it would take a person… to root through thousands of lines of schedules, we can do with our AI service in a matter of minutes,” Conafay said.
Integrate is also working to let users “interact with the database as naturally as you would a coworker.”
“The criticality of every second mattering is going to only increase, and the kind of shiny object solutions aren’t going to be the only ones that matter,” Conafay said. “[The question then becomes] how do we actually get this done, and Integrate is here and ready for it.”
