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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 March 17 – March 23

Eric F. Risley
March 23, 2025
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March 17th – March 23rd

PERSPECTIVES by Eric F. Risley 

 

Broker and exchange consolidation is in full swing, finally.

 

Kraken’s acquisition of NinjaTrader made headlines as the largest crypto M&A transaction in the industry’s history. NinjaTrader offers futures and foreign exchange trading services across a wide variety of assets—beyond just crypto—to retail investors. As highlighted previously, acquisitions between traditional financial services and crypto businesses are becoming increasingly common. In this case, the crypto specialist is embracing traditional financial markets, with Kraken adding the trading of futures contracts for stock market indices, bonds, gold, crude oil, and foreign exchange to complement its historical crypto-only focus. We have a more detailed analysis in our M&A Alert here.

 

Three additional broker and exchange transactions were announced this week, marking a record for any single week. Swyftx, the second-largest crypto broker in Australia, acquired EasyCrypto, the largest crypto broker in New Zealand. In line with geographic expansion, LPT acquired Turing Capital Brokerage, offering MiCA-licensed access to Spain and the EU.

 

Although still a work in progress, regulatory clarity is improving. As highlighted below—taken from our Year-End 2024 Crypto M&A and Financings Report in January—this topic remains a critically important gating factor for the broadening of crypto M&A activity, particularly regarding the entry of traditional financial institutions.

 

“There are several gating factors preventing additional buyers from jumping in, starting with regulatory clarity. When we see bridge transactions TradFi buying crypto natives) we know those regulatory hurdles are low enough to commit capital. Really only Robinhood acquiring Bitstamp fits, but it is something we closely monitor. Also favorable are reverse bridge transactions (crypto native buying TradFi), and crypto.com has done two of them in Q4. The weaving together of TradFi and crypto natives makes sense to us and we expect more to come. 

 

In sum, not enough activity to say itʼs a healthy market, but we are hearing optimism we havenʼt heard for the past two years. This optimism is coming from large and small players, with several large players sharing they are reviving acquisition efforts of scale. So we expect headline consolidation deals in the upcoming year.”

 

Michael Klena, Partner