Inside Lee "Zap" Bond's Journey Building Gauge: A Payments Platform for Groups and Communities

After-school programs, scout trips, and fundraisers are the heartbeat of local communities. But when planning local events, money often moves between parents, neighbors, and friends without a clear view of how funds are being organized. 

P2P payment platforms like Zelle and Venmo make it easy to send money, but they don’t present a record of who paid, for what, and how it relates to an event. And when contributions are made across multiple payment apps, event organizers are left trying to centralize the funds manually. 

As a parent of two young kids regularly involved in after-school programs, Lee “Zap” Bond ran into this challenge repeatedly. So he set out to build Gauge and provide fellow parents and community organizers with a better option.

Introducing Gauge: Organized Payments, Handled

Gauge is a payments platform for coordinating, tracking, and reconciling payments across people, groups and organizations. While most P2P apps handle payment transfers but not coordination, Gauge organizes payments per person, per amount, and per group, so the full picture for a collection lives in one place. 

The platform offers three modes of use. Direct P2P enables users to send and request money, similarly to apps like Zelle and Venmo. Group payments make it easy to create a group, see exactly who paid, how much, and when, reconciled automatically for that group. Organization collections offer a similar benefit at scale, designed to manage tuition, aftercare fees, donations, ticket sales, and campaigns.

Under the hood, Gauge has partnered with Stripe for its back-end infrastructure. The platform is not a bank and never holds user funds—balances sit in a Stripe account connected to the user's Gauge account, with Stripe processing and holding the money under its own licenses. With Stripe processing $1.9 trillion in payments volume in 2025 alone, users can trust that Gauge is operating on a safe and reliable infrastructure.

Lee's Journey to Gauge

With children ages 6 and 7, coordinating after-care programs, sports, and Girl Scouts events has become a central focus of Lee’s parenting life. For each event, however, Lee found that collection methods were scattered and unorganized. 

One troop leader in particular shared with Lee that she was struggling to track who had sent money and how much, because contributions came in across two or three different platforms. Monthly reconciliations meant researching each payment to figure out who sent what and through which app.

Lee set out to build Gauge for his community first, so that organizers like the troop leader could create a group and see exactly who paid and when, reconciled for that group. Since launching on Earth Day 2026, Gauge has had roughly four months of consistent operation with a growing user count across Lee’s community and beyond.

Lee’s Advice for Fellow Founders

In building Gauge, Lee hasn’t looked for venture funding. Instead, he’s focused on getting people to use the platform and understand how it works. “That activity will justify and prove what Gauge can actually do,” Lee explains. “I want the platform to prove itself.” 

He advises that if you have an idea, you go for it and try it—you don’t need to wait for investment. “You're going to have to put your own skin in the game. You're going to have to fight, you're going to have to make partnerships, and you're going to have to focus on getting the product active and getting users to it — doing that with your own money. That way investors can see you've had skin in the game for a certain amount of time before you go out and seek investment."

To learn more about Lee’s journey building Gauge, you can follow him on LinkedIn and visit usegauge.co.