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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.

Crypto M&A Snapshot

Week of April 8 – April 14

Eric F. Risley
April 14, 2024
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Gaming is approaching a $200B annual revenue business today, perhaps surprisingly, 3x larger than the traditional film and television market.  The magnitude of value created is staggering; multiple trillions of dollars of equity value have been created by companies engaged in building and supporting games. 

 

Every decade or so, the gaming industry embraces new platforms and associated revenue and business models – not to replace but to extend their business.  Examples include game consoles, handhelds, PC, mobile, cloud, free-to-play and play-to-earn games, VR headsets, etc.  The most recent and perhaps most impactful innovation to date is blockchain-based games.  Why is this so impactful?  

 

Blockchain and crypto assets open the doors to the creation and preservation of realizable value to players (and developers) in ways that were previously either discouraged or impossible.  Games often have exceptionally complex “walled economies” with in-game currencies, earning mechanisms and a myriad of ways to spend and invest.  Typically, fiat value plus player time is invested for the right to play and create in-game assets.  With the advent of in-app purchases, the WSJ reported a staggering 75% of gaming revenue was attributable to in-game purchases of virtual goods. For the most part, all this value is stuck and never realized by transferring to other games or converting back into fiat.  A player’s investment of money and time is never paid off.  Blockchain and crypto enable the payoff, with profound implications: players get to own their earned or purchased game assets and developers get new downstream residual revenues when those assets are created or sold.

 

This is why blockchain gaming has attracted $15B in investment capital to date.  We count hundreds of active blockchain-based games today, with over 500 new games in development (Source: DAppRadar, Big Blockchain).  This topic is beginning to show itself in M&A as well, as demonstrated by the proposed merger of Carry and SLG.Games announced on Friday.  Carry helps blockchain game developers monetize via advertising.  SLG.Games simplifies game development by offering blockchain-based capabilities (often referred to as Web3) like token minting, management, trading, governance and game data analytics, all via a SDK.  Carry is offering a token exchange, functionally similar to a stock swap, to SLG.Games token holders.  The transaction has a nominal value of approximately $165M.  As we highlighted two weeks ago, yes, decentralized M&A is a thing!