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Champ Titles Raised $18M from Point72 Ventures
Champ Titles Raised $18M from Point72 Ventures

Architect Partners was the exclusive Financial Advisor to Champ Titles.

Transaction Overview

On March 27, 2024, Cleveland-based digital title and registration platform Champ Titles announced an $18 million Series C equity round led by Point72 Ventures with participation by existing investors.

Company Description

Champ Titles provides a digital title and registration suite to streamline the vehicle titling process. Their platform enables the creation of legal, digital titles for easy transfer and verification, serving insurance carriers, lenders, state governments, auto dealers, and owners. Stakeholders, including state motor vehicle departments, lenders, and vehicle owners, benefit from a unified and transparent system, where all information is readily accessible and transaction times are markedly reduced. The governance of the digital platform is established through clear guidelines, ensuring all parties adhere to the updated processes and regulations.

Champ Titles’ success is measured by the elimination of more than 5 million pieces of paper annually on average per state; a reduction in processing time from 40-60 days to a matter of hours; increased productivity of DMV title clerks processing more than five times as many titles per day; and the improved experience for consumers in each state that has adopted Champ Titles’ solutions. Over the last twelve months, the company has successfully onboarded new states including New Jersey, Kentucky, and Illinois, and expanded its relationship with West Virginia by creating the first National Digital Titling Clearinghouse (NDTC). Through these efforts, the company has grown rapidly with revenue increasing by more than 300% year over year. 

Founded in 2018 by CEO, Shane Bigelow, the company now has 63 employees and is headquartered in Cleveland, Ohio. 

Funding

In this Series C funding round, Champ Titles raised $18M from Point72 Ventures and existing investors including W.R. Berkley Corporation, Eos Venture Partners, Guidewire Software, and Rev1 Ventures, bringing the total amount raised since inception to $45M. 

In the prior Series B round, Champ Titles raised $13M from Guidewire Software, Eos Venture Partners, and Ally Ventures.

Before that, Champ Titles raised $13.5M in 2021 in a Series A. Emergents, now Architect Partners, served as the exclusive Financial Advisor for that financing. 

Competition

Champ Titles’ biggest competitors are existing state DMVs deciding to be a software company and developing solutions on their own or via large systems developers.  However, they also compete with other digital title networks such as Cario and Oxhead Alpha/Tezos. In addition, technology-enabled DMV solutions such as Fast Enterprises are seen as competitive but don’t offer the same efficacy.

 

Architect Partners’ Perspective

Champ Titles’ SaaS-based solutions present a compelling example of blockchain-enabled infrastructure solving real-world problems.  By focusing on the needs and pain points of legacy auto title, registration, and lien processing, Champ has leveraged the power of blockchain to transform critical government services.  The result is exponentially accelerated processing time for DMV constituents, with improved accuracy and reduced cost.  Yet Champ’s solutions capture many key benefits of on-chain data processing – which include trust, transparency, data integrity, security, and efficiency – without users even being aware of their blockchain foundations.  

While much attention is focused on recent resilience in crypto asset prices, we believe 2024 will see significant growth in non-speculative enterprise applications for distributed ledger technology.  Champ’s successful raise demonstrates investor interest in practical and scalable solutions to real-world problems.

Crypto M&A Snapshot

Week of November 18 – November 24

Eric F. Risley
November 24, 2024
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November 18th – November 24th

PERSPECTIVES by Eric F. Risley 

 

Regulatory compliance.

 

 

While anathema to the founding ethos of crypto, the evolution of regulatory acceptance of crypto and digital assets is now the latest in a long series of narratives driving investor enthusiasm and asset prices. Ironically, regulatory acceptance has also been both a major hindrance while simultaneously an important catalyst for mergers & acquisitions. In the former category, one must know what the regulations are before complying, the United States being the poster child for this conundrum. Other markets, like the European Union and its Markets in Crypto Assets (MiCA) regulations demonstrating the polar opposite — a clear roadmap.

 

 

Since the MiCA legislation passed and was published in April-2023, we count 7 acquisitions which were, at least in part, strategically driven by positioning for compliance within the European Union. This is in addition to another 18 transactions which were oriented toward regulatory compliance in other regions including Australia (regulated by the Australian Securities and Investments Commission), Singapore (regulated by the Monetary Authority of Singapore), the UAE (regulated by Virtual Asset Regulatory Authority), and more. 

 

 

This week, Paxos announced its first acquisition: Helsinki, Finland-based Membrane Finance. Like Paxos, Membrane Finance offers product and services supporting stablecoin issuance and is the issuer of EUROe, a euro-backed stablecoin, first announced in February 2023. As with other euro-backed stablecoins, EUROe has failed to attract meaningful use. In fact, according to Stablecoins: The Emerging Markets Story, recently published by Castle Island Ventures, Brevan Howard Digital and Visa Crypto, 98.8% of outstanding stablecoins are US Dollar-backed. Undoubtedly, this will change in the future, which is why Paxos is acquiring Membrane Finance, a Electronic Money Institution which will allow Paxos to offer a portfolio of assets and tokenization solutions compliant with MiCA. 

 

 

It’s important to note that stablecoins are rapidly transforming to become a very important asset for everyday people, particularly in developing countries, radically transitioning from simply a favorite of crypto traders. The report highlighted and linked above as well as Visa Crypto’s Onchain Analytics Dashboard are the most comprehensive and detailed analyses we have seen to-date. The two following charts demonstrate this trend nicely. Survey derived use cases in developing countries and data supporting small transaction sizes predominate.