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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 December 4 – December 10

J. Todd White
December 13, 2023
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21 Crypto Private Financings Raised ~$249M 

Rolling 3-Month-Average: $166M

Rolling 52-Week Average: $179M

 

Private financings announced this week came in with a healthy $249M raised across 21 deals, representing consistent deal flow and a robust amount of capital after a few banner weeks. The majority were smaller and earlier stage deals, with the $165M announced by Swan Bitcoin standing out as the sole larger raise.

 

Swan is an investment platform founded in 2019 that provides asset management services to investors seeking to accumulate bitcoin. This week they announced a pair of financings completed in 2023 – $40M to fund expansion plans and another $125M to support PE and venture investing across the Bitcoin ecosystem – with an additional $150M planned for 2024.

 

At the core, Swan develops investment software to facilitate consistent accumulation of Bitcoin with low costs and friction. They are focused exclusively on Bitcoin investment and savings, and intend to use their new expansion capital to move into institutional products. This will include bitcoin-backed lending products, a potentially controversial move after high-profile meltdowns among the likes of Celsius, BlockFi, and Genesis. But the wake has left a void of lending capacity, and Swan feels well-positioned to enter the space as a trusted institutional-grade player after withstanding and emerging from the crypto carnage of 2022. They intend to do so with two key differentiators from other failed crypto lenders – first, focusing exclusively on Bitcoin-backed loans, and second, by insisting they will never rehypothecate funds to invest or lend client assets outside of their own accounts.

 

Details, including valuation and participation, on the round(s) are scant, but the investor validation from a sizeable raise during a sparse year for big rounds seems clear. And this is yet another example of the ongoing evolution from speculation to investment, which we believe to be a healthy sign of maturation for Bitcoin and the crypto asset class in general.