ClearTax, India’s leading Income Tax Returns e-filing website, has raised $2 million in a series A round of funding from venture capital firms Sequoia Capital India, and Paypal co-founder Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund Angel, a seed stage venture firm. This is Founders Fund Angel’s first investment in an Indian startup. It’s parent arm, Founders Fund, has invested in firms like data analytics startup Palantir, payments company Stripe and fitness wearable maker Misfit.
Defmacro Software Pvt. Ltd. backed ClearTax has recently raised $1.3 million in angel funding from Silicon Valley-based angel investors, including PayPal co-founder Max Levchin, Whatsapp’s business head Neeraj Arora, and AngelList founder Naval Ravikant, among others.
ClearTax helps Individuals file their Tax returns online via their website – all a user has to do is upload their Form-16 PDF and the ClearTax software prepares the tax return instantly and automatically. The startup processed tax return e-filings for 300,000 individuals in assessment year 2014-15. An estimated 1 million users filed their returns using the site for the assessment year 2015-16. The company was founded in 2011 by Archit Gupta along with his father Raja Ram Gupta, a Chartered Accountant; Srivatsan Chari; and Ankit Solanki. Archit is an IIT Guwahati alumnus who went on to pursue a Masters in Computer Science from the University of Wisconsin- Madison.
The firm, which currently employs 95 people, plans to add about 200 more in the next six months. It claims 1 million users for its product for individuals, and about 10,000 chartered accountant firms. “We hope to grow the user base to about 50 lakh people by 2017. We want to fix people’s poor relationship with their money because of the complexity involved in handling in it, by making the whole process simple,” said Archit Gupta, chief executive officer, ClearTax.
Recently, the company has also launched its 2G optimized mobile app to file taxes even in offline mode.
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