Fintech start-up Clear (from the makers of Cleartax) invested $15 million to build Max ITC for businesses to maximize their savings with ITC claims. MaxITC is an end-to-end automated solution to manage input tax credit claims efficiently.

MaxITC claims to reduce GST taxes for enterprises using our proprietary AI and Machine Learning platform to manage vendors and Input Tax Credits. It leverages gamification to improve vendor behaviour, rewards prompt filing and penalises delay. It also allows businesses to set payment terms for vendors based on their ITC behaviour.

Talking about the launch, Archit Gupta, founder and CEO - Clear , said, “A lot of companies do not know how they are losing out money due to vendor payments. Profitability is impacted due to vendors not filing ITC, vendors filing quarterly returns, and delayed filing by vendors. But with Max ITC, businesses can put their ITC journey on autopilot leading to 0% impact on business and working capital due to ITC.”

Reasons for inefficiency

In India, enterprises are paying an extra ₹8,000 crore in GST payment every month. As per a survey of 200 enterprises by Clear, big enterprises are losing up to 8 per cent of their working capital. Vendor noncompliance and delay in filing GST by vendors is the biggest reason for this inefficiency.

The lack of an automated system to manage Input tax claims, manual and offline intervention, and coordination across teams made the process prone to errors. 83% of organizations Clear surveyed are trying to block vendor payments manually to save on taxes, but that is far from efficient.

MaxITC’s systems directly pull data from ERP, schedule auto reconciliations, and automatically sync payment decisions for each invoice. Its AI-based configurable PAN-level matching compares 60,000 invoices per minute and undertakes matches across GSTINs and PAN. The AI-based engine recognises errors made by vendors. For example, if a vendor files Maharashtra GSTIN instead of a Karnataka GSTIN, MaxITC calls out these errors. It helps save the money that businesses might not even realise they are losing.

Clear claims to have more than 2,800 enterprises and 5 million consumers. Earlier this year, Clear also launched ClearOne, a billing and e-invoicing software for SMEs.

Clear has raised $65 million in equity capital investment since its inception. The company was incubated in Y Combinator and is funded by Silicon Valley investors, including PayPal co-founders Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund, Max Levchin, and Scott Banister. Clear’s investors include Composite Capital, Sequoia Capital, and SAIF Partners.

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