Co-founders: Emmanuel Udotong, Isaiah Udotong, and Luis Carchi

Today, we are excited to announce that we have secured $2.1 million in pre-seed funding from Kraken Ventures, Eterna Capital, Alchemy, Moonpay, and several leading security investors. We are also pleased to share that we have been funded by and are currently participating in a16z's Crypto Startup School accelerator.

Who We Are

We are a team of Princeton and MIT alumni—Emmanuel Udotong, Luis Carchi, and Isaiah Udotong—who left jobs at Facebook and McKinsey to pursue new opportunities in crypto. We are also Y Combinator alumni with prior experience building tech companies.

Last year, we launched the Ancient Warriors NFT project. Our focus was onboarding people from our home countries into crypto, but after witnessing several members of our online community get exploited by scammers, losing thousands of dollars, we endeavored to build a new layer of security for web3.

What Does Shield Do?

Shield helps organizations adopt comprehensive security measures to prevent crypto exploits and increase user trust across the ecosystem

Surveying the crypto security landscape, smart contracts have been the primary focus; however, 1 in 3 crypto attacks aren’t related to contracts and instead are triggered by compromised private keys or front-end spoofing. Therefore, auditing and monitoring your smart contract alone is not enough. To fill the gap, we are developing automated protections against frequently neglected attack vectors.

Our first software product is a proprietary threat detection engine that organizations use to detect and block crypto scams. Our engine was built leveraging AI and machine learning models trained on more than 25 network variables to identify malicious content and bad actors.

Who We Work With

We believe crypto security is a key driver of growth and retention and we take care to align security outcomes with the success metrics of our customers.

Leading NFT launchpad HeyMint co-founder Nate Broughton says, "Thanks to Shield's guidance, we've fortified our cybersecurity measures by amplifying Discord safeguards and bolstering security in our software development pipeline, to better safeguard our company and the communities we serve."

Super app wallet Castle Wallet co-founder Stephen Song adds, "Shield helped us work through multiple checks such as penetration testing, anti-malware & phishing protection to prove our team’s commitment to keeping people safe with our product.”

Shield's threat detection software can be integrated directly onto any platform via our API or within Discord as a security bot for online communities. Our security stack protects 350,000+ users and boasts notable users like Fox Sports and Rarible. And on Guild.xyz's platform, Shield is one of the most frequently used integrations for thousands of communities.

"Shield’s innovative security tools have the potential to become the new standard for enabling web3 communities to build trust and confidence among their members,” says Paul Almasi, the Head of Alchemy Ventures.

Our vision is simple: to shield millions of organizations and consumers from crypto exploits. We are building a blockchain-native endpoint security stack, Norton Antivirus for crypto. Battling cybercrime is a game of whack-a-mole: once one problem is solved, bad actors find another angle. So we’re hyper-focused on building the best team and technology possible to address emerging threats of the future.

Other investors in our pre-seed round include Bessemer Ventures DAO (Steel DAO), Orange DAO (1400+ YCombinator Alumni), NGC, Wagmi Ventures, MH Ventures, Coinswitch, 2Punks Capital, Lecca Ventures, and Very Serious Ventures. Also participating in the round are angel investors Rob Behnke (CEO of Halborn—a leading crypto security auditing company), Peter Liebert (former CISO of the State of California), Vijay Maharajan (Bitscrunch founder preventing crypto wash trading), and angels from Coinbase, Google, Microsoft, and FireEye (merged with McAfee).

To learn more about Shield and how it can help secure your organization, visit www.getshield.xyz and schedule a demo today.