The future of automotive retail

What if buying and servicing a car could be as easy as shopping on Amazon? Tesla showed it’s possible. Why can’t every dealership in America do it? 

With those questions as his North Star, Jay Vijayan founded Tekion to reimagine the automotive retail experience. As Tesla’s former CIO, there was no better person to take on this challenge. And with our years of insight into the automotive retail sector, experience in scaling businesses, and deep understanding of international markets, payments, and the strategic use of M&A, we were ideal partners to join him on this journey. In 2020, we led Tekion’s $150 million Series C.

Today, if you purchase a vehicle from a dealer running on Tekion’s Automotive Retail Cloud, you can choose a seamless all-digital experience. When you bring your vehicle in for maintenance or repairs, an RFID tag recognizes and welcomes you, while alerting the dealership’s staff. During the service, you can track progress and receive notifications, often enhanced with images, about any new issues that come up. Based on the car’s maintenance history, the platform can recommend additional work that could save you money and headaches down the road.

The Advent team are great partners that any entrepreneur would want on their side. Their deep insights into the industry create strong alignment with management and allow them to be true partners for the long haul.

Jay Vijayan

CEO, Tekion

It’s not just consumers who benefit. Dealers no longer have to patch together an array of niche software packages that previously handled siloed tasks in sales, inventory management, financing, service, parts, payments, accounting, and more. Early adopters are reporting higher revenue, lower costs, fewer headaches, and a growing number of happy customers. And manufacturers, starting with GM, are embracing Tekion as a way to make it easier to purchase their electric vehicles.

The market is massive. Dealers spend billions on automotive software alone. With unmatched access to data and analytics, Tekion is poised to layer on additional services to further streamline the workflows of dealers and delight customers.

It took a visionary like Jay to see the opportunity clearly: a large, heavily fragmented vertical market suffering from a huge tech deficit and ripe for transformation. We had a deep understanding of the dealer pain points and the inability of the incumbents to solve those challenges, making Advent an ideal thought partner to help Jay and the Tekion team become the future platform for automotive retail software globally.