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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.

Snapshots

Week of May 1 – May 7

Steve Payne

May 10, 2023

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22 Crypto Private Financings Raised ~$95M

Not much to write home about this week – a decent number of financings were announced, but announced capital raised was the second lowest week of the year.

Arguably, one week is too short a period to extract much meaning, but let’s parse the data a bit:

Deals raising over $100M – zero
Deals raising over $10M – just two
Stage – half of the top ten are seed stage
Lead Investors – evenly split between VCs, crypto-centric VCs and some large institutions/strategics

Compared to our financing snapshot from one year ago:

$433M was raised in 47 announced financings (and this was the lowest week in April)
Deals raising over $100M – zero
Deals raising over $10M – ten!
Stage – none were seed stage, half were Series B/late stage
Lead Investors – 2/10 were VCs, 8/10 were crypto-centric or not disclosed (=same)

The largest deal last week, Fedi, was a $17M raise by this project started in 2022. Today, most users store their crypto on an exchange for convenience, or in their own wallet, for security. Both have problems – like FTX in the former case, or losing your keys (and being unable to recover your crypto) in the latter. To provide both convenience and security, Fedi is building a product to help trusted communities (“federations”) store bitcoin together and simplify crypto transactions between members. Using an open-source protocol called Fedimint, Fedi offers a compromise between (easy) custodial storage and (safe) self-custody: outsourcing backup storage to people you personally know and trust.

Fedi lead investor Ego Death Capital (!) explains it well: “Imagine a wallet app holding your Bitcoin where a family could act as their own guardians and trusted network for each other. Lose your key – no problem as the members of your family can easily vouch for you and get your Bitcoin back. Now imagine that the definition of “family” could be extended to any size of network of trusted “guardians”. With Lightning and Fedi, since transactions are not on-chain and instead use blind signatures, privacy is greatly enhanced and scale becomes unlimited and cheap.” We’re interested to see how this project develops.