Former Tesla CIO Jay Vijayan’s Tekion turns a unicorn with $150 million funding – Times of India

BENGALURU: Tekion, founded by former Tesla CIO Jay Vijayan, has raised $150 million in funding led by private equity firm Advent International. The funding values the company, which offers a cloud platform for the automotive retail sector, at over $1 billion, taking it into the Unicorn club within four years of its founding.
Other investors who participated in the round include Index Ventures, Exor, the holding company of Fiat Chrysler Automobiles and Ferrari, Airbus Ventures and FM Capital. Tekion’s other investors include General Motors, BMW iVentures and Nissan-Renault-Mitsubishi Alliance Ventures. Tekion has previously raised $65 million.
Of Tekion’s 500 people, 300 are in its technology centres in Bengaluru and Chennai. Vijayan grew up in Chennai and did his Master’s in science at the Madras University.
Tekion’s platform brings together manufacturers (OEMs), dealers and the consumers together seamlessly. The platform, called Automotive Retail Cloud (ARC), provides modules for sales, finance & insurance, service, parts and finance and accounting, while leveraging IoT for dealer connects and AI/ML for personalisation.
“We want to deploy the funds to accelerate the product roadmap and customer rollout,” said Vijayan. The US automotive sector, he said, is 4% of the GDP or $850 billion and with services baked in, its $1 trillion worth of annual transactions, opening up a big opportunity for Tekion. “The automotive software space hasn’t been disrupted for over 50 years. Core systems have not kept pace with recent technology advancements. There are several point solutions where dealers have to toggle between 9-12 different applications and even enter data manually before they close the deal,” said Vijayan, who at Tesla was instrumental in developing www.tesla.com, its store systems and internal systems.
Vjayan said over the next six months, his team will roll out an enhanced version of digital retailing which is completely contactless. They have already launched zero contact services to sell and service vehicles. Tekion’s ARC already integrates with 17 OEM brands and the company is targeting to complete the remaining OEM integrations in early 2021.
“We provide a unique ID that digitises the entire paperwork,” Vijayan said. He said a dealer saves between $16,000 and $66,000 annually by using ARC. “Dealers have a revenue uptick of 10%-20% through cross-sell and upsell opportunities. They eliminate too many point solutions. In less than a year, we have had $330 million worth of transactions going through our platform,” he said.
Eric Wei, a managing director on Advent’s technology investment team in Palo Alto, said, “From the moment we started talking to Tekion’s dealers, we were blown away by the ease and speed of the migration process, especially from the multiple dealers who transitioned in one month’s time, entirely remotely during the Covid-19 pandemic. Their dealer-friendly approach to contract terms and data ownership will be a breath of fresh air for dealers.”
Vijayan said the company plans to hire 250 more people by next year. He also plans to launch the solution in India next year. Tekion did a share buy back recently that allowed some employees to offload shares worth Rs 3 crore.