Thrive Holdings, an offshoot of Joshua Kushner’s venture firm Thrive Capital Management, is putting $100 million into a months-old company it helped create called Shield Technology Partners — providing an early glimpse into how the holding company is using its $1 billion war chest.
Formed last year, Thrive Holdings incubates, operates and invests in businesses that aim to bring artificial intelligence to service providers like accounting firms and other traditionally analog companies. Shield, launched last summer, acquires stakes in small and medium-sized IT businesses, and then applies artificial intelligence internally to make the core operations — such as resolving IT support tickets — more efficient.
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Shield plans to use some of the fresh $100 million to acquire majority stakes in other IT services businesses. The roll-up strategy, which is becoming more common in some corners of Silicon Valley, blends a private equity tactic with software and services industry businesses.
“We’re sort of borrowing what works for each of those models and trying to do our own thing to meet the moment,” said Shield CEO Jim Siders, a former Chief Information Officer at Palantir. Current providers’ strategy of “stick a chat bot on the side and hope it works,” he said, “is turning out not to be valuable.”
Shield’s technology is starting out by triaging and resolving IT service tickets that come in, helping decide which can be handled by artificial intelligence and which should be dealt with by human workers. About 60% of tickets that Shield sees can currently be addressed by its own AI product, said Anuj Mehndiratta, a partner at Thrive Capital and founding member of Thrive Holdings. Eventually, Shield’s vision is to create a fully-autonomous IT engineer.
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