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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 9 – October 15

J. Todd White
October 18, 2023
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19 Crypto Private Financings Raised ~$151M

Rolling 3-Month-Average: $131M

Rolling 52-Week Average: $185M

 

 

Conferences & Events

Architect Partners is co-hosting an event with The Tie and Gemini on Thursday, October 19th at The Tie’s office (link here to register). We will also be at Money2020 (October 22 – 25).

 

 

Private financing activity proved consistent this week with 17 financings for the third week running, and healthy proceeds of $151M.  Infrastructure deals continued to dominate.

 

 

Selected Highlights 

 

 

Membrane Labs, a crypto-lending and trading platform, closed a $20M Series A from a respectable cohort of investors including Brevan Howard, Point72, Jane Street, and Two Sigma. Proceeds will be used to build sophisticated infrastructure to meet institutional needs for spot, derivatives, lending and collateral management activities.  This includes the option to use decentralized settlement using smart contracts as escrow agents to avoid counterparty credit risk, or to opt for traditional “sign and send” settlement through Membrane’s customizable, modular tech platform.

 

 

Why Notable?   

2022’s crypto-market implosions largely obliterated lending and prime brokerage capacity for the digital asset markets, leaving a liquidity void that impedes institutional trading and remains largely unfilled.  Membrane hopes to unify the industry’s diverse custody and wallet solutions, and thus facilitate market liquidity with its tech-driven risk management and customizable bilateral trade management on a custody-agnostic settlement network. Their recent financing round stands out with an impressive mix of top tier traditional financial investors with more crypto-focused capital providers.

 

 

Untangled Finance, raised $13.5M to expand their on-chain solutions for tokenized private credit. The lead investor, London-based Fasanara Capital, also opened two private tokenized credit pools on the platform to put their mouth where their money is. Untangled’s platform is built on the Celo network, and will extend Ethereum and Polygon using Chainlink’s cross-chain interoperability protocol to create a multichain interoperable credit pool. Untangled is initially targeting fintech lending, such as invoice/trade finance and consumer salary lending, and green infrastructure projects. They offer some innovative tools such as a built-in liquidation engine and credit assessment model to anticipate default risks, as well as auction-based withdrawals to facilitate early liquidity for credit pool investors.

 

 

Why Notable?  

Untangled is positioned in the middle of one most anticipated digital asset developments this year. Tokenized asset and collateral management is an extremely hot opportunity, and featured quite prominently at Goldman Sachs’ digital asset event in New York last week. Traditional heavyweights are poised, with JPMorgan executing the first tokenized derivative trade this week on the heels of BlackRock’s tokenized money market fund the week before, both utilizing JPM’s Tokenized Collateral Network, and Franklin Templeton’s own tokenized money market fund launched a few weeks prior.  

 

 

Patterns  

Capital focus shifted back toward infrastructure this week, with a sub-emphasis on bridge transactions bringing to market tools that facilitate institutional interest in tokenization, collateral management and liquidity management.