After a successful bootstrapping period of three years, Shield closed its growth round, supporting expansion into North America led by Macquarie Capital and OurCrowd and joined by Mindset Ventures.

Shield (the Company), the world’s leading workplace intelligence platform for compliance teams, today, after impressively bootstrapping itself since its launch in 2018, announced it has closed a $15 million Series A funding round led by Macquarie Capital and OurCrowd with significant participation from Mindset Ventures. Shield will use the funding to significantly expand its U.S. presence with a New York City office, while further establishing itself in markets throughout Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and the Asia Pacific. The funding will also be used to ramp up development of Shield’s end-to-end, award-winning communications compliance platform.

Shield enables regulated financial institutions to detect market abuse, gain behavioral analysis, mitigate toxic workplace culture and ultimately automate surveillance over all employee communication channels, saving both operational and compliance cost.

Shield brings an immensely needed cloud native solution that is disrupting an outdated legacy vendor market through its cutting-edge platform that automatically captures, archives and provides surveillance over the communication channels that have become especially relied upon as remote and hybrid work environments become more permanent. Through rigorous data enrichment, powerful analytics, enhanced search tools and proactive surveillance, Shield offers a tailored platform that applies advanced Artificial Intelligence and Natural Language Processing capabilities throughout the entire communications lifecycle. An almost instant Time to Value solution, Shield makes communications compliance a competitive advantage.

“The ability to access and understand new and evolving communication channels is increasingly becoming a pain point for organizations, no matter the industry, and this funding round is well-timed as it will empower us to scale our technology and enhance our already robust platform that addresses compliance concerns that enterprises deal with daily,” said Shiran Weitzman, Co-Founder and CEO of Shield. “As a bootstrapped company, we’ve already proven that our AI platform is unquestionably valuable to banks and financial institutions. Now, with the help of our highly regarded investors, we’re ready to further build out our technology, expand our global sales and customer success teams, and enhance our already impressive ability to discover and manage compliance and risk concerns across electronic communications.”

The capital infusion and subsequent further development of its tech offerings come at a time when the industry is actively seeking cloud-based solutions - evidenced by Shield’s recent signing of a tier one global bank as a client. Global banks have come to rely upon Shield’s unmatched analysis, transparency and understanding of compliance triggers across all business communication channels. An advanced, end-to-end communications compliance platform, Shield allows organizations of any size and across industries to mitigate risks, escape time-consuming data silos, improve operational efficiency and reduce compliance costs.

“Compliance, legal and surveillance professionals in top tier banks and across financial service firms have incorporated the Shield platform, finding inherent value in our eDiscovery, case management, investigations, contextual surveillance and archiving solutions,” said Ofir Shabtai, Co-Founder and CTO of Shied. “From the time they implement our dynamic platform, our customers are seeing the benefits and immediate ROI.”

Over the past two years, since the pandemic hit, there has been a sharp rise in financial crime compliance costs, nearing $50 billion annually, making Shield’s platform much needed in today’s business environment.

“In order to support hybrid working, better manage changing compliance and regulatory requirements and the need to be cloud native Shield has adopted a new architectural approach to software development. Shield’s leading edged software platform, agile development philosophy and ability to rapidly implement its solution to deliver more immediate benefits to customers positions Shield to be a new market leader,” said David Standen, Co-Head Venture Capital Group, Macquarie Capital. “We are excited to be the lead investor and support the aspirations of the very talented team at Shield.”