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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.

Alerts

MoonPay Acquires Iron for at Least $100M

John Kennick
March 16th, 2025
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Transaction Overview

On March 13th, 2025, MoonPay, historically offering fiat to crypto onboarding capabilities, announced its acquisition of Iron, a platform that provides API-based stablecoin infrastructure for $100M.

 

Target: Iron

Iron (iron.xyz) provides turn-key stablecoin payment APIs, enabling developers to integrate global on/off-ramps, swaps, banking rails, payments, wallets, and virtual accounts into their applications. They serve PSPs, Fintechs, Banks, Enterprise Wallets, Remittance Platforms, FX Platforms, Treasuries, Onchain Banks, etc. 

 

Launched in early 2024 as a spin-out of Unstoppable Finance and still pre-access when the Bridge deal occurred, Iron.xyz is headquartered in Berlin with a team of 13 members. The company raised seed funding from w3.fund and its parent company also received venture capital from Lightspeed, Speedinvest, Backed, RockawayX, Inflection, Fabric and Discovery Ventures. 

 

Buyer: MoonPay

MoonPay is a fiat-to-crypto on-ramp provider that enables users to buy, sell, and swap cryptocurrencies and NFTs. The company offers on/off-ramp services as an API-integrated solution for businesses and directly to end users through its own non-custodial wallet.

 

MoonPay supports over 110 cryptocurrencies and 30+ fiat payment methods, including credit/debit cards, bank transfers, Apple Pay, Google Pay, and Samsung Pay, operating in more than 180 countries. To date, MoonPay has facilitated the creation of 20 million accounts and delivered over $6 billion in cryptocurrency.

 

In April 2024, MoonPay reported reaching $150 million in annual revenue. The company has been profitable since launching its platform in 2019.

 

Founded in 2019 by Ivan Soto-Wright, Victor Faramond, and Maximilian Crown, MoonPay is headquartered in Miami, Florida, and employs over 300 team members across nine countries. The company was last valued at $3.4 billion following a $555 million Series A round led by Tiger Global and Coatue in April 2022, during the peak of the crypto market prior to the Crypto Winter. Other notable investors include Animoca Brands, Paradigm, Andreessen Horowitz, Genesis Accel, Cobalt Capital, WndrCo, and 122 additional backers.

 

Transaction Parameters

MoonPay acquired Iron for at least $100M, with the form of consideration (cash or stock or a combination) being undisclosed.

 

The direct comparable transaction is Bridge.xyz | Stripe for $1.1B (M&A Alert) and some secondary comparable transactions include Pay.so | Request Finance, Bit2Pay | MELD, Cryptpay | Hero, Membrane Finance | Paxos, Minke | Zengo, Diem | Silvergate Bank for $201M (Architect Partner’s advised, (M&A Alert), First Digital Trust | Fireblocks for $100M (M&A Alert)

 

Strategic Rationale

Officially, this acquisition has been framed as a means to expand MoonPay’s offering for enterprise customers include multi-currency treasury management, facilitate instant cross-border payments, and generate revenue from yield-bearing assets. Worth noting, Ivan Soto-Wright was quoted saying that “This is [MoonPay’s] Braintree moment” where “Iron’s technology positions MoonPay to become the definitive infrastructure provider for enterprise stablecoin solutions.”

 

Architect Partners’ Observations

As said very well by Ivan Soto-Write, today’s cross border payments are like international phone calls before the advent of Skype and Apple Facetime, widely expensive. In the case of payments add slow (often days), and are difficult to track status. Ripple was the first to build its business around this use case and value proposition, starting by using their XRP token, rather than a stablecoin. Since then, stablecoins have emerged as the preferred instrument for these payments and many, including Ripple are embracing this reality, building both business and consumer-focused businesses to capture this opportunity. Plain as day that others will follow, including those who already own the customer relationship; banks, enterprise payment software providers and a wide variety of financial technology companies.  

 

Sources 

PitchBook, Moonpay Press Release, The Block, CNBC