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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 October 30 – November 5

J. Todd White
November 8, 2023
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22 Crypto Private Financings Raised ~$94M

Rolling 3-Month-Average: $123M

Rolling 52-Week Average: $182M

 

Private finance deals showed a modest uptick this week, though remain below both recent and long-term averages for the year.  Teams building infrastructure continue to receive strong investor support.

 

Selected Highlights 

 

The rapid emergence of Artificial Intelligence (AI) has met extremes of both excitement and concern. According to some recent findings, the level of concern may be outpacing the excitement, and led President Biden to issue a sweeping executive order on Oct 30. At the top of the list is how to distinguish the provenance of digital content – where is AI involved, and how can we tell if its output is true?

 

Enter Modulus Labs, a startup at the intersection of AI and blockchain technology. Modulus recently raised $6.3M in seed funding, and aims to deploy zero-knowledge machine learning (zkML) – a variant of zero-knowledge cryptography that can validate the integrity of blockchain transactions without exposing underlying data – into the AI world where the line between reality and artificially generated content is increasingly difficult to distinguish. Modulus is using ZK-proofs to descry the veracity and integrity of generative content by assessing whether AI has been executed correctly.

 

Modulus emerged from Stanford, and their seed round presents a highly credible roster – led by Variant and 1kx, with participation from Inflection, Bankless, Blockchain Builders Fund, the Ethereum Foundation, Worldcoin, Polygon, Celestia and Solana. The potential applications are myriad, from price discovery in NFT lending to enhanced and scalable security of generative content that minimizes human involvement in the operation of decentralized protocols. The company also has numerous partnerships brewing that include Ethereum-based applications and, based on the angels in their round, we can anticipate similar expansion on other layer-1’s such as Polygon and Solana.

 

Making AI accountable through blockchain cryptography is certainly an ambitious undertaking, but its importance is hard to understate if AI will truly become as ubiquitous and transformative as many predict. We applaud the team at Modulus Labs for identifying the need and presenting a potentially credible solution. And we hope the confidence shown by their impressive Seed series investors proves well founded.