ARCHITECT SUCCESSES

SEE ALL
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.

Qualcomm Incubated Gimbal Acquired by The Mobile Majority

Purchase price not disclosed, however, represented xx trailing twelve months revenue.

With explicit consumer permission, Gimbal gathers and analyzes location signals derived from over 125mm U.S.-based mobile phones as these consumers navigate their daily lives. Gimbal’s platform captures instances where the phone is in proximity to over 2 million locations in the U.S., using both geofences and Bluetooth beacons. These location-derived consumer insights are used by consumer brands, retailers, advertisers, app publishers, venues and out-of-home networks to inform and tailor their marketing interactions with consumers.

Gimbal’s SDK (software development kit) allows for the collection of the location signals and is used by over 250 mobile app publishers who publish 600 mobile apps. Their SDK is passive, highly phone battery efficient and always-on in the background, allowing continuous monitoring of phone location.

Customers and partners include Shazam, Ruckus Wireless, Touchtunes, RetailMeNot, Dunkin’ Donuts, the Cleveland Cavaliers, and Accuweather. Competitors include Foursquare, PlaceIQ, NinthDecimal and xAd.

The San Diego-based company was conceived and incubated within Qualcomm before being spun out in May 2014. Post-spinout, the company received $26.25M in funding from investors including Qualcomm, i-Hatch Ventures, Ajax Partners and Jonathan Kraft.

According to BIA Kesley, location-targeted mobile ad sales are expected to rise from $9.8 billion in 2015 to $29.5 billion by the end of 2019, a 24.6% compound annual growth rate. Although mobile search is still expected to dominate most of that ad spend, we expect to see that dynamic change as advertisers have more diverse ways of delivering location-specific ad or marketing campaigns, such as triggered push notifications and in-app advertisements.

Gimbal’s physical world network and trove of location data can augment The Mobile Majority’s Audience Collective and AdSynergy platform with a better understanding of consumer behaviors, location history, demographics, etc.

The Mobile Majority will be able to charge a higher CPx due to its ability to now offer more highly targeted ad campaigns and better audience segmentation to its clients.

The Mobile Majority also gets the ability to offer location-triggered ads and measurable attribution.

Gimbal also offers a widely proliferated app SDK that will increase TMM’s mobile presence.
Gimbal brings a technical team deeply experienced in proximity marketing and data monetization.