California-based Tekion, a cloud-native automotive retail platform, has expanded its global footprint by opening a technical center in Chennai.
“This is our second technical center in India after Bengaluru. We have three other centers in the US, dealerships in Canada and a new one in France. We are in a hiring mode in India,” said Founder and CEO Jay Vijayan.
Inaugurating a 52,941-square-foot center in Chennai that could accommodate more than 200 people, Mr Vijayan said the number of employees would double in a year. At the same time, Bengaluru’s technical center will be expanded from 1,050 to 1,500 seats, he said.
Chennai plays an important role in developing the startup ecosystem, and Tekion is banking heavily on the city to boost global growth, said Mr. Vijayan, who is from Chennai.
Tekion is the first and fastest cloud-native SaaS platform for automotive retail. It disrupted the aging Dealer Management Systems platform through the Automotive Retail Cloud (ARC). The ARC business has grown 250% to 300% over the past calendar year.
In 2021, Tekion was valued at $3.5 billion after the last fundraiser. “Most of the original investors are still with us and participated in the last round. Our vision is to grow the valuation to $100 billion by 2030. We will achieve this by entering Europe,” he said.
As Tekion had plenty of cash, Mr Vijayan said he wasn’t ruling out taking over companies – should things get in the way – adding that an IPO could happen in two or three years.
