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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.

Insights

Q1 2024 Crypto M&A and Financing Report

Elliot Chun
April 4, 2024
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Download the full report above.

Crypto Mergers & Acquisitions

 

The market tone continues to improve, but M&A activity is still running below 2022 levels.

 

Announced M&A deal activity in Q1 2024 was up 22% from the previous quarter – good news indeed, but still below the pace of the peak year 2022. The crypto sector’s announced deal activity improved a bit more than the overall tech sector deal activity, in contrast to an observed decline in announced fintech deals last quarter. (Note that most announced crypto deals do not have an announced value, so deal value is not an accurate indicator.)

 

In Q4 2023, 39% of crypto deals were in the Brokers & Exchanges or Investing & Trading Infrastructure subsectors.  This trend continued in Q1, with 45% of deals in the same two leading sectors.

 

The share of “bridge transaction” deals in which a non-crypto native firm acquired a crypto-native firm inched up to 25% last quarter, indicating increased comfort with the sector. 

 

Valkyrie Funds | CoinShares, Brassica | BitGo, and the three-way combination of SingularityNET, fetch.ai, and Ocean Protocol into the Artificial Superintelligence Alliance (at a whopping $7.5B notional value) were the headline M&A deals in Q1.

Crypto Private Financings

 

A significant rebound compared to 2023, but there is a lack of conviction in later-stage growth capital financings.

 

Disclosed private financings increased significantly in Q1 from Q4 2023, with capital raised increasing by 36% and the number of financings increasing by 77%. However, if the pace from Q1 remains for the rest of 2024, the financings market would be at $12.4 billion in capital raised, still over 50% lower than the levels seen in 2021 and 2022.

 

Part of this decrease is likely due to the lack of significant, large-scale, later-stage growth capital rounds. In 2020-2022, there were numerous $100 million+ deals completed every week. This quarter, however, there were only four, of which two were earlier stage/seed stage deals.

 

On this theme, there was a 112% increase from Q4 2023 to Q1 2024 in the number of early-stage financings but only a 32% increase for later-stage financings. In addition, seed-stage financings attracted a 108% increase in capital, while later-stage financings only attracted 25% more.

Crypto Public Companies

 

Public crypto markets had mixed results in Q1.    

 

Bitcoin rallied from $42,000 in January to $72,000 by March 12, setting a new all-time high. For the quarter, bitcoin was up 63%, and Ethereum was up 53%. There were several factors driving the price of bitcoin, including the approval of spot bitcoin ETFs, the upcoming bitcoin halving, uncertain and volatile macroeconomic and global political conditions, and an overall surge in institutional support.

 

With bitcoin’s price appreciation, trading volumes are generally higher, allowing exchanges to benefit from higher transaction fees and commissions. Many of the stronger crypto exchanges saw high share price appreciation during Q1, with Coinbase up 69%, Galaxy Digital up 40%, and Coinshares up 31%.

 

On the flip side, despite the run-up in bitcoin, the majority of bitcoin miners saw their share prices decline. This decline is attributed to the correlation of bitcoin prices to hash rates and the impact on profitability, the halving, and the proposed 30% excise tax on miners’ energy use.