Saleh ElHattab

Saleh ElHattab runs a company called Gravity, which does something both simple and, if you are the CFO of a mid-sized manufacturer, quietly essential: it turns utility bills, purchase orders, and supplier questionnaires into a numeric estimate of your carbon footprint, then hands that estimate to your auditor. In January 2025, investors decided this was a $13 million idea. Ansa Capital led the Series A. Eclipse Ventures, Caffeinated Capital, and Hanover, who were already there, wrote follow-on checks. Communitas Capital, Buoyant Ventures, and, notably, WEX Venture Capital, which is the corporate venture arm of a fleet-card company, joined. The total on the cap table now exceeds $20 million. Gravity's own press release credited 400 percent year-over-year revenue growth. The customer list includes WM (the waste giant formerly known as Waste Management), Autodesk, and MiddleGround Capital, a private equity firm whose LPs care about financed emissions, which is a phrase that did not exist as a marketing category five years ago.

Gravity is headquartered at 900 Kearny Street in San Francisco's North Beach, a block from City Lights bookstore, in the sort of neighborhood that has historically produced poets rather than industrial software. The team is about 76 people, split between the US and Europe. The European half exists mostly because the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive exists, which means several thousand large European companies now have to file emissions data with financial-grade rigor, and someone has to build them the accounting software.

ElHattab's argument to those companies is not really an environmental one. It is that reporting has become, in his phrase, "a manual, time-consuming chore that's detached from everyday business priorities," and that the same platform that produces the disclosure report can also route customers toward energy efficiency projects that lower their utility bill. If you make the compliance easy and the savings visible, the reporting stops being a cost center. It becomes a line item that pays for itself. This is the sort of pitch a former product manager gives.

Too often, sustainable disclosure is a manual, time-consuming chore that's detached from everyday business priorities. Reporting should be easy and connected to business value. - Saleh ElHattab, January 2025

Before Gravity

ElHattab was, in order: a software engineer at Salesforce (2015-2016), a product owner at Salesforce (2015-2016, overlapping), and then the head of solution architecture and product owner for Salesforce IoT until early 2018. He moved to Samsara, which sells connected-hardware and telematics software to trucking fleets and industrial operators, and rose from product manager to director of product management by 2019. He stayed at Samsara through 2021, which was the year the company went public. In August 2021 he took a seat as a venture partner at Eclipse Ventures, the deep-tech firm known for backing industrial software. He held the seat for eleven months. Then he left to build Gravity, and Eclipse, having watched him up close, later returned as an investor.

The biography reads like a list of resume bullets but is worth reading again, because the pattern matters. He shipped IoT product at Salesforce. He shipped fleet and warehouse software at Samsara. He looked at the industrial deal pipeline at Eclipse. And then he started a company that sells software to the exact operator he had spent seven years learning to sell to. This is what people mean when they call a founder "operator-led."

What Gravity Actually Does

The pitch is that Gravity is an enterprise carbon accounting and energy management platform. In practice, that means ingesting a firehose of unpleasant data - utility bill PDFs, supplier questionnaires answered in inconsistent formats, procurement records that use the wrong units - and turning it into an emissions inventory tagged with the appropriate emissions factors, then generating a report that maps onto whichever disclosure regime the customer needs to file under. In Europe that is CSRD. In California it is SB 253 and SB 261, the state's new climate disclosure rules. In private equity it is whatever the LPs are asking for that quarter.

The platform also runs what Gravity calls an energy efficiency marketplace, which connects customers to decarbonization projects and financing partners. This is the piece that makes the CFO care. It is one thing to tell a factory in Kentucky how much carbon it emitted last year. It is another to hand them a routed proposal for a rebate-eligible motor upgrade that lowers their power bill by four figures a month. The Series A press release described the plan as expanding this marketplace with "new decarbonization and financing partners." WEX, the fleet-card company that invested, has an obvious commercial reason to be interested.

Gravity's stack, per public data, runs on AWS, Vercel, DigitalOcean, Cloudflare, and Anthropic's Claude. The Claude integration is used, in Gravity's own marketing language, for "AI-powered data accuracy," "climate impact calculations," "data inference," and "agentic AI for scope 3." Scope 3 is where the supplier data lives, which is where the messiness lives, which is where large language models are, at the moment, the most defensible sales angle for a carbon startup.

The Sustainability LIVE Set

ElHattab does the conference circuit in the way founders of climate startups have to do it. He appeared at Sustainability LIVE Chicago in 2025, was interviewed by Sustainability Magazine, and did a long podcast episode with Products That Count in early 2024, where he talked to Silicon Valley Bank's climate tech SVP Maggie Wong about pragmatism, diversity, and scaling through economic headwinds. The recurring theme, in interviews, is that he does not talk about climate the way climate people talk about climate. He talks about it the way a product manager talks about a wedge. Value first. Disclosure second. Impact as a byproduct of both.

Our mission at Gravity is to ensure you never need to sacrifice what's good for your business to do what's good for your sustainability needs. - Gravity, Company Values Page

The About page for Gravity lists three values: collaboration and humility, pragmatism, and focus on impact. It says climate work requires "a broad, apolitical joint effort." The word apolitical is doing a lot of work there. It signals to industrial buyers - many of whom operate in red states, sell into red states, or are owned by private equity firms nervous about ESG blowback - that Gravity is not selling ideology. It is selling a general ledger for kilowatt-hours and combustion.

The Interesting Bet

There are a lot of carbon accounting startups. Watershed. Persefoni. Sweep. Greenly. Sinai. Each has its own wedge. Gravity's wedge, best as it can be described from the outside, is that it went industrial and stayed industrial. Manufacturing. Warehousing. Waste. Distribution. Fleet-heavy operators. These are companies with real Scope 1 emissions from combustion, real Scope 2 emissions from grid electricity, and real Scope 3 emissions from long supply chains that they, historically, do not have great data about. They are also companies where energy is a genuine line item, which means the CFO answers your call.

Gravity's early education was Indiana University Bloomington and, at some point, Universitat de Barcelona. His LinkedIn handle is selhattab. He is listed as based in New York, though Gravity's headquarters is in San Francisco, which is either a commuter's compromise or a reasonable amount of time spent in front of Fortune 500 procurement teams. He talks about warehouse floors with the fluency of someone who has stood on them, which is a habit that carries over from Samsara.

What's Next

The Series A gets deployed toward three things, per the company's own statement: product development in carbon management and customer experience, expansion of the energy efficiency marketplace, and hiring in the US and EU. Marco DeMeireles, co-founder and managing partner of Ansa Capital, joined the board. The next twelve to twenty-four months will test whether Gravity's operator-first sales motion continues to hold as the CSRD deadlines start biting, as California's disclosure rules take effect, and as the broader climate software category consolidates. ElHattab, for his part, seems content to keep talking about utility bills, energy savings, and reporting workflows, which is a rhetorical strategy that has, so far, done well by him.

Gravity's public customer roster is a rough map of who has been forced to care about carbon disclosure first. WM is one of North America's largest waste and environmental services companies - the emissions math there is unavoidable, and the marketing benefit of measuring it is substantial. Autodesk is a Fortune 500 software company whose customers, architects and engineers and manufacturers, increasingly ask about the embodied carbon of their design decisions. MiddleGround Capital is a private equity firm investing in industrial businesses; their limited partners have started asking pointed questions about the aggregate emissions profile of the portfolio, which is what "financed emissions" means. This is the tail wagging the dog in real time.

The keyword list Gravity uses to describe itself is telling: "financed emissions," "supplier engagement," "utility bill processing," "generative AI for emissions," "carbon data traceability," "agentic AI for scope 3." Half those terms are recent inventions. The other half are old accounting concepts wearing new coats. What ties them together is the assumption that this data eventually gets audited, which means it eventually gets a software vendor.