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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 6 – November 12

J. Todd White
November 17, 2023
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26 Crypto Private Financings Raised ~$90M

Rolling 3-Month-Average: $119M

Rolling 52-Week Average: $175M

 

Deal flow picked up slightly again this past week though total proceeds remain steady and modest at $90 million.

 

Selected Highlights 

 

Tokenization and stablecoins are having a bit of a moment in the sun.  High-profile prognostications like Larry Finke’s clarion for the coming age of tokenization have been reinforced by numerous legitimate applications, including among the largest financial players.  BlackRock tokenized one of its money markets funds on JPM’s Onyx blockchain as collateral in an OTC derivatives trade with Barclays.   Citi has piloted internal tokenized deposits to transfer client liquidity between branches and has used digitized tokens with Maersk and a canal authority as an alternative to bank guarantees and LOCs in trade finance.   

 

Stablecoin initiatives are also numerous, including PayPal’s PYUSD built by Paxos, Midas’ new U.S. Treasury-backed tokens to increase yields for the DeFi community, and Deutsche Bank and Standard Chartered’s SC Ventures using the Universal Digital Payments Network to test on-chain stablecoins and CBDC-based interbank transfers as an alternative to SWIFT messaging.

 

Amidst this buzz, Agrotoken, an Argentinian startup, announced a pre-Series A round led by Visa.   Agrotoken uses a platform built on Ethereum, Polygon and Algorand to tokenize agricultural commodities.  Its current round solidifies a collaboration with Visa that began in 2022, and follows an agreement penned this summer with Banco Galicia to use AgroTokens as collateral for agricultural loans – an intriguing use of tokenized digital collateral to access Argentina’s rich agro-assets as a stabilizer against the Peso’s penchant for hyperinflation.

 

Stablecoins promise fast and frictionless payments, a means of storing and transferring value that can be insulated from cross-border frictions, and access to alternative assets and commodities without the inherent FX and inflation volatility of fiat and fiat-based instruments. Long-lauded use cases seem to be finally taking shape, and investment support for these initiatives presents another example of capital flowing to teams building infrastructure in the down market.