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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

Elliot Chun
April 5, 2024
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As crypto (crypto assets and digital assets) solidifies itself as a sustainable asset class, market participants must have different tools to track the performance of the industry. Bitcoin has long been the bellwether gauge of the industry’s performance with Ether sprinkled along the way, but neither are comprehensive in capturing the impact that this technology is delivering across all industries.

 

There are a few indexes that seek to track the performance of our industry, including the CoinDesk20 Index, Nasdaq Crypto Index, S&P Cryptocurrency Broad Digital Market Index, and STOXX Digital Asset Blue Chip Index. Each index covers a specific area of the industry, ranging from tokens to publicly traded companies.

 

In understanding the importance of having these tools that legitimize the crypto industry, we created the Architect Crypto Public Company Index. Our objective is to track the performance of publicly traded companies that are crypto-native or that have significant parts of their business driven by the use of blockchain. 

 

Established on April 14, 2021 (the day Coinbase went public), the index is a price weighted average across the three Subsectors in our crypto public companies snapshot. 

 

The current Subsector weightings are:

  • Crypto Investment Platforms – 45%
  • Bitcoin Network Operators – 45%
  • Crypto Influenced – 10%

 

In the bottom graph, we compare the performance of the Architect Crypto Public Company Index against Bitcoin, S&P 500, and Gold. The Index lags versus BTC and has still not recovered to its Apr 2021 launch value, but its last 12 month performance is impressive.

 

As blockchain and crypto percolates throughout most publicly traded companies and transitions from emerging tech to essential tech, we expect to add more names to this index and see sustained outperformance going forward.

 

From a conference perspective, we attended NFT.NYC this week and the good energy continues to build. NFT.NYC is known for driving adoption in the individual user demographic. We will be at Paris Blockchain Week Apr 9 – 12.