Gravity: AI-Native MBSE + GRC
for Deep-Tech Founders

Section 1

The Compliance Burden for Deep-Tech Founders

Defense-adjacent and space-sector ventures face a compliance stack that is qualitatively different from commercial software startups. ITAR and EAR govern which technologies can be developed, who can participate in development, and which foreign nationals may access technical documentation. NIST SP 800-53 mandates information security controls at a depth appropriate for systems that may ultimately interface with government networks. CMMI-DEV Level 3 requires institutionalized engineering processes — documented, trained, measured, and enforced — before a program is considered mature enough for government prime contractor trust. AS9100D extends ISO 9001 quality requirements into aerospace-specific dimensions: configuration management, nonconformance tracking, first-article inspection.

Each of these frameworks operates on a different cadence, uses different vocabulary, and is audited by different bodies. ITAR compliance is continuous and self-enforcing. CMMI appraisals are periodic and conducted by lead appraisers. AS9100D certification requires a certified registrar. NIST assessments may be driven by a government customer's authorization schedule. A founding team has no reasonable path to satisfying all four simultaneously using manual processes alone — the documentation overhead would consume engineering capacity that must remain on the technical stack.

[CONTENT PENDING — Principal Review: insert specific quantitative data on compliance cost-per-framework and founding-team bandwidth impact from Gravity program analysis]

Section 2

Gravity's Approach: MBSE as the GRC Substrate

Model-based systems engineering organizes system design around a formal model — a structured, machine-readable representation of system requirements, architecture, behavior, and verification relationships. Every design decision is represented in the model and every model element can be traced to a requirement, a test, or a decision record. This traceability is, incidentally, exactly what compliance frameworks require: documented requirements, evidence of verification, change records, configuration baselines.

Gravity's core integration is to treat the systems engineering model as the primary compliance evidence source. Rather than generating compliance artifacts separately — a CMMI-required process asset library, an AS9100D quality plan, a NIST control implementation statement — Gravity extracts these from the engineering model using AI-native workflows. When an engineer updates an interface control document in the model, Gravity identifies which NIST controls are affected, which AS9100D clauses require notification, and whether the change creates an ITAR-relevant modification to the technical scope.

[CONTENT PENDING — Principal Review: insert specific Gravity workflow descriptions, automation percentages, and tool integration details]

Section 3

Differentiation: Why Existing Tools Fall Short

Palantir

Palantir's AIP and Foundry platforms are enterprise data integration and analytics tools used by large defense primes and intelligence agencies. They solve a different problem: integrating heterogeneous data sources at scale for decision-support applications. The minimum viable engagement scale and the required integration infrastructure are calibrated for organizations with operational data systems already in place. A founding-stage deep-tech venture does not have the data estate, the integration team, or the budget to engage Palantir's platform as a compliance substrate. Palantir is not competing with Gravity at the founding stage; it is a potential future integration target when scale justifies it.

Drata

Drata is a cloud-native compliance automation platform that excels at SOC 2, ISO 27001, and HIPAA compliance for software companies. It integrates with common SaaS toolchains (GitHub, AWS, Okta) to collect compliance evidence automatically. The product is well-designed for its target market. The gap for deep-tech founders is that CMMI-DEV and AS9100D are not in Drata's framework library — and could not be supported by the same SaaS-integration approach, because the evidence for these frameworks lives in engineering artifacts (model files, test reports, nonconformance records) rather than cloud service audit logs.

ServiceNow

ServiceNow's IRM (Integrated Risk Management) module is an enterprise-grade GRC tool capable of supporting NIST frameworks and custom control libraries. The barrier is implementation complexity and cost: ServiceNow implementations require specialist consultants, months of configuration, and ongoing platform administration. For a founding-stage venture, the implementation cost and operational overhead of a ServiceNow GRC deployment would exceed the cost of a dedicated compliance officer — which defeats the purpose of automation at this stage.

[CONTENT PENDING — Principal Review: verify Gravity capability claims before publishing this table]

Section 4

Proof Case: The Legacy Minerals Initiative

The Legacy Minerals Initiative is a 150-technology stack organized across seven development phases, spanning mining extraction, defense autonomy, and space systems domains. The program operates under four concurrent compliance frameworks: NIST SP 800-53 (information security), CMMI-DEV Level 3 (systems engineering maturity), AS9100D (aerospace quality management), and ITAR/EAR (export control). At founding-team scale, managing four frameworks against a 150-node technology development roadmap is a systems problem, not a documentation problem.

Gravity is deployed as the compliance substrate for the LMI program. The 150-node architecture is represented in the Gravity engineering model. Control mappings for NIST SP 800-53 are maintained against the model's information security boundaries. ITAR technical scope determinations are attached to individual nodes at their category classification (A: Signet-owned; B: Licensed; C: Open standard; D: To-develop). As nodes progress through development phases, Gravity identifies which framework obligations activate and generates evidence-collection tasks for the engineering team.

Current compliance posture across the four frameworks, at Q1 2026:

• NIST SP 800-53: 62% implementation — control baseline fully mapped; continuous monitoring architecture in place
• CMMI-DEV Level 3: 45% implementation — process areas defined; institutionalization underway
• AS9100D: 38% implementation — quality management system structure established; internal audit cycle initiated
• ITAR/EAR: 88% implementation — technology control plan active; DTSA trade secret protections enforced

Detailed compliance posture data, open finding counts, and framework progress timelines are available to DT:2 portal users in the Governance dashboard. DT:3 due-diligence access under executed NDA provides full control implementation statements and audit-ready evidence packages.

[CONTENT PENDING — Principal Review: add specific Gravity productivity metrics, comparison to pre-Gravity baseline, and any additional program-specific context]

Conclusion

MBSE + GRC Integration as Structural Advantage

The compliance frameworks that govern defense, space, and resource development ventures are not optional — they are the entry ticket to government contracts, prime contractor partnerships, and regulated export activity. For a founding team, the question is not whether to satisfy these frameworks but how to do so without consuming the engineering capacity that the technical stack demands.

Gravity's answer is architectural: build compliance artifact generation into the systems engineering workflow so that the evidence is a byproduct of engineering activity, not a separate work stream. The LMI program demonstrates this is feasible at a 150-node scale across four frameworks simultaneously.

Qualified investors seeking detailed technical documentation, compliance posture data, and full program architecture access should request DT:2 or DT:3 portal access through the investor relations channel.