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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.

Financing

Week of January 27 – February 2

Todd White
February 5, 2025
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January 27 – February 2 (Published February 5th)

PERSPECTIVES by Todd White

 

29 Crypto Private Financings Raised: $249.3M

Rolling 3-Month-Average: $162.7M

Rolling 52-Week Average: $202.7M

 

The concepts of security, identity management, and privacy are in many ways interlinked, and the potential for vast improvements in each has been woven throughout the story of blockchain and Web 3.0 technologies. While so-called Web 2.0—characterized by user-generated content, interactivity, and collaborative online experiences such as social media—dominates current internet usage thanks to established infrastructure and user-friendly interfaces, proponents of Web 3.0—characterized by decentralization, user-centric online experiences built on blockchain, AI, and machine learning, “trustless” interactions, and ubiquitous connectivity—believe that the underlying philosophies of decentralization, security, and, most of all, privacy will drive an inevitable transition and integration with all things Web 2.0.

 

Yet this transition has been hampered by the complexity of the underlying technologies and the notorious difficulty of using them. Two of the largest financiers this week, in their own way, are seeking to address this complexity to facilitate and expand adoption.

 

D3, the developer of a fully Domain Name System (DNS)-compliant blockchain purpose-built to transform and tokenize Web 2.0 domains as “digital real estate,” secured $25M in Series A funding at a $104M valuation from Paradigm and a collection of their industry notables. Their unique thesis would bring the usual benefits of tokenization—fractional ownership, financial innovation and liquidity, and enhanced ownership options—to perhaps the original digital “real estate”: internet domains. Their goal is to bridge the Web 2.0 DNS and Web 3.0 name systems to more easily connect Web 2.0’s user volume and ease of use with Web 3.0’s structural benefits.

 

And finally, Irreducible, a startup building zero-knowledge proof (ZKP) infrastructure for transaction and identity verification, locked a $24M early-stage round, also led by Paradigm with support from Fenbushi Capital, L2 Iterative Ventures, and Robot Ventures. Focused on the efficiency of ZKPs—a cryptographic method that allows one party to prove a statement’s validity without revealing any underlying data—the company was inspired by the high-frequency trading world’s success in combining specialized hardware with software-enabled trading algorithms. By matching the hardware in their own data center, using field-programmable gate array (FPGA) chips that can be customized for specialized computations, with co-designed software and ZKP protocols, they seek faster execution with lower power consumption to ultimately achieve the precise privacy benefits that ZKP technologies provide.

 

Contact ryan@architectpartners.com to schedule a meeting.