Tekion
“Can a modern AI-native DMS become the financial operating system for automotive dealerships by embedding payments, payroll, and consumer financing into every workflow?”
HQPleasanton, California, United States
Latest roundPrivate Equity
IndustryVertical SaaS / Automotive Retail
The story
Tekion is an AI-native automotive retail SaaS platform (Automotive Retail Cloud) for dealerships covering DMS, CRM, service, parts, F&I, payments, and payroll. Embedded finance is now a core wedge: Tekion Pay grew from a simple payment link in 2020 to $10B+ in volume by 2025, powered by Stripe. The company is layering BNPL/POS-financing on top via Klarna and Sunbit to capture service-lane revenue, and has launched embedded Tekion Payroll inside ARC.
Product timeline
2020
Tekion Pay launched as a payment link product· payments
2023
Partnership with Sunbit to embed point-of-sale lending in service lane· lending
2025
Tekion Pay surpasses $10B in global payment volume· payments
2026
Klarna partnership embeds BNPL (Pay in Full, Pay in 4, longer-term financing) into Tekion Pay service-lane checkout· lending
The stack
Payments / PSP
Lending
Klarna Pay in FullKlarna Pay in 4Klarna longer-term financingSunbit point-of-sale lending (service now, pay-over-time)
Payroll
Accounting gap: none