ClearTax, an income tax returns e-filing website, has raised $12 million (about Rs 80 crore) in Series-A investment round. The funding round, was led by Ravi Adusumalli of SAIF Partners who will also be joining the company’s board.
In a conversation with MediaNama, Archit Gupta, Founder & CEO of ClearTax said that the funding will be used for three aspects. The company is looking to build up the tech team and scale up the engineering team. He also said that the company will be hiring in senior leadership roles. Cleartax will also be bringing new products to market in the tax saving and investment side.
Software for GST: In terms of product expansion, Gupta said that since the Goods and Services Tax (GST) is coming out, as a tax company, it would like to focus and dominate the GST segment. The company will soon be launching a software which will help in filing the GST.
He also stated that the company will be focusing on tax saving and investment and will soon be launching more products for that segment. “We are also focusing on business tax returns like Income tax returns and TDS, with self-service and assisted models of our products,” he added.
Expansion of team: The company stated that it will raise the overall team size to 300 employees by the end of the year. ClearTax is also building up its executive leadership team in the areas of Business and Engineering, and has recently hired executives from Flipkart and InMobi for its core team, the company said in a statement. The company claims to have over 10,000 CA firms and thousands of businesses across India, which use the ClearTax platform for Tax & TDS returns. It plans to expand to 75,000 CA firms by the end of FY 2017-18.
The Bangalore-based company was launched in 2011 and with this round of funding, Cleartax has raised over $ 15 million in the past three months. The comapny’s products include ClearTax, which helps in e-filing income tax returns to consumers; ClearTDS, a cloud-based platform for organisations to file TDS returns and generate Form 16 for employees; and TaxCloud, which helps chartered accountant firms in filing tax returns and TDS returns for their clients.
ClearTax plans to expand its consumer user base to 30 lakh by the end of this year and 50 lakh by the end of the fiscal year 2017-18. Over 10 Lakh users have e-filed their tax returns through ClearTax during the fiscal year 2015-16. It also plans to expand its business user base to over one lakh by the end of FY 2017-18.
Past Funding
Last month, the company had 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.
In April it had raised $1.3 million in funding from PayPal co-founder Max Levchin, Scott & Cyan Banister, WhatsApp’s Business Head Neeraj Arora, AngelList Founder & CEO Naval Ravikant and Dropbox VP Ruchi Sanghvi among others.
Image credit: Flickr user Phillip Ingham under CCBY 2.0
