ClearTax has announced that it has raised $12 million in its Series A round of funding from SAIF Partners. This announcement comes just weeks after the company raised around $2 million in pre-Series A round.
So far, this is one of the largest Series A funding round announced this year. As a part of the deal, Ravi Adusumalli, managing partner at SAIF, will join board of ClearTax’s Delaware, USA-based entity ‘Software is Correct’.
With the current round of investment, the total amount of money raised by the company in the last two months has now reached $15 million.
The Bengaluru-based startup plans to use the money towards building new products and to further strengthen its engineering team. It also plans to hire about 150 engineers to build a strong tech presence.
It also plans to launch a slew of consumer-focused tax-saving products, including mutual funds and other equity-linked saving schemes. It will reportedly include two more B2C products and three more B2B products for businesses.
The company is also working on machine learning and deep learning technologies to add better predictability and decision making capabilities to their line of products.
Archit Gupta, founder and CEO of ClearTax, says,
The funds will bolster, accelerate, and seal our plans for the future. It will help us take long term decisions while going back to our fundamental focus. Also, it felt right to raise funds from SAIF at this point of time. We are not a gross negative margin business, but it is always good to have capital securing you the extra mile. This eliminates the fear of running out of funds, and focus solely on building the business.
Commenting about this funding, Ravi Adusumalli, Managing Partner, SAIF partners, said,
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 the tax filing space to become one of the largest fin-tech platforms in India.
Archit Gupta formed the company in 2011, along with his CA father Raja Ram Gupta, Srivatsan Chari and Ankit Solanki. ClearTax helps individuals file their income-tax returns online in less than 10 minutes. It is the only India-focused startup backed by Y-Combinator.
The company claims to have over 1 million consumers e-filing their tax returns via their platform. It is targeting to bring more than five million customers, 75,000 CA firms and one lakh businesses on-board by the end of the current fiscal year.
Prior to this funding round, the company had raised $2 million in pre-Series A round from Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund. That funding round marked Founders Fund’s first investment in Indian startup. It raised $1.3 million in its seed round from various angel investors, including Andreessen Horowitz.
