ARCHITECT SUCCESSES

SEE ALL
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.

Euromoney Institutional Investor PLC acquires Relationship Science (RelSci)

On May 21st, 2021, Euromoney announced the acquisition of RelSci. Architect Partners was the exclusive financial advisor to RelSci in this transaction.

Relationship Science offers enterprise, nonprofit, and consumer customers deep insights into millions of organizations and their decision makers. Their solution includes aggregation of a client’s relationship data with RelSci’s internal database, automatic relationship mapping, AI-based news and business alerts, and insights on pathing to decision makers. Their people data offering is exceptionally broad with over 10 million people and 1.8 million organizations tracked on their platform that ranges from public companies, law firms, investment banks, and more. The company has over 600 large enterprise clients that consist of financial institutions, law firms, nonprofits, and corporations. RelSci’s relationship mapping is based on data science that scores how well a user should know a particular target, not on user-generated connections like LinkedIn.

RelSci competes with other people data providers including LinkedIn’s Sales Navigator, BoardEx (acquired by Euromoney), Introhive, Equilar, Intapp, WealthEngine (acquired by Euromoney), and Wealth-X (acquired by Euromoney).

Founded in 2011, by Neal Goldman, founder of Capital IQ, Relationship Science is based in New York City and is currently led by CEO Domenic Graziosi, who was previously the Director of Data Products at Capital IQ. The company received venture funding from a variety of well-known investors including Henry Kravis, William Ackman, Ken Langone, Salesforce, and many others.

Founded in 1969, London based Euromoney is a leading provider of data and market intelligence to businesses. With 2,000 employees globally, Euromoney has trailing twelve-month (TTM) revenues of $431 million between their three divisions: pricing, data & market intelligence, and asset management. Euromoney has an enterprise value of $1.6 billion resulting in an EV / TTM revenue multiple of 3.7X. Euromoney’s data & market intelligence segment accounts for $190 million (44%) of their total revenue.

Euromoney has acquired ten other companies in the last five years, with their four most recent acquisitions focused around the theme of people data aggregation. These four people data acquisitions include WealthEngine, Wealth-X, BoardEx, and The Deal, for a cumulative price of $122 million.

While financial data has been effectively captured by large companies such as Capital IQ and Dunn & Bradstreet, people data is typically unstructured and therefore has always been much more difficult to capture. RelSci set out in 2011 to tackle this challenge and invested heavily in technology to build the gold standard in people data collection and presentation. With Euromoney’s financial support and broader distribution, the combined companies will be able to extend their competitive advantage in the people data space.

A prime use case for people data is in CRM and sales automation tools, automating the manual process of figuring out “who does our organization know at customer X and who has the warmest path for an introduction”? RelSci had built integrations into Saelesforce.com and Microsoft Dynamics 365.

This transaction represents another example of Architect Partners’ legacy of strategic M&A for data and data analytics clients.

Over the past few years, Euromoney has become a leader in the people data market through their five acquisitions in the space (including RelSci). Their acquisition of RelSci will give them access to proprietary relationship mapping software, automated collection tools, and a broader set of people and organizational data. RelSci also nicely extends Euromoney’s data & market intelligence business unit.