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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 June 16 – June 22

Todd White
June 25, 2025
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June 16 – June 22 (Published June 25th)

PERSPECTIVES by Todd White

 

29 Crypto Private Financings Raised: $199.1M

Rolling 3-Month-Average: $257.6M

Rolling 52-Week Average: $256.3M

 

Staking has become an intuitive concept to those steeped in the world of crypto and decentralized finance, but it can be elusive and confusing for those outside or newly interested in the sector. The most common analogy is to interest earned on bank deposits, where banks pay account holders a return in exchange for the right to lend or otherwise rehypothecate their funds to third parties. This is both fundamental to how banks operate and central to concerns about the stability of the “fractional reserving” system, which allows the same funds to be re-lent and re-deposited almost infinitely.

 

Staking permits crypto holders to receive a yield on their assets, but through a fundamentally different mechanism that was originally designed to avoid the systemic risks of fractional reserving. Transactions on a blockchain must be validated in order to be executed and recorded on the chain. This can be done through “proof-of-work,” where bitcoin miners compute complex calculations to compete for rewards, or “proof-of-stake,” where users of blockchains like Ethereum lock up (or “stake”) their cryptocurrency to help verify transactions and secure the network. In return, they earn rewards that are similar to interest in a savings account. The more you stake, the greater your chance of being chosen to validate transactions and receive rewards.

 

But traditional staking ties up the assets, making them illiquid and inaccessible for other uses while they’re staked. To solve the problem, liquid staking was developed, where users receive a “liquid staking token” (LST) in return for their staked assets. This LST represents an interest in staked assets and can be traded, used in DeFi, or lent out, providing liquidity or potentially additional yields while the original tokens remain locked up. This has led to the next step, known as “restaking,” which allows users to take their LSTs and “restake” them to secure not just the main blockchain (like Ethereum) but also additional networks or applications, which are known as Actively Validated Services (AVS). Examples of AVS include rollups, oracles, data-availability layers, and other decentralized protocols that need security but don’t want to build their own validator networks.

 

If this sounds confusing, that’s because it is complicated. But it is probably no more so than the world of repackaged security interests known as ABS, MBS, and CDSs that nearly took down the financial system in 2008 and begat the whole crypto world in the first place. Whether the advent of LSTs and liquid restaking is re-introducing systemic risk can be actively debated. Suffice it to say the space is receiving significant interest among users and investors alike. Major players now include EigenLayer, Lido, Ether.Fi, Renzo, and StakeStone, among others.

 

EigenLayer, one of the concept’s pioneers, received a meaningful $70 million token investment from a16z, one of its early and consistent supporters. EigenLayer is a blockchain infrastructure protocol built on Ethereum that helped pioneer the concept of restaking. EigenLayer now acts as a marketplace connecting restakers and will use the new funds to launch EigenCloud, a new platform offering “verifiability-as-a-service” that lets developers build off-chain applications that are cryptographically verifiable, thus extending blockchain-grade trust to any computation or data workflow.

 

This certainly sounds intriguing, but let us hope that the evolving complexity does not also bring unmanageably complex risks.

 

Contact ryan@architectpartners.com to schedule a meeting.