California-based Tekion, a cloud-native automotive retail platform, has expanded its global footprint by opening a technical centre in Chennai.
“This is our second technical centre in India after Bengaluru. We have three more centres in the U.S, and dealer customers in Canada and a new one in France. We are on a hiring mode in India,” said founder & CEO Jay Vijayan.
Inaugurating a 52,941 sq. ft centre in Chennai that could accommodate more than 200 people, Mr. Vijayan said the number of staff would be doubled in a year. At the same time, the Bengaluru technical centre would be expanded from 1,050 seats to 1,500 seats, he said.
Chennai is playing a vital role in the evolution of the start-up ecosystem and Tekion is betting big on the city to foster global growth, said Mr. Vijayan, who is from Chennai.
Tekion is the first and fastest cloud-native automotive retail SaaS platform. It has disrupted the ageing Dealer Management Systems platform through Automotive Retail Cloud (ARC). The ARC business has grown by 250%-300% over the last calendar year.
During 2021, Tekion was valued at $3.5 billion after the latest fund raiser. “Most of the original investors are still with us and have participated in the latest round. Our vision is to take the valuation to $100 billion by 2030. This, we will achieve by entering Europe,” he said.
As Tekion was flush with money, Mr. Vijayan said he did not rule out acquiring firms — if anything comes their way — and added that an IPO might happen after two or three years.
