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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.

Snapshots

Week of August 14 – August 20

Michael S. Klena
August 23, 2023
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23 Crypto Private Financings Raised ~$203M

Rolling 3-Month-Average: $166M

Rolling 52-Week Average: $230M

 

Segment Overview

Led by BitGo, this week featured three, $20M+ capital raises and the total capital raised for the week was above the three-month rolling average.  A trend developing?

 

Selected Highlights 

BitGo raised $100M from new, strategic investors at a $1.75B post-money valuation. BitGo is an NYDFS-regulated qualified custodian (QC) providing custody, financial services, and core infrastructure to over 1,500 institutional clients globally. The company is the leading crypto custodian, processing 20% of all Bitcoin transactions by value, and has top-tier clients such as Nike, Bitstamp, Pantera, eToro, and Mysten Labs (read more on this financing in our Financing Snapshot here). 

  

Why Notable?  BitGo has sustained their business during a very difficult period (measured by AUC & number of customers) and recently introduced the BitGo Go Network to address the gaping hole left by the demise of Silvergate and Signature’s settlement networks.  Attracting institutional capital today, at scale, is a very welcome signal of confidence for the industry. 

 

ZetaChain raised $27M from a large group of impressive investors, including Blockchain.com, CMT, Foundation, GSR, Jane Street, VY Capital, and Sky9. ZetaChain seeks to become a blockchain solution for interoperability, allowing projects, users, and developers to migrate across numerous chains without hiccups.

 

Why Notable?  This is a healthy-sized round for a project that is still in its test net phase demonstrating the importance of solving the age old problem of technology, user and network islands.  History taught us that the suite of widely adopted communication protocols embedded in TCP/IP is what allowed the Internet to bloom.  What allows the same powerful network dynamics to be created for the innumerable blockchain islands in existence today? 

 

Dinari raised a $7.5M seed round, which included investors such as Susquehanna. Dinari offers non-U.S. individual investors access to U.S. equities.

 

Why Notable?  Dinari notes that far more individual in many countries have a digital wallet holding crypto assets than have access to a brokerage account.  Their vision is to allow those that hold a digital wallet to access U.S. equities through their digital wallets using a token-based structure.

 

Patterns  Early-stage financings (seed and series A), by count, continue to dominate, representing 86% of all announced financings.  For important context, crypto is demonstrating exactly the same trend as the overall technology financing markets.