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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 9 – September 15

Eric F. Risley
September 15, 2024
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It will happen soon, hopefully…

 

Crypto as an industry is perceived by most laypersons (and many in our industry) to be all about novel assets called tokens.  Of course, perfectly natural given collectively tokens of all forms represent well over $1 trillion in U.S. Dollars.  However, tokens are only a feature of something far bigger, a collection of technologies that form a new platform upon which to build applications.  Applications are simply software and online services that “do something useful” for people as individuals and as members of companies (and perhaps AI as well!).  Chris Dixon, in his book “Read Write Own: Building the Next Era of the Internet”, describes this new platform as “Blockchain Networks” or “Blockchain” and others call it “Web3”.  So far these labels seem to come up short but the combination of technologies which comprise blockchains like Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, Avalanche,… offer “Web3” application developers a platform upon which to build applications that promise capabilities and features that are “better” than existing applications.  Chris Dixon cites examples including games and social networks.  “Better” are games where users actually own the in-game assets they earn from gameplay and can easily convert these assets to money useable both inside and outside the game.  Another example of “better” is social networks where the users directly benefit financially from their “social graph and persona” rather than Facebook keeping all the benefits (roughly $140 billion in annual revenues or $45.00 per active user) in return for offering a “free” service.

 

There are thousands of Web3 application developers working to discover where the capabilities offered by Blockchain Networks make better or allow a new class of applications and services to emerge.  There are also many companies and foundations who are supporting various blockchains dedicated to assisting these developers to make it easier to build.  A small subset includes companies like Alchemy, Consensys, Forte, Blockdaemon, Amazon Web Services and blockchains such as Ethereum, Base, Solana and Avalanche.  Each caters to developers as their customer.  Each offers a variety of solutions, some unique and many overlapping.  This week a relatively newer entrant to this effort, Nirvana Labs, announced an acquisition of Vektor.  Nirvana Labs is offering a Web3 application optimized version of Amazon Web or Google Cloud Services.

 

We will see if this rapidly developing ecosystem of Web3 development tools and services allows Web3 application developers to discover the big breakout Web3 application(s) that shift our industry’s focus from token value speculation to real-world applications that “do something” of value.