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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.

Persistent Systems Acquires Social Enterprise Solutions Provider CloudSquads

On February 7, 2014, Persistent Systems announced the acquisition of CloudSquads, a social enterprise consultancy and integration platform, for an undisclosed amount. Architect Partners advised CloudSquads on this transaction.

CloudSquads helps clients use social applications to collaborate with their partners, customers and employees, typically across brand, marketing, sales and support functions. CloudSquads advises on selecting and deploying popular social enterprise applications and then integrates these apps across a company’s existing CRM, ERP, marketing/analytics, HR and content management systems. CloudSquads’ cloud-based and fully scalable platform provides a flexible framework with IP connectors for existing and emerging social community platforms, allowing mediation between these platforms and disparate enterprise systems.

CloudSquads integrates and partners with Lithium, Jive, Salesforce.com, Microsoft, Oracle, Twilio, Adobe Omniture and Janrain, among others. Current customers include HP, Comcast, E-Trade, New Balance, BT, SanDisk, Autodesk and Intuit Demandforce.

Henry Bruckstein and Ashish Seth founded CloudSquads in 2009. An alumnus of York University, Bruckstein has previous experience at BroadVision, Lithium Technologies and Salesforce.com. Seth is an alumnus of University of Texas and has previously worked at Rearden Commerce, EmailLabs and BearingPoint. The company has office locations in Palo Alto, California, Pune, India and Singapore.

Online social communities are a critical part of individuals’ personal lives, and are now increasingly becoming important components of the enterprise environment. CloudSquads, one of the visionaries in the social enterprise space, believes social community integration in the enterprise is the next fundamental step of evolution for the corporate online presence.

According to IDC, worldwide enterprise social software adoption is poised for rapid growth through 2016, becoming a $4.5b market within three years.

CloudSquads’ social enterprise platform and services complement and extend Persistent’s software capabilities around social, mobile, analytics and cloud (SMAC). CloudSquads’ IP connectors, social community implementation and consulting services will enable Persistent to better serve their enterprise and independent software vendor (ISV) customer base in the fast-growing social enterprise market.