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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 Public Companies Snapshot

Crypto Public Companies Snapshot

Todd White
September 22, 2023
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Activities of broader public market players are increasingly relevant to the public crypto market sphere. This is of course no surprise, as we have long believed the distinction between traditional finance and the crypto/digital asset sectors will diminish over time, with crypto and its core technology inevitably becoming an integrated component of global financial and capital markets. This is true on both the speculative side, as investors seek the ability to allocate to crypto-based investment as an asset class, and on the infrastructure side, with blockchain-based technologies poised to permeate the inner workings of global finance.

 

This week saw two such moves from players outside our core public crypto index that will likely reverberate for the companies we cover. Interactive Brokers (NASDAQ: IBKR), the tech-enabled online trading and custody platform, has formally partnered with Zero Hash, a “crypto-as-as-service” company that embeds digital asset trading into existing customer trading interfaces. The partnership will give IBKR clients access to Zero Hash accounts to trade BTC, ETH, BCH and LTC directly through IBKR’s platform.  Zero Hash’s API-enabled integration seems purpose-built for the popular fintech trading platform, perhaps unsurprising after IBKR’s participation in Zero Hash’s 2021 Series D investment round.

 

On the infrastructure side, Citi (NYSE: C) launched “Citi Token Services” on Monday, using a permissioned private blockchain offering programmable, 24-7 tools for trade finance and cash management to institutional clients.  The services were piloted on the trade finance side by using tokenized deposits and smart contracts to give Maersk an instant settlement solution with a canal authority – similar to a traditional bank guarantee/letter of credit facility, but without the friction of cut-off times and gaps in the service window – and will also target corporate treasurers with tools to manage global liquidity on a just-in-time, programmable basis.