CEO poises Tekion as a disrupter to DMS market

Jay Vijayan says he wants his startup dealership management system company, Tekion, to shake up the DMS market.

"We are a disrupter," Vijayan, Tekion's CEO and a former chief information officer at Tesla, told Automotive News. The company last month said it raised $150 million in its latest funding round and is now valued at more than $1 billion.

Why? He says Tekion is a cloud-native platform that offers an alternative to incumbent DMS providers that have been slower to evolve and create a seamless experience for both dealerships and customers.

Vijayan would not share the number of dealerships enrolled on Tekion's DMS platform, called Automotive Retail Cloud, as of October, but he said Tekion's customers' stores span 28 states. Tekion has won business away from nine different DMS providers, he said.

Vijayan, 48, spoke with Staff Reporter Lindsay VanHulle last month about Tekion's plans. Here are edited excerpts.

On Tekion's expansion plans:

We are expanding our product modules to bring that vision to life, [which is to] run the core business for automotive retail dealerships in one single platform. The core process of selling a car, servicing a car and consumer engagement all should be done in one platform, so we are expanding the platform capabilities.

Second is scaling of the team. We have a good problem — we have a great demand from the market, from the industry, so we are rapidly expanding our implementation [teams], account management teams and also solutions teams, which will increase our capability to roll out to more and more dealers on a regular basis.

On its technology:

This is the first truly cloud-native technology platform.

We didn't buy companies to piecemeal it together. We didn't have to connect with 100 different systems. It's all built ground up, thought through, part of one platform. So the whole consumer journey comes together. The flow for dealership operations becomes totally frictionless.

The world has seen what Amazon and Google and Apple as technology companies have been delivering using the power of data, using the power of experience and convenience to the consumers.

So end consumers, if dealers are able to deliver [a] frictionless, most-convenient buying experience and servicing experience and engagement experience, spend is not a problem because all of these companies that I mentioned in the technology world have showed us that it's not about money. Money is a factor, but it's not the No. 1 factor in everyone's mind. So if you deliver the best experience and the best convenience to your customers, they're going to stay loyal.

And you have to keep that transparency so they will buy, they'll keep coming back. The biggest value we will bring to the dealership and automotive retail ecosystem is leveling the playing field — in fact, giving an edge to dealers to compete with all of the latest and greatest e-commerce platforms that are out there.

On rolling out during a pandemic:

We may have slowed down a little bit because everyone in the industry has slowed down. So we had to revise our rollout numbers overall, mainly because we didn't want to pressure dealers who are dealing with the pandemic. We were rolling out continuously.

During the pandemic, we launched a complete zero-contact sales and service.

On the possibility of going public:

A public offering is one of the outcomes for us.

I feel we are here for decades. We have global aspirations, not just in the U.S.