Tekion, the US-headquartered SaaS unicorn with a large technology presence in India, will continue to hire as it aims to maintain its growth rate of over 80% given the demand for its software solutions from the American automotive market.
“We passed the $100 million revenue run rate earlier this year and our growth this year will exceed 80%,” said Tekion Founder and CEO Jay Vijayan in an interaction with YourStory.
Founded in 2016, Tekion is solely focused on the automotive industry, with the key market being North America. It also has a presence in the UK, France, and The Netherlands. Vijayan remarked that Tekion has just scratched the surface of the US automotive retail market and the opportunity to grow remains vast.
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The company also undertook employee resizing measures this year where it let go of a certain number of people. While the CEO claimed it was a small percentage without providing the actual numbers, he emphasised that the restructuring was much needed to bring efficiency to the company.
At the same time, Tekion will continue with its hiring momentum although not at the same pace. It is looking to onboard senior-level professionals from other companies.
“We are hiring in many critical positions and looking at people who know how to scale the business,” said Vijayan. Tekion is now aiming at a revenue target of $1 billion by 2027.
The company could achieve a revenue base of $100 million this calendar with around 25 sales personnel, however, it’s not sufficient to scale the business.
Tekion’s technology platform is targeted at three types of customers in the automotive industry—partners, enterprises, and retail. The retail segment garners the strongest traction for Tekion as it is part of the dealer network.
Vijayan said, “We exceeded our 1,000-unit target of dealerships and will continue to grow more than 90% this year. This is in addition to successfully launching seven new enterprise and OEM integration programmes.”
Tekion counts Penske Motor Group, American Motors Group, Walt Massey Automotive, and California Automotive Retailing Group, among its clients in the US. Also, Longo Toyota and Lexus of Penske Motor Group have been running on Tekion’s automotive retail cloud platform for nearly two years. The dealer services 350 cars per day.
Vijayan believes the demand for their technology platform is strong and will continue to remain even if there is a downturn in the economy as its customers will look at higher efficiency at the same cost.
In this direction, Tekion has been placing a lot of effort into generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) as it is building numerous applications on this platform which can be deployed in real-use business cases.
Vijayan claimed that an application built by Tekion on GenAI platform has led to the dealer networks seeing a 40% increased efficiency in customer email communication and saving one hour per day per employee.
“The adoption among our customers for GenAI solutions is very high and we are constantly looking at solving key business cases through this platform,” he remarked.
Edited by Kanishk Singh
