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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 September 25 – October 1

J. Todd White
October 4, 2023
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17 Crypto Private Financings Raised ~$92M

17 Crypto Private Financings Raised ~$92M

 

Rolling 3-Month-Average: $145M

 

Rolling 52-Week Average: $188M

Private financings continue their subdued pace, with both deal count and capital raised trending down this week from already muted volumes. Seven of our top 10 transactions were infrastructure deals, with half in early-stage investing and trading, showing continued investor appetite to build the plumbing during an extended sector down-cycle.

 

Selected Highlights 

 

SupraOracle announced a total of $24M in private investments completed, including support from some of the largest digital asset investors such as Animoca Brands, Coinbase Ventures and Valor Equity Partners. Supra is a developer of low-latency infrastructure for cross-chain interoperability and security to enable migration of Web2 to Web3 with powerful oracles, cross-chain communication protocols and consensus mechanisms

 

Why Notable?   Supra is building the critical interoperability infrastructure that is essential for the adoption and scaling of Web 3 initiatives. The large number of high-profile strategic investors providing private financing, co-developing white papers and collaborative R&D suggest that Supra’s “academic approach” to cross-chain oracles and bridgeless communication is resonating with key market players.

 

Rated Labs secured a $12.9M Series A round led by crypto venture investor Archetype, who also took a board seat. The UK-based oracle and dataset provider, which currently offers Ethereum-based node and node-operator ratings, data pipelines and comprehensive datasets, will use the new funds to extend into Layer 2 networks and additional blockchains including Polygon, Cosmos and Solana.

 

Why Notable? As we have seen in several infrastructure deals, simplifying access to Web3 continues to attract capital. This round is also notable for the sizeable participation from previous investors such as Placeholder, Cherry and Semantic who are showing continued financial support.

 

AnchorWatch secured $3M in funding led by Ten31 in order to meet the regulatory and capital requirements necessary to bring to market a regulated insurance product embedded in its secure custody vault, Trident Vault. The solution is an example of combined technical and financial infrastructure to meet the needs of commercial institutions as well as financial advisors with clients seeking secure and insured custody for Bitcoin.

 

Why Notable? We view appropriately scoped insurance solutions to be essential financial infrastructure for the Web3 and digital assets space in general.  While not yet offering products in the market, AnchorWatch was formed to specifically fill a void identified by the founders, in this case commercial coverage for cold-storage Bitcoin. Investor support for their approach – combining secure technology with credentialed insurance – is encouraging as the broad insurance needs of the sector continue to be underserved.

 

Patterns  

Infrastructure continues to dominate the private financing landscape, with cross-chain interoperability being a recurring theme. And we expect the often overlooked financial infrastructure – notably the underserved insurance and risk management needs of the sector – to attract increased investor interest as digital markets mature.