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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.

Insights

Week of June 10 – June 16

Glenn Gottlieb
June 19, 2024
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35 Crypto Private Financings Raised ~$129M 

Rolling 3-Month-Average: $253M

Rolling 52-Week Average: $195M

 

This week, once again, we saw the dominance of early-stage investments.   And while there were multiple interesting companies, we’re going to focus on the growing importance of zero-knowledge proofs. 

 

By aligning with blockchain principles like decentralization, transparency, and privacy preservation, zero-knowledge proofs are an important innovation that has found a natural home in the crypto space. The unique challenges and opportunities presented by blockchain networks have accelerated the research, development, and adoption of ZKP technologies to enhance scalability, security, and functionality.

 

Zero-knowledge proofs (ZKPs) are a powerful cryptographic technique that enables one party to prove to another that a statement is true without revealing any additional information. This enhances security and privacy by allowing verification of data integrity and validity without exposing the underlying sensitive data itself. ZKPs eliminate the need to share passwords or personal information during authentication, reducing attack surfaces and risks like identity theft.

 

ZKPs have numerous applications for enhancing security across various domains – blockchain/crypto for enabling private transactions and scaling, secure multi-party computation, identity management, voting systems, supply chains, and more. In blockchain, ZKPs underpin critical scaling solutions like zk-rollups that batch transactions off-chain while preserving trust and privacy. ZKPs are a key enabler for bringing enhanced privacy, trust, and scalability to decentralized systems.

 

There are many approaches to the ZKP market, with Nexus Laboratories being one of the pioneering companies focused on making zero-knowledge cryptography more accessible and scalable for developers. Their core product is a zero-knowledge virtual machine that optimizes and parallelizes verifiable computation across a network of machines. Nexus recently raised $25M (co-led by Lightspeed Venture Partners and Pantera Capital, with participation from Dragonfly Capital, Faction Ventures, and Blockchain Builders Fund) to expand their cutting-edge ZKP tools and support early production deployments, especially for zk-rollup scaling solutions on Ethereum, although the company says their solution is designed to work across different blockchain chains and zero-knowledge (ZK) rollup ecosystems.

 

With techniques like compact proof aggregation, Nexus aims to drive down the costs of ZKP generation by orders of magnitude compared to current solutions. By lowering the barriers to adoption, Nexus can enable more widespread use of ZKPs across decentralized networks, AI, cloud computing, and any application requiring robust data integrity and privacy. Nexus is building key infrastructure to unlock the full potential of ZKPs for securing the next generation of internet services and applications.