Jay Vijayan | Success story of the founder of Tekion Corp

Jay Vijayan is an Indian-American business executive. Jay has been the Chief Information Officer of Tesla Motors from 2012 to 2016. Later, he founded Tekion Corp in 2016, selling software for automotive retail.

Early Life

Jay was born into a Tamil family in Chennai, India; his father is K. Vijayan, and his mother is V. Umadevi. Both his parents are politicians and leaders of the Indian National Congress party in Tamil Nadu.

He earned his bachelor’s degree from the University of Madras (in Chennai) with Geology. He, later on, obtained his master’s degree as well, with the same speciality under it.

Career Of Jay Vijayan

Jay led the development of ERP products at Oracle. In 2007, Vijayan joined VMware and held positions in Applications Development and later Business Applications, Information Technology before retiring from VMware in 2012.

Later, Jay started working at Tesla, Inc. in 2012 as CIO; he was responsible for leading a team of engineers. He developed an enterprise-wide system with more than 400 million lines of code. In July 2014, Vijayan received the Tamil American Pioneer – Lifetime Achievement Award for Excellence in Engineering/Science by the Federation of Tamil Sangams North America for his contributions to engineering science and technology fields.

In 2016, Vijayan left Tesla to find Tekion Corp., a cloud tech company that operated in stealth mode up until late 2019. Later in 2020, they raised $150 million as part of its series C funding led by an equity firm ‘Advent International.’

Jay also serves on HyreCar and NIC Inc. It is a digital government service provider for federal and state governments in the U.S.

More about Tekion

Tekion is a cloud technology company focused on the automotive industry. The company claims to bring together consumers, dealers and OEMs through its cloud-native platform. Tekion connects the entire automotive retail journey through their comprehensive Automotive Retail Cloud.

The company strives to provide new and modern experiences for consumers by using IoT and Machine Learning technologies. In his 4-year stint at Tesla, Jay has been responsible for building the entire Digital and IT systems from the ground up.

He is currently based out of the U.S. with Tekion APAC Headquarters in Bengaluru, India, with a development centre in Chennai, Tamil Nadu. Tekion also plans to use the fresh capital. It recently raised to support additional investment into its platform and scale its capabilities.

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