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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.

Home Services Leader Porch Acquires Moving Labor Marketplace HireAHelper

Porch.com acquired the membership interests of HireAHelper, LLC. Consideration was not announced. Architect Partners was the exclusive financial advisor for HireAHelper and initiated the transaction.

Comparable transactions include IAC’s acquisition of HomeAdvisor for $150mm (3.8x trailing revenues), News Corp’s acquisition of Move.com for $950mm (4.3x trailing revenues), Home Depot’s acquisition of Red Beacon for $70-95mm, Ikea’s purchase of TaskRabbit, Angie’s List’s 2017 acquisition by IAC/HomeAdvisor for $500mm, and IAC/HomeAdvisor’s subsequent 2018 acquisition of Handy (price not disclosed, but Pitchbook estimated Handy’s prior valuation at $360mm).

HireAHelper is an online marketplace for booking local moving labor. Founded in 2007 in San Diego, the company operates nationally and describes themselves as the easiest way to compare and book movers. HireAHelper’s platform lets consumers input the date and destination for their move, compare movers and prices against tens of thousands of reviews, and book and pay online. HireAHelper operates as a payment processor for booked jobs, also providing insurance, background checks and customer service.
HireAHelper works with several thousand independent professional moving companies across the country, and has movers in all 50 states. The company focuses on high levels of customer service, and their movers on average are rated 4.7 out of 5 stars. The company was founded in 2007 by CEO Mike Glanz and COO Pete Johnson. Mike and Pete were college friends and began a moving business as undergraduates.

Early on, the company raised some modest financing from friends and family, but they mainly bootstrapped their way to profitability. HireAHelper has 60 employees, almost all located in Oceanside, California just north of San Diego. The company will continue to operate as a standalone division at least initially, although marketing and operations will be integrated with Porch.

Porch.com is an online marketplace for booking home service professionals from contractors to plumbers to painters to handymen. The company started in 2013 with 1.5 million professionals in their network. In 2014 they partnered with Lowes home stores to provide services to homeowners. Since then, they have added additional partners such as Walmart, Pottery Barn and Overstock.com and have grown their service provider directory to 3 million professionals, of which some 140,000 are viewed as “active”. Porch had acquired three complementary businesses before HireAHelper.
Porch was founded in 2012 by CEO Matt Ehrlichman, Ronnie Castro, Scott Austin, Ha Phan and Eric Schliecher. The company has raised over $100 million in equity financing. Lowes led the Series A round of $28mm in 2014 and Valor Equity led the Series B round of $67mm in 2015. Panorama Point, FJ Partners, Founders Fund, Capricorn Investment Partners, and Battery Ventures also participated in the most recent round, which was said to be at a valuation of around $500 million. Porch has over 600 employees and is headquartered in Seattle.

This is not a gig economy transaction – both companies primarily work with professional service providers, unlike gig Uber drivers, TaskRabbit helpers or Lugg movers.

It’s all about CAC (customer acquisition cost). Porch has been very strategic in monetizing as many homeowner contacts as possible, via expansion both horizontally (adding more service categories) and vertically (offering company owned, contracted, and lead gen tiers of service providers) to be able to meet any need. For a given marketing spend, successfully boosting conversion of more inquiries into booked jobs means lower marketing spend (and higher margin) per job.

This whole sector has seen lots of investment and consolidation over the past handful of years (see comparable transactions, above), with most recent activity at the professional level rather than the gig level. IAC has become the home services juggernaut, with the acquisitions of HomeAdvisor, Angie’s List and Handy, but players like Amazon, Facebook and Yelp are also entering the market.

Porch gets at least three things from this acquisition:

1. Another complementary, high-margin service to monetize across the millions of homeowners that visit Porch.com, without spending more on customer acquisition. (Conversely, HireAHelper gets thousands of jobs passed from Porch)

2. HireAHelper’s mobile app for letting helpers schedule their jobs, and other SaaS tools for helping service professionals to run their businesses and keeping them on the Porch platform.

3. HireAHelper’s management team, which pairs a tight focus on operations with sophisticated systems for tracking and measuring every homeowner and mover transaction, and has admirably delivered on both growth and profitability.