Shield Raises $100 Million From Thrive Holdings to Accelerate the Growth of its IT Services Platform

NEW YORK--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Shield Technology Partners (“Shield”), an IT services platform combining frontier AI, product and engineering capabilities, and operational and M&A expertise, today announced a $100 million investment from Thrive Holdings. This capital will help to accelerate product innovation and pursue strategic M&A to strengthen Shield’s platform capabilities and market reach.

“Every business, regardless of size, should have access to world-class IT that powers them rather than holding them back,” said Jim Siders, CEO of Shield. "This investment allows Shield to double down on building an AI-first IT services platform, equipping our partners with the capabilities and resources they need to create long-term value and competitive advantage for the businesses they serve."

Part of this investment will support the work of the engineering team at Shield, which is working alongside OpenAI researchers to build and embed AI-enabled products that supercharge the work of IT engineers and free them up to focus on more strategic work.

• Sentinel constantly monitors and triages customer tickets to make sure every ticket reaches the right engineer, at the right time, with the right priority.

• Spectre works hand in hand with engineers to orchestrate a fleet of agents that can resolve specific queries on their behalf.

Since deployment, Shield’s products were able to work across some of the most complex, time-consuming ticket categories in IT services like software and email issues that represent over 60% of overall volume. For several tasks, they cut median time-to-resolution for engineers by over half.

“AI is transforming everything — how we work, how we operate, how we serve customers. Shield’s work in building AI-driven products are initiatives that we had envisioned but didn’t have the expertise or bandwidth to execute,” said Alexander Saca, CEO of IronOrbit, one of Shield’s partners.

“We believe that specialized AI is core to driving enterprise AI adoption,” said Anuj Mehndiratta, a member of the Thrive Holdings founding team. “Shield’s unique model aligns incentives across the people building the technology with those using it in a way that we think will be very powerful at scale.”

In 2025, Shield reached over $100 million in annual revenue and this investment will help to accelerate the expansion of its national platform of IT services businesses. Shield currently partners with nine companies across the US, collectively serving over 1.5k customers across critical industries of the economy like construction, energy, and healthcare.