Who We Are

We are Cole Hersowitz and Landon Martin.

We founded Gauge Industrial Group after more than 25 years of friendship.

Throughout that time, we’ve shared an interest in building businesses, exploring new technologies, and understanding what makes great companies endure. Our friendship continues to shape the way we approach every partnership, with a focus on long term thinking, continuous learning, and earning trust through our actions.

Complementary careers, one shared thesis

Cole attended both the School of Engineering and the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, and Landon studied at the University of Southern California’s Marshall School of Business. We built complementary careers investing in technology companies, where we gained experience evaluating acquisition opportunities, partnering with management teams, and helping businesses grow. Together, we’ve developed a deep understanding of acquisitions, technology, and the roots of successful businesses.

A generational shift in industrial compliance

We believe artificial intelligence represents a generational shift that will radically impact the industrial compliance industry. For the first time, it is possible to fundamentally transform how firms operate in a step-change way, making them more efficient, more scalable, and better equipped to serve their clients.

The fastest, most impactful, and most durable way to realize that opportunity is to scale by building a family of AI-native firms. Every new partner company brings additional geo-specific expertise, workflows, data, and institutional knowledge that make the entire organization stronger. Shared technology with a common context layer becomes more valuable with every acquisition, creating a flywheel that individual firms simply cannot achieve on their own. Building that kind of platform requires experience acquiring and integrating businesses while understanding how technology creates operational advantages across an entire AI-native organization. This is why we started Gauge and we’re uniquely positioned to win, together, with our partner companies.

Why founder-owned firms can’t do this alone

Many founder-owned firms simply don’t have the resources or expertise to build AI capabilities internally or to adopt vendor tools while continuing to run their businesses. A traditional private equity firm’s three-to-five-year investment timeline often does not align with making the sustained technology investments and deep transformation required to build a truly AI-native organization, particularly when those investments reduce short-term profitability or integration is conducted on stale playbooks not adapted for the AI era.

Work that keeps our world running

The work performed by industrial compliance consulting firms is essential to the infrastructure that keeps our world running. These businesses have durable competitive advantages built over decades through technical expertise, trusted customer relationships, and strong local reputations. Those strengths are not going away.

We are building Gauge with a long-term perspective. That means investing in technology and enabling our partner companies to leverage tools years before they become standard across the industry. Firms that are part of the Gauge family leverage AI in meaningful ways, giving them stronger capabilities, access to data, and a lasting competitive advantage.

Building alongside exceptional people

Above all, we’re builders. We’re excited by the opportunity to work alongside exceptional people at our partner companies and shape the next generation of the industrial compliance industry.

We started Gauge because we believe the next generation of enduring companies will be built by combining exceptional people, durable businesses, and thoughtfully applied artificial intelligence.

We’re investing for where the world will be ten years from now, not where it is today, and we’re looking for partners who share that vision.