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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 December 9 – December 15

Eric F. Risley
December 15, 2024
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December 9th – December 15th

PERSPECTIVES by Eric F. Risley 

 

Signal from noise is a tough problem. What matters?

 

One thing that certainly matters to crypto is developer activity. Electric Capital has done an outstanding job with its just-updated Developer Report, shedding light on the state and trends of this critically important topic. A few highlights from our read:

 

 

Ethereum continues to lead in developer base (L1 and associated L2s), although it has declined by 17% in the past year.

 

Solana has the strongest momentum in attracting new developers, growing its developer base by 83% in the past year.

 

Active developers today total 23,613, still down from the peak in 2022, and have not yet regained upward momentum.

 

North America has declined from its leadership position and is now third globally, behind Asia and Europe. Regulatory policy matters!

 

Remarkably, NFT minting volume is at an all-time high, occurring mostly on Base, with most trading activity happening on Solana.

 

NFT use cases are shifting from “art” toward more practical categories, such as rewards and loyalty, credentials and identity, and game assets.

 

Decentralized Finance (DeFi) remains a popular development category, encompassing lending, DEXs, derivatives, stablecoins, restaking, and more. This represents the democratization of capital markets, enabling anyone globally to access and participate in a variety of low-risk and high-risk activities outside the traditional financial system.

 

 

The report features contributions from an incredible 339 collaborators—kudos for such a broad, open-source-minded effort!

 

We’ll leave you today with our picks for the two most interesting charts in the report: (1) where stablecoin transactions are happening globally and (2) the median transaction size. As highlighted in Stablecoins: The Emerging Market Story, Africa may be emerging as the “cradle of real-world stablecoin usage.”