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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
May 3, 2024
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Building a business in crypto is hard, even for the most reputable and well positioned “TradFi” (traditional finance) companies.

 

Last week, Cboe – Chicago Board Options Exchange (CBOE) – announced their plans to wind down Cboe Digital Spot Market in Q3 2024 and to transition digital asset derivatives trading and clearing into existing derivatives and clearing business lines.

 

Cboe was one of the earliest TradFi adopters of BTC, launching BTC Futures Trading in December 2017.

 

Cboe then made one of the most significant Bridge M&A transactions in crypto by acquiring ErisX in October 2021, paving the way for the launch of Cboe Digital with digital asset spot, derivatives and clearing capabilities.

 

We constantly say in M&A that timing is one thing that none of us can control and nine months later, Cboe wrote down $460M on the ErisX acquisition, defensibly as we were in the heart of the Great Purge.

 

Despite the writedown, Cboe continued building digital asset derivative products, including margined BTC and ETH futures that launched in Jan 2024.

 

We highlight the Cboe Digital journey because there are real consequences and implications for the politicized, directionless, paralyzed, [enter your preferred adjective] and completely inept state of U.S. regulation that plagues our industry. For 50 years, Cboe has done it the right way for all other products they service. If one of TradFi’s most successful exchanges can’t operate within today’s U.S. crypto asset framework, what choices must other high quality businesses make?

 

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Coinbase’s Quarterly Shareholder Letter is now required industry reading and consistently one of the best written perspectives of our industry. Biggest takeaway is Q1 Adjusted EBITDA was $1.0B – more than full year 2023.

 

The Bitcoin Lightning Network is one of the first Bitcoin Layer2 protocols that is focused on the BTC as a medium of exchange (i.e. payments) use case. This week, Coinbase also announced their integration of Bitcoin Lightning through the important work of the Lightspark team. For those that question if BTC will ever be used to pay for every day goods and services, this is a very important step towards making this a reality. (I expect crypto payments to be part of everyday life by 2030.)

 

MicroStrategy hosted their Bitcoin for Corporations conference this week, where Michael Saylor unveiled MicroStrategy Orange, an enterprise platform for building decentralized identity (DID) applications on the Bitcoin blockchain. DID will be one of the most important innovations to spawn from blockchain and it is notable that one of the highest profile BTC companies is launching a DID for enterprises on the Bitcoin protocol. Also notable is the conference was geared to educate publicly traded companies on, essentially, how to use BTC on corporate balance sheets and for treasury management purposes. Zero companies in the S&P 500 have BTC on their balance sheet today. How many will have some BTC by 2030?  

 

BlackRock (BLK), Hamilton Lane (HLNE), and Tradeweb Markets (TW) participated in Securitize’s $47M round this week, further validating the tokenization of real-world assets trend. I continue to say that 75% of securities will be owned in a digital structure on a blockchain by 2030. Announcements like this will force TradFi companies to get involved with tokenization initiatives, so expect more to come, especially from publicly traded companies who have a lot to lose.

 

Not a public company, but notable that Tether announced a $4.52B profit in Q1 2024. Tether is making the case of becoming one of the most successful companies of all time when measured by profit generated from number of employees (<100).

 

The last two weeks we delved into publicly traded BTC Miners. Nat Brunell’s Mining the Future Podcast featuring five CEOs of publicly traded miners hits on all the key topics and is a must listen for those seeking to understand the current state of the BTC mining industry.