Jay Vijayan's Tekion raises $250 million, valued at $3.5 billion

Bengaluru-based Tekion, developer of a cloud-native automotive SaaS platform-Automotive Retail Cloud, secured the Series D financing round of $250 million, which has helped the company to get valuated over $3.5 billion.

Tekion would invest this additional capital towards accelerating its ARC platform rollout to dealers globally, setting up a customer experience centre, expanding product innovation hubs in California and Texas and fund its product innovation expansions activities in India.

Jay Vijayan, Founder and CEO of Tekion said, “We have experienced phenomenal market acceptance during the past year. This strong round of funding validates industry and investors’ belief in Tekion’s disruptive innovations.''

ARC, which claims to have the potential to replace legacy automotive dealer management systems, uses big data, machine learning, and AI to seamlessly bring together OEMs, retailers/dealers and consumers.

The investment was led by Alkeon Capital and Durable Capital. Other investors included Hyundai Motor Co., several dealer groups, Advent Capital and Index Ventures. The latter two, Advent and Index Ventures, have previously invested in Tekion.

The business model of Tekion is not trying to replace dealerships. Rather, Vijayan envisions cloud computing as the key to making the car-buying experience more efficient for consumers, and streamlining the operations of dealerships.

The valuation of $3.5 billion valuation is more than three times what it was just one year ago when it had raised $150 million. The founder said, Employment has grown from more than 400 a year ago to about, 1,350 now.