CashShield Acquires Shield.com and Rebrands as SHIELD

Last year, a domain name listed in John Daly’s NameConnect newsletter caught my attention. Shield.com was listed for sale with an asking price of $600,000. The domain name was beyond what I would spend for it as an investment, but I thought it would be a good deal for a prospective buyer. I am not sure if the domain name was sold by a broker or not, but it looks like a company that has raised $25.5 million in funding recently rebranded as Shield.com.

According to a press release from the company that was published in early December, CashShield has rebranded as Shield, and it is using the Shield.com domain name. I learned about the rebrand via Mark Upgrade’s post on Twitter this morning:

CashShield has rebranded to SHIELD to reflect the company’s evolution and #business development. @shieldfraud has secured the #ExactBrandMatch #domain name Shield(.com). What is your #BusinessGrowth strategy? How does your #domain reflect that vision? https://t.co/J9TfCPTd78 pic.twitter.com/XV9JnBGNhU

— MarkUpgrade (@markupgrade) December 17, 2019

I do not have any details about the sale of the domain name, but using DomainTools, I can see that Shield.com transferred registrars (from Enom to GoDaddy) in June of this year. The domain name now has Whois privacy enabled, so I can not see the name of the current registrant. In addition, because of GDPR, the Whois record was obscured just prior to the transfer as well. It had Whois privacy enabled at Enom since 2017.

Joe Uddeme, founder of NameExperts, shared a bit of background information about Shield.com in a 2018 educational newsletter discussing domain acquisitions:

“When running a new naming strategy—always have a clear exit path. Spend money wisely and select a name that can be resold if things fail with your business plan. Years ago, Slomin Shield owned Shield.com. When they went out of business, they still had the valuable digital real estate in their domain name, Shield.com which was later sold for a decent price.”

Although I do not know the sale price of Shield.com, my guess is that it was a mid six figure acquisition. It is a valuable one word .com asset, and I think the broader brand name should be helpful to the company.