SHIELD

Justin Lie did not set out to build a cybersecurity company. As a teenager, he was reselling gaming products on eBay and his own e-commerce sites - an early digital entrepreneur learning the trade in real time. Then the fraudulent orders started arriving: buyers using stolen credit cards, chargebacks landing weeks later, losses he had no tools to prevent.

That frustration became the seed of a company. In 2008 Lie started what was first called CashRun, then CashShield, and eventually SHIELD - each name a step in the same fifteen-year effort to understand fraud from the inside. Along the way he founded related ventures, including the bot-mitigation firm ShieldSquare, before consolidating around the device-first vision that defines SHIELD today.

Lie now serves as Founder and CEO and sits on the Forbes Technology Council. His framing of the mission is unusually plain for the industry: "eliminating unfairness to enable trust for the world." It is a deliberately human way to describe a technical business. Where competitors talk about chargeback ratios and false-positive rates, SHIELD talks about fairness - the idea that genuine users and honest businesses both deserve a system that is not rigged against them.

The company he built reflects that outlook. SHIELD is distributed across eight offices - Singapore, San Francisco, London, Berlin, Bangkok, Jakarta, Beijing and Bangalore - and was certified a Great Place to Work in 2025. Its roughly 260 employees work across engineering, data science, and fraud research, staying close to the threats their customers face.

SHIELD sells business-to-business software. Customers integrate its SDK and API into their apps and websites, then pay on a recurring subscription or usage basis tied to the volume of devices and transactions protected. The pitch is grounded in economics: fraud prevented is money returned to the business, and SHIELD leans on studies like inDrive's - which referenced a 1,377% return on investment - to make the case.

That framing matters because fraud prevention has a hidden cost that rarely shows up in a demo: friction. Block too aggressively and you turn away real customers, inflate false positives, and quietly bleed revenue through abandoned sign-ups and declined payments. SHIELD's design fights friction as hard as it fights fraud, aiming to let genuine users through untouched while stopping the devices that matter.

In a crowded market, SHIELD competes with names like Sardine, Sift, Forter, Riskified, Arkose Labs and SEON, along with device-intelligence specialists such as Fingerprint. What distinguishes it is the combination of a device-first foundation, a shared intelligence network, and a strong footprint in high-growth Asian markets - ride-hailing, super-apps, e-wallets and gaming - where fraud is both rampant and fast-evolving.

The company holds the certifications enterprise buyers expect - PCI DSS, ISO 27001, SOC/AICPA attestation, and GDPR compliance - which lowers the barrier for regulated fintech and marketplace customers. Backed by GGV Capital and Temasek across some $31.7 million in funding, SHIELD sits in the infrastructure layer of the internet: rarely seen by end users, but load-bearing for the platforms they trust.