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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

Week of April 1 – April 7

Glenn Gottlieb
April 10, 2024
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40 Crypto Private Financings Raised ~$261M 

Rolling 3-Month-Average: $250M

Rolling 52-Week Average: $184M

 

Ethereum’s current processing capacity of 20 transactions per second is a bottleneck that hinders the scalability of dApps that rely on the Ethereum blockchain.  Along with the significant growth of DeFi, which requires real-time interactions, and the popularity of NFTs with marketplaces requiring quick minting and trading, congestion continues to increase leading to slower transaction confirmation and higher fees. 

 

Competition from alternative L1 chains, such as Solana and Cardano, offer EVM compatibility, faster transaction speeds and lower fees.   In addition, Layer-2 chains, such as Polygon, have been developed to increase processing speeds.

 

Another approach is to re-architect the entire system, while maintaining complete EVM compatibility.  This is the approach Monad Labs took, and today announced a $225M financing for their Ethereum Layer-1 competitor.  Since this transaction was announced today, it isn’t noted in our list of last week’s Notable Transactions, but it was significant enough to demand some attention in today’s Snapshot. 

 

Monad re-architected and optimized all levels of the stack.  Optimization included parallel execution of code and superscalar pipelining.   Monads optimization supports 10,000 transactions per second, with a 1-second block time.  And just as important, Monad’s EVM is 100% compatible (a compatibility layer is not needed) with Ethereum’s EVM allowing developers to use their existing code as it exists.

 

As a Layer-1, Monad offers a scalable, performant chain that remains decentralized, and with much lower fees.     

 

Monad will use the funds to fully commercialize the network, offering developers the simplicity of EVM with the performance of Solana.