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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 January 29 – February 4

Steve Payne
February 4, 2024
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Right on trend, only three announced M&A transactions this week, and only 1 with disclosed value.

 

Art Blocks, a platform for generative art that has raised $6M, acquired Sansa, a marketplace for art NFTs and secondary sales.  Art Blocks runs the well-known Marfa digital art festival, and has moved towards NFTs, opening an NFT marketplace for its artist community last year.  Sansa was part of the Art Blocks ecosystem and this is a logical combination of forces.

 

Lokotech Group AS, a listed European company, announced the acquisition of a 66.6% stake in Powerpool.io, a six-algorithm mining pool, for about $1M.

 

The biggest deal this week was around parts of Qredo, a well-known web3 infrastructure provider, being placed into administration (akin to bankruptcy in the U.S.) in the U.K.  Dan Tapiero’s 10T and 1RT firms acquired the remaining “substantial” assets of Qredo through their new U.K.-based entity, Fusion Laboratories. The two creditor firms led Qredo’s bridge financing round and reorganized the company late last year after a year-plus of decline in revenues and cash.  Two dozen key Qredo employees shifted over to Fusion, the remaining ~40 were laid off.

 

Qredo was founded as a L2 protocol featuring instant cross-chain swaps and settlements.  They raised $35M in July 2021 via the QRDO token, and also raised $94M in venture capital, including $80M in a Series A in February 2022 led by 10T with Coinbase, Avalanche, Terra and others at a $460M post-money valuation.  QRDO’s market cap reached as high as $300M in November 2021 and is currently $18M, as their business has fallen off markedly with the crypto market decline.

 

Qredo recently shut down Anker, a hybrid (both DEX and CEX features) derivatives exchange, just months after launch.  The company has stated it will now focus on web3 wallets and custody.

 

Events

Architect Partners will be at the Satoshi Roundtable (1/31-2/7), ETH Denver (2/29 – 3/3), and Digital Asset Summit (3/18 – 3/20). Please contact elliot@architectpartners.com or arjun@architectpartners.com if you would like to meet.