SAIF Partners invests $12 mn in ClearTax

Income tax return e-filing platform ClearTax, run by Defmacro Software Pvt. Ltd, has raised $12 million (over Rs 80 crore) in a Series A round of funding led by Ravi Adusumalli of SAIF Partners. The firm will use the funds to launch new products and hire talent, it said in a statement.

The company will triple its team size to 300 employees by the end of the year. Top talent from India and the Silicon Valley is expected to be hired soon. This is part of the firm's move to strengthen its leadership team.

"Instead of spending the capital raised on advertising, we will be investing in building technology products and in engineering talent from within India and Silicon Valley," said founder and CEO, Archit Gupta.

For its new products, ClearTax will tap into areas such as consumer and business taxes, tax savings and investments. The company expects to extend its services to 25 lakh users by the year-end. It claims that over 10 lakh users e-filed their tax returns through its platform during FY2015-16.

As part of its new product launch, ClearTax will roll out a robotic tax saving platform, which will advise users on the best way to save taxes based on income profile, age and other parameters. "For now, we are starting with tax savings and in the future will diversify into investments," Ankit Chaudhary, who oversees marketing for ClearTax, told Techcircle.in.

Besides providing advisory services, users can also avail of investment instruments such as PPF, mutual funds, fixed deposits, etc.

In April, ClearTax hired former InMobi executive Arvind Shastry to head its business unit. The firm also hired a number of engineers from Flipkart—Prasanth Nair, former director at the e-commerce major, joined the tax e-filing firm as vice president of engineering; Anand Mathur, who was with Flipkart from 2010 to 2016, was appointed as director of engineering; Jai Santhosh and Aakash Bapna too joined the startup from Flipkart as senior engineers.

The latest round of funding comes after the firm raised $2 million in a pre-Series A round from PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel's Founders Fund Angel (FF Angel) and Sequoia Capital.

In April 2016, ClearTax secured angel funding worth $1.3 million (around Rs 8.6 crore) from Silicon Valley investors, including PayPal co-founder Max Levchin.

ClearTax provides e-tax filing services to individual consumers, small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) and chartered accountants (CA). It has also launched a mobile app through which users can file tax returns. It was among the 47 startups selected for Y Combinator's 2014 summer batch and was the fourth Indian startup to be funded by the accelerator.

Like this report? Sign up for our daily newsletter to get our top reports.