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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
June 28, 2024
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Q2 2024 delivers the most active quarter for Crypto Public Companies since Q2 2022.

11 of the 21 constituents in the Architect Crypto Public Company Index announced meaningful corporate actions in the quarter.

 

Capital activity in BTC Mining continues with Coatue investing $150M in Hut 8 (HUT) through a convertible note. This investment aligns with the BTC Mining and AI compute combination thesis as well as the transition of BTC network operators to energy infrastructure providers. Coatue’s participation is important as they were one of the most active crossover funds who invested in crypto during the last cycle. Having an investor of this magnitude return to crypto is a strong indicator that new capital will flow into the industry.

 

Acquisition activity in BTC Mining continued its rampant pace as Cleanspark (CLSK) announced two additional acquisitions. They acquired GRIID Infrastructure (GRDI) for $155M in an all-stock transaction, which they expect will add 400MW of capacity in Tennessee. GRIID was one of the few crypto companies to complete a public listing through the SPAC process, though they experienced significant delays along the way. CLSK also acquired 5 BTC mining sites in Georgia for $25.8M in all cash. With 4 acquisitions in 2024, CLSK is actively executing their BTC Miner roll-up strategy while showing their flexibility to structure all-cash and all-stock transactions. They have positioned themselves in reach for the title of largest publicly traded BTC Miner.

 

In Feb, Architect Partners said we expect “meaningful” mining-related M&A in the second half of 2024, and into next year.  With 8 M&A transactions in 2024, the activity came faster than even we thought.

 

Our industry needs legitimacy in order to attract new high quality market participants. One of the best ways of legitimizing crypto is having traditional financial services organizations provide crypto services. In the last two weeks, Itau (ITUB, $54B Mkt Cap), Standard Chartered (STAN.L, $18B Mkt Cap), and Santander (SAN, $72B Mkt Cap) all announced crypto trading services. 

 

From a product perspective, Nubank (NU, $61B Mkt Cap) announced a partnership with Lightspark to bring the Bitcoin Lightning Network to Nubank’s users. State Street (STT, $22B Mkt Cap) and Galaxy Digital (GLXY) announced digital asset investment products that focus on all the other investable assets that are happening in our $2.3T digital asset ecosystem, outside of BTC and ETH. Both of these are important announcements as they improve our industry’s distribution and eventual adoption of the asset class.

 

All this real capital, M&A, products and services activity to start 2024 signals an accelerating and robust go-forward market environment for our industry. We are just getting started.

 

Architect Partners will release our Q2 Crypto M&A and Financings report next week.