ARCHITECT SUCCESSES

SEE ALL
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.

Financing

Week of December 9 – December 15

Todd White
December 18, 2024
DOWNLOAD FULL REPORT

December 9 – December 15 (Published Dec 18th)

PERSPECTIVES by Todd White

 

36 Crypto Private Financings Raised: $432M

Rolling 3-Month-Average: $211M

Rolling 52-Week Average: $216M

 

The delineation between the Fintech and crypto/blockchain worlds can be fuzzy. Fintech, short for financial technology, can be broadly thought of as technological innovation for the finance industry. Yet, it is increasingly difficult to find any financial institution that is not almost completely reliant on integrated technology, so it seems Fintech is being increasingly subsumed into just plain old finance.

 

Crypto can be even harder to define. Original conceptions of decentralized digital money seemed like a nice subset of Fintech, but expanded use cases and new offshoots deploying blockchain technology have pervaded beyond finance into supply chain, identity, art, healthcare, logistics, and media… just to name a few. Crypto has arguably become a technical phenomenon unto itself. Yet much of our sector remains very much financially focused and, along with the rest of Fintech, may also inevitably be melded into plain old finance.

 

Regardless of semantics or taxonomy, the intersection of the two can be an exciting space. Two such examples received notable funding rounds this week.

 

Current is a consumer-focused tech platform that is bringing crypto into banking. Their tech enables enhanced consumer banking services, such as paycheck access, savings pods, a secured charge card connected to member balances, and earned wage access. These services include crypto trading, with members able to buy and sell cryptocurrencies from within the app as an integrated financial service. Following an impressive 90% growth in revenue for the year, Current closed a rare $200M growth round with support from existing investors Andreessen Horowitz, Wellington Management, and Avenir, with new participation from General Catalyst and Cross River (which also collaborates with warehouse funding).

 

Klickl is a UAE-headquartered open finance platform bringing banking services into Web3. Their tech enables banking, digital payments, and crypto trading services on a Web3 interface, as the region’s first fully licensed service of its kind. Their $25M Series A featured support from Web3Port Foundation, Aptos Labs, and other notable investors.

 

It is encouraging to see these and other initiatives receive solid funding support as 2024 draws to a close, with one of the strongest financing weeks we’ve seen lately. We look forward to publishing our annual sector review and to the hopefully exciting times ahead in 2025.

———————————————————————————-

Contact ryan@architectpartners.com to schedule a meeting.