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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 February 19 – February 25

Steve Payne
February 25, 2024
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Price was unannounced, but the largest deal last week was likely Yuga Lab’s all-stock acquisition of PROOF.XYZ.  Yuga is the largest NFT studio and creator of the famed NFT collection Bored Ape Yacht Club, and has acquired other collections such as Meebits and CryptoPunks.  Yuga raised $450M in a 2022 seed round led by a16z.  Proof is a web3 digital art platform best known for its Moonbirds collection of 10,000 pixelated owl NFT profile pics (PFPs).  Proof last raised a $50M Series A, also led by a16z, in 2022.

 

Like other NFT collections, Moonbirds’ trading volume has swooned, from a peak of $500M/month in April 2022 to about $5M/month recently.  At the peak, the cheapest Moonbirds was $115K; this dropped to $3K recently, but after news of the acquisition the floor price doubled.  Proof had several other acquisition offers in late 2023.

 

In other NFT news last week, V3V Ventures acquired Metaverse.sg for about $3M.  Metaverse.sg is a site for NFT info and pricing and owns the Metaverse trademark.

 

Vancouver-based mining portfolio BlockchainK2 (TSXV: BITK) acquired a majority stake in Enverxergy, Inc, the developer of RealBlocks, a front- and back-end investment platform  “leveraging generative AI with blockchain tokenization” for alternative asset managers.  RealBlocks had raised a total of $23.9M, and BlockchainK2 was a minority (non-lead) investor in their seed round in 2019.

 

Web3 app store Magic Square acquired token launchpad TruePNL.  Price was undisclosed, but this was an all-cash deal for the tech and team but not the brand assets or token.  Magic Square had been talking to TruePNL about a white label deal to support their announced staking and launchpad platforms, but this morphed into an acquisition.  Magic Square provides app discovery, with over 1000 apps listed, and has its own SQR token to provide incentives to reward users for engagement.  Magic Square raised $11M in 2022 at a valuation of $75M, and CoinGecko lists SQR at a $522M fully diluted value.

 

Events

Architect Partners will be at ETH Denver (2/29 – 3/3), and Digital Asset Summit (3/18 – 3/20). Please contact elliot@architectpartners.com or arjun@architectpartners.com to meet.