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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 November 20 – November 26

Eric F. Risley
November 26, 2023
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The same but different.

 

Two weeks and two M&A transactions that echo one another.  This week Bullish announced the acquisition of CoinDesk after last week, an 80% control stake of The Block was sold.  Each is a combination of related but differing businesses, including media, events, data, data analytics and research.  The mix matters.

 

On the media side of the business, building an audience is job #1.  Revenue is a function of visitors and page views.  As highlighted in last week’s Crypto M&A snapshot, CoinDesk and The Block attracted 6.9M and 2.2M total visits over the past 30 days, respectively, according to Similarweb.  An average visitor views 1.63 pages at Coindesk and 2.02 pages at The Block.  With this data, plus an estimate of advertising units per page and cost to advertise, we can back into revenue from advertising.

 

Without diving into the details, it’s possible in a perfect scenario, that each page view could generate $.05 – $.10 (a CPM of $50 – $100).  That roughly translates into annual advertising revenue of $6.5M – $13.5M for CoinDesk and $2.5M – $5.0M for The Block.  Setting aside the costs to create the necessary content to attract visitors, these are relatively small businesses when only considering advertising revenue.  This is why most publishers seek additional revenue by hosting events, like Coindesk’s annual Consensus conference, and seek subscription revenue through selling data, data analytics, and research products.

 

So why did Bullish acquire CoinDesk?  Bullish is building a challenger crypto asset execution platform, oriented toward institutions today.  Building investor visibility is crucial to attract new customers.  Acquiring arguably one of the best-known brands within the crypto assets sector certainly attracts visibility.  Also, with the tone of the crypto asset markets improving, CoinDesk is likely to see improving business fundamentals for the foreseeable future.  It’s also borrowing from the playbook of Binance, who acquired CoinMarketCap in April 2020 which is explained in our M&A Alert from that time.