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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 November 27 – December 3

J. Todd White
December 3, 2023
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25 Crypto Private Financings Raised ~$316M 

Rolling 3-Month-Average: $166M

Rolling 52-Week Average: $179M

 

The ability for different blockchains to communicate and transact with each other is one of the more critical infrastructure needs for the Web3 ecosystem to realize the full scale of its potential.  Broadly one can think of such interoperability in two functions – communications and transactions or value flows across chains.  Both are essential to eliminate fragmentation of the larger ecosystem among specific blockchain communities and initiatives.

 

Wormhole is a protocol launched in August of 2021 and incubated by Jump Crypto (the crypto arm of high-frequency trading firm Jump Trading) that, according to its press release, has won the trust of leading firms such as Circle and Uniswap, and facilitated over $35 billion in value transfer and regularly processes 2+ million daily messages across more than 30 chains. 

 

This past week Wormhole built on its success with an impressive $225 million capital raise in exchange for a token warrant and at a $2.5 billion valuation.  The deal is the largest single capital round so far this year, with the third-largest valuation for 2023.  The round received diverse support, including Brevan Howard, Coinbase Ventures, Multicoin Capital, Jump Trading, ParaFi, Dialectic, Borderless Capital, and Arrington Capital. It also deployed an interesting structure for a deal of this size, offering token warrants instead of traditional equity stakes, more typical of smaller and earlier-stage projects in the Web3 space. Proceeds will be used to onboard additional employees, build out and develop the protocol, promote cross-chain activity and encourage developers to build on top of the protocol’s messaging technology.

 

There are several intriguing aspects here. It is the first external funding round after being incubated by Jump Crypto. The team concurrently launched Wormhole Labs to complete its spinout from Jump and provide product development and implementation capabilities. Purportedly the round did not have a “lead”, and achieved more equal and collaborative support among its investors.  And of course, this is another example of teams building critical market infrastructure receiving solid investor support.

 

Relatively few companies have raised this year at valuations north of $1 billion. Coming on the heels of the largest total capital raised last week, Wormhole’s impressive financing round certainly has the hallmark of growing momentum for the sector.