[Funding alert] Tekion raises $250M as valuation rises to $3.5B

Tekion, a SaaS unicorn focused on the automotive sector founded by former Tesla CIO, has raised $250 million in Series D round with its valuation more than trebling to $3.5 billion.

Tekion, which is headquartered in Silicon Valley, US, has offices in Bengaluru and Chennai. It was founded by Jay Vijayan in 2016, and attained unicorn status last October at a valuation of $1 billion.

The latest round of funding was led by Alkeon Capital and Durable, with participation from Hyundai Motor, as well as several automobile dealer groups in the US.

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Existing investors of Tekion – Advent International and Index Ventures – also participated in this round.

The startup plans to use this latest round of funding in multiple areas such as product development and expansion, customer experience centres, and partnerships.

Tekion’s flagship product – Automotive Retail Cloud (ARC) – is focused on the automobile dealers, primarily in the North America market, to provide digital platform to carry out their tasks.

“Tekion is experiencing strong tailwinds in a large, multi-billion-dollar market including cloud adoption for online retailing, connected vehicles, increased consumer expectations for seamless, digital car purchasing experiences, and digital vehicle connectivity. We believe Tekion is just getting revved up for its multi-year journey in redefining an industry,” said, Deepak Ravichandran, General Partner at Alkeon Capital.

Tekion has over 1,000 employees globally with around 900 of them based out of its India centres.

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

Tekion claims its technology platform has enabled the sale of over 1.7 lakh vehicle with service provided for more than one million units. This has resulted in transactions worth over $2 billion.

“Tekion is disrupting the industry with its cutting-edge cloud-based platform, and we believe in the company’s capacity for value creation and exponential long-term growth through scalability,” said Henry Ellenbogen, Chief Investment Officer, Durable Capital Partners.

Tekion also received a boost with the coming in of global automobile company Hyundai Motor as an investor.

“Our shared efforts will provide even better data quality, integrity and digital experiences for our dealers and their customers,” said Manish Mehrotra, Executive Director, Digital Business Planning and Connected Operations of Hyundai Motor North America.