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

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NEW YORK--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Feb 2, 2026--

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.

About Shield Technology Partners

Shield Technology Partners is a national IT Services platform formed through the collaboration between Thrive Holdings and ZBS Partners. By combining Thrive Holdings’ technological expertise with ZBS Partners’ proven approach to supporting founder-led businesses, Shield Technology Partners is dedicated to accelerating growth, innovation and long-term value creation for IT services companies across the country.

About Thrive Holdings

Holdings owns and operates businesses in critical industries where we believe technology can deliver strategic value to employees and customers. We take a long-term approach, acquiring established businesses and combining their expertise with our technical and operational capabilities. This integrated strategy enables us to develop domain specific AI models and other proprietary technology that can continuously improve over time. Holdings is focused on sectors that are core to the real economy and currently operates in the Accounting and IT services sectors.

View source version on businesswire.com:https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20260202196878/en/

CONTACT: Media Contact

Raghav Kotha

Shield Technology Partners

[email protected]

KEYWORD: NEW YORK UNITED STATES NORTH AMERICA

INDUSTRY KEYWORD: TECHNOLOGY MOBILE/WIRELESS SOFTWARE NETWORKS INTERNET HARDWARE ELECTRONIC DESIGN AUTOMATION DATA MANAGEMENT ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

SOURCE: Shield Technology Partners

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PUB: 02/02/2026 07:00 AM/DISC: 02/02/2026 07:00 AM

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