Barely a month after receiving $1.3 million in Angel funding from top Silicon Valley Angels like PayPal co-founder Max Levchin, Bengaluru based fintech start-up ClearTax has clinched an investment of Rs 13.5 crore ($2 million) in a pre-Series A funding round. The round drew participation by Sequoia Capital and Founders Fund Angel, each investing $1 million in ClearTax.
Speaking to Business Line, Archit Gupta Founder and CEO, ClearTax, said “Both Sequoia Capital and Founders Fund are the top VCs in the world, who have deep understanding of the fintech space and bring in a lot of global experience in nurturing companies. San Francisco based, Founders Fund invests in science and technology companies solving the world’s most difficult problems and this is their first investment in an Indian firm. We are very excited to announce the successful closure of this funding round.”
In 2014, ClearTax became the first India-focused investment for US-based, Y Combinator with an investment of $120,000.
Gupta said the funding will be used to introduce new products that will simplify financial lives for Indians and to ramp up the team size from 95 at present to 300 over the next six months with the maximum hires focused on the technology team which has 30 engineers at present.
“Taxes is the first step for us - helping millions of Indians e-file and save on taxes. We will do this with three core strengths that we possess as a company - Deep domain expertise in finance, Consumer design and Software. With this funding, we will aggressively invest more in new products which help Indians save more on Taxes.”
e-filing
ClearTax is gearing up to launch a brand new product that is targeted at the mobile-first youth who are first time tax payers and investors in India, in the age group of 21-33 years who fall under the 20 – 30 per cent tax bracket.
Used by over 1 million Indian taxpayers to e-file their tax returns, ClearTax is one of India’s largest players in the space. Taxpayers just have to upload their Form-16 PDF, and their tax return is prepared automatically by ClearTax software, within seconds. With over 3 per cent of the 3.4 crore tax-paying citizens of India already on ClearTax, the new round of investment will bolster the company’s growth and help launch more products. Besides Individual taxpayers, over 10,000 CA firms and thousands of businesses across India use the ClearTax platform for e-filing and TDS returns.
ClearTax was founded in 2011 by Archit Gupta along with his father Raja Ram Gupta, a Chartered Accountant; Srivatsan Chari; and Ankit Solanki.