Vehicle location data startup chooses Tysons for corporate HQ

Tysons is now home to a technology startup that enables drivers to automatically pay for parking, gas and other vehicle-related expenses.

Citing expectations of rapid growth, Sheeva.AI opened its first corporate headquarters in the office building at 8609 Westwood Center Drive last Tuesday (Feb. 15), the company announced.

The startup also added an office in the Detroit, Michigan, area, drawn by the automobile industry’s major presence in that region.

“The decision to expand our office presence in Northern Virginia and Detroit regions was a logical next step for us,” Sheeva.AI founder and CEO Evgeny Klochikhin said in the press release.

Founded in March 2016, Sheeva.AI has been developing a cloud-based platform to provide real-time location data that can be used for vehicle-related services, from guiding drivers to empty parking spaces to enabling automatic toll, gas and curbside pick-up payments.

The company had been operating remotely, with its leadership team primarily based in Alexandria, but it experienced growth last year that suggested a physical base would be needed to better meet employees and customers’ needs, according to Randy Brown, Sheeva.AI’s director of communications.

“With a majority of our executive leadership already located in northern Virginia, as well as the region’s excellent pool of talent — especially in the technology industry — it made sense for the area to be the home base for our operations,” Brown said by email. “Tysons is the epicenter of the Dulles technology corridor, and that was an important factor for us as we grow our company and advance our vehicle location based solutions.”

There are currently six employees working out of the new headquarters, but the startup anticipates expanding its workforce in both Tysons and the Detroit area throughout this year.

Brown says Sheeva.AI plans to spend 2022 “ramping up our capabilities to scale” and connecting with the vehicle and service industries “to identify the right opportunities to bring our product to market.”

Though it lost out on Amazon’s new headquarters to neighboring Arlington County, Fairfax County has become a popular destination for the technology industry, with about 8,800 companies and roughly one in every four jobs related to that sector, according to the county’s Economic Development Authority.

The EDA reported that the information technology services sector accounted for 29.5% of the new jobs added in the county in 2021.

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