Once more underlining why it is considered to be one of the most exciting FinTech ventures in the country,
ClearTax, India’s leading Income Tax Returns e-filing website, has announced the successful conclusion of its $12 million Series-A investment round. The funding round, was led by Ravi Adusumalli of SAIF Partners, will be chiefly utilised by ClearTax to build and launch new products, hire 100+ engineers and build its executive leadership team.
ClearTax will be leveraging the capital raised to triple its overall team size to 300 employees by the end of the year. Top talent from India and the Silicon Valley is expected to be hired in the coming months as the company looks to scale up its executive leadership as well as strengthen its employee base.
Commenting on the capital raised, Mr Archit Gupta, Founder & CEO ClearTax said, “Our Series-A investment is a strong validation of the ClearTax vision and demonstrates the clear market leadership ClearTax has. Instead of spending the capital raised on advertising, we’ll be investing in building world class technology products, and in top notch engineering talent from within India & Silicon Valley. As a founder, I’m deeply excited the impact fintech will have on India and I’m proud of our team for reaching this milestone.”
Having already established itself as the most dominant player in the tax returns e-filing space, ClearTax will also be looking to tap into greater opportunities in the space of Consumer and Business taxes, Tax savings and Investments. Newer products are expected to be rolled out in the near future as ClearTax looks to consolidate its presence across the country by extending its services to 25 lakh users by the year end. Over 10 Lakh users e-filed their tax returns through ClearTax during the 2015-16 fiscal.
Ravi Adusumalli of SAIF Partners said, “The ClearTax team has demonstrated distinctive growth over last five years to build the largest tax filing platform in India. We are very excited to partner with Archit and team as they translate their market leadership in tax filing space to become one of the largest fin-tech platforms in India. We look forward to working with the Cleartax team in their journey to create a wide range of offerings for retail and SME customers.”
The latest development follows close on heels of recent angel investment into ClearTax by leading Silicon Valley angels such as Max Levchin, Neeraj Arora, Scott Bannister and Cyan Bannister as well as a $2 million pre-Series A round that saw participation from Sequoia Capital, Founders Fund. The Bangalore-based venture has already earmarked machine learning and deep tech as its top priorities in product and technology. ClearTax is also building out its executive leadership team in the areas of Business and Engineering. Recently executives from Flipkart & InMobi have joined ClearTax in the core team.
