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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 September 16 – September 22

Eric F. Risley
September 22, 2024
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Everything starts small.

 

Decentralized identity management using a blockchain is one of the commonly highlighted opportunities within our industry.  The thesis is that the decentralized architecture of blockchain design can provide more security from unauthorized access, and individuals can have greater control over their own data (self-sovereign identity) ensuring each individual selects who has access and under what circumstances.  With sensitive data breaches virtually a daily occurrence and the business model of surveillance capitalism rampant, this seems rather appealing to many.

 

Identity and access management (“IAM”) is one commonly accepted “label” used to describe this type of functionality and it’s roughly a $20B annual revenue market.  Household names like Microsoft, Oracle, IBM, Google, Apple, and Facebook offer a variety of flavors of these capabilities.  Also, independent companies specialized in this area including Okta, Ping Identity, SailPoint, Auth0, ForgeRock, Centrify among others and have created multi-billion dollar valued businesses in the past 15 years.

 

Conversely, decentralized identity remains nascent.  Some of the more widely recognized early projects and companies like Sovrin, Evernym, Civic and uPort never caught traction and more recent efforts like Worldcoin launched with much fanfare with a message appropriate for the time, differentiate humans from AI bots.  In the past two years companies like Root, Clique, Indicio, Verida, Fractal ID and d.id have raised modest amounts of early stage capital pursuing the opportunity.  So far, progress has been slow.  

 

Despite its early stage, decentralized identity was the theme in two of the three announced transactions this week.  Zug-based Privado.ID (formerly Polygon ID) acquired disco.xyz and Mask Network acquired Nametag.