Shield Technology Partners took an ownership stake in Florida-based managed services provider Nerds Support and offered a peek at the Forge IT services automation platform driving its acquisition strategy on Thursday. Nerds Support marks Shield’s 20th MSP acquisition since the company launched last year with more than $100 million in private equity funding from Thrive Holdings and ZBS Partners.
Shield is rolling up small and midsize MSPs that can benefit from its AI-infused platform as firms automate level one support and private equity drives industry consolidation. Nerds Support, which has provided IT services to accounting, legal and wealth management firms for more than 20 years, was ripe to scale and fit neatly into the Shield mold of successful MSPs that need an AI boost, according to Shield CEO Jim Siders.
“What we're trying to do is find a range of different types of the small and medium technology businesses that serve all kinds of customers in the real economy and turn them into world-class versions of themselves,” Siders told Channel Dive. “We're looking for businesses where the founders are still involved — the classic MSP, where they founded the business and they can't grow it beyond a certain point. They still have a lot of ideas. They still want to do the thing that they set out to do. They just need our help on the technical front, the financial front and the operational front.”
Siders was recruited from Palantir, where he rose to CIO after starting as a level one helpdesk engineer in 2013. His appointment in December followed OpenAI taking an ownership stake in Thrive Holdings, a move that brought the LLM builder’s AI capabilities closer to the MSPs in Shield’s growing portfolio.
Platform economics
The Forge platform targets common MSP pain points, including helpdesk tickets, account management and project engineering, the company said Thursday. It also gives providers in the Shield network tools to build custom agents for recurring issues that can be automated.
“The single most reused agent is a billing reconciliation agent,” Shield Head of Technology Mayank Jain told Channel Dive. “We're plugged into Pax8. We're plugged into Microsoft. We're plugged into whatever marketplace you're using.”
Shield MSPs have already tested AI’s mettle in the helpdesk arena. Forge closed tickets nearly 25 times faster than technicians and automation helped one firm slash the time it spent resolving tickets by roughly 70%.
“The approach to solving tickets in an automated fashion is the beginning of the conversation — it's the first sentence in the story,” Siders said. The next chapter, he added, doesn’t have to involve staffing cuts.
“We're building an Iron Man suit for each engineer,” Siders said. “We're not trying to automate them out of existence. The lived experience, knowledge of the customer's problem space and trust built over time by experienced IT engineers and technicians is literally irreplaceable.”
Shield is expanding platform capabilities as the need arises, through joint efforts.
“The majority of our partners have tickets at the center of their of their workflow, but that’s not a requirement,” Jain said. “We assemble teams of AI engineers that can go build a thing that adds the most value to the businesses that we partner with, and if that ends up moving in the direction of more than just tickets, we're very open to it.”
Acquisition strategy
Shield refers to its acquisitions as partnerships. The company owns a controlling stake in its MSPs but aims to give the founder or leadership team equity in the business and an ongoing role in the business. Firms can also continue to use existing vendor tooling, including professional services automation and remote monitoring and management platforms.
“At some point in the past we would have needed to rip and replace a bunch of things, but that induces churn and customer problems,” Siders said. “We would rather just be able to work with whatever they've got, and Forge becomes the layer that they interact with on top of it.”
Shield has its ear to the ground for acquisition opportunities. The company, which launched with four MSPs in its network, added five during the first three months of 2026, according to an analysis by Omdia, a Channel Dive sister company.
“We don't have a goal or a hard target in mind,” Siders said. “The thing that we're most informed by is getting the right businesses for the right reasons. As long as the right businesses are out there, we're going to go out of our way to keep finding them.”
