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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 October 23 – October 29

Eric F. Risley
October 29, 2023
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Talented, engaged software developers are the lifeblood of our future.  In fact, a blockchain and its associated reward tokens are nothing more than an exposed, bare foundation.  Each blockchain must attract the time, talent and vision of software developers to build useful applications (dApps in crypto nomenclature) or that foundation is useless and valueless.  This is the same dynamic as the emergence of other software development platforms such as the mainframe, PC, game console, client-server, cloud, mobile device, and the metaverse headset.  Applications must be built upon these foundations to have value.

 

Historically, to the mainstream person, crypto is associated solely with the token and more specifically, participating in speculation of the value of the token.  Okay fine, nothing all that different than purchasing ownership (equity) in an early-stage company.  However, what has been different is the virtual sole focus on token price as evidence of success vs. measures reflecting the use and effectiveness of the underlying product(s) and associated business(es).  That must change and is changing, however, it’s time to move from speculation to investment.  

 

Investment mindset begins with a vision of a use case and value proposition, is followed by building the associated dApp, and then the hard work of attracting users and scaling to become meaningful.  It’s the software developer that is integral to starting this cycle.  The more engaged software developers, the more use cases and value propositions are ideated, built upon and tested.  

 

Right now, like it or not, crypto is back to the basics, in its search of use cases and value propositions that justify the efforts to build these many bare foundations.  The good news is that according to the Electric Capital Developer Report, as of October 1, 2023, there were 19,279 active developers building software on the top public blockchains.  However, according to Statista that represents a minuscule 0.7% of global software developers, simply not enough and demonstrates just how nascent crypto remains.  

 

We’ve spent our careers helping to build early-stage industries and believe that blockchain and associated tokens are both evolutionary and revolutionary.  We also believe that it’s time for a shift of emphasis to valuable use cases with proof of value measured by real use, not just token trading volume or price.  Make no mistake, token trading and value are very important, it’s just time to shift the mindset to the underlying fundamentals that create both.

 

So why this topic today?  Attracting and training software developers to build upon blockchains is the theme.  This week Rise In acquired Blockbeam, both dedicated to this aim.  Both, working in partnership with various blockchain protocols, have built curricula to teach both fundamentals and more technical skills to both college-level and professional software developers.