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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.

Opera Acquires Video Delivery Optimization Provider Skyfire

On February 15, 2013, Opera (OB: OPERA; market capitalization: $789mm) announced its acquisition of video delivery optimization provider Skyfire for up to $155mm. Architect Partners was the financial adviser to Skyfire on this transaction.

Skyfire’s flagship product, named Rocket Optimizer, enables mobile carriers to optimize video or other multimedia content on crowded cellular networks, including 3G and 4G LTE. On average, Rocket Optimizer provides mobile networks a 60% boost in capacity by optimizing video streams based on available bandwidth. Skyfire can identify when particular users are experiencing poor video quality or connections and intervene instantaneously to minimize long start times, rebuffering and stalls on video and audio streams. Skyfire’s technology is cloud-based, meaning that network operators can boost effective capacity and improve user experience without expensive network upgrades.

Skyfire also offers Skyfire Horizon, a mobile browser extension and toolbar platform that allows users to personalize their mobile browsing experience. Carriers that preload Horizon on phones gain valuable new “beach front” real estate that can be monetized via promotions, advertising and/or commerce. Skyfire has over 20mm worldwide app downloads to date. The company currently has three large U.S. mobile operators as customers for its Rocket Optimizer and Skyfire Horizon solutions, and is in trials with ten other operators around the world.

Founded in 2006 and based in Mountain View, CA, Skyfire has raised $40.8mm in funding from Lightspeed Venture Partners (Peter Nieh), Matrix Partners (Andy Verhalen), Panorama Capital, Trinity Ventures (Ajay Chopra, Larry Orr) and Verizon Ventures.

Mobile data traffic is expected to grow 18x by 2016, according to Cisco’s latest VNI report, and two thirds of this traffic will be video. Mobile service providers are already stretched to support this massive growth without huge expenditures on network infrastructure and mobile video optimization will be one key step to solve this problem.

Opera is no longer simply a browser vendor, but has moved strongly to provision, measure and bill new revenue-generating services (such as Web Pass) for global operators – a new business direction that is showing growth.

Opera intends to keep the Skyfire team in Mountain View as an important cloud/mobile technology development asset in Silicon Valley

Opera and Skyfire’s synergies in technology, carrier relationships, product lines and customer base made this transaction a natural fit for both companies. Skyfire’s Rocket Optimizer adds a major new revenue opportunity for Opera, and Rocket Optimizer technologies can also boost Opera’s Web Pass offerings by letting global operators offer customized new data plans with enhanced video options. And Opera has also stated plans to use its compression and optimization technologies in core carrier network infrastructure.

Opera is not a major player in the desktop browser wars, but it has been quite successful with its mobile browsers, and more recently has moved into mobile advertising and new services to generate revenue for operators. With Skyfire’s Horizon toolbar and cloud content management system, Opera now has more ways to present ads and offers on mobile devices and can offer a full suite of ad sales, ad optimization and analytics.