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Tax filing is a tedious task! Be it layman or a CA, it gets time-consuming and cumbersome to a great extent. Then came in a startup in 2011 that made this process simpler for the people. Founded by Archit Gupta, Srivatsan Chari, and Ankit Solanki, ClearTax provides a range of services to clients including tax preparation, e-filing, accounting, and investment planning solutions for individuals and businesses.
Read this article to know more about ClearTax, founders, team, how it was started, startup challenges, competitors, funding, and investors.
ClearTax - Company Highlights
| Startup Name | ClearTax |
|---|---|
| Headquarter | Bengaluru, India |
| Sector | FinTech |
| Founders | Ankit Solanki, Archit Gupta, Srivatsan Chari |
| Founded | 2011 |
| Revenue | INR 60 Crore (FY20) |
| Total Funding | $65.3 Million |
| Parent Organization | Defmacro Software Pvt. Ltd. |
| Website | cleartax.in |
ClearTax - About & How It Works?
ClearTax - Founders & Team
ClearTax - How It All Started?
ClearTax - Startup Launch
ClearTax - Funding & Investors
ClearTax - Growth & Revenue
ClearTax - Startup Challenges
ClearTax - Acquisitions
ClearTax - Competitors
ClearTax - Advisors & Mentors
ClearTax - Latest News | Black App
ClearTax - FAQs
ClearTax - Conclusion
ClearTax - About & How It Works?
ClearTax is Built on top of India’s Massive Digitization of its Tax Systems. They are a Bangalore based Financial-Technology platform providing solutions for Income Tax filing, GST and Mutual Fund Investments.
The startup helps individual consumers, CAs, and businesses to prepare and file their tax returns by easy and effective means. For individual users, the process at ClearTax is super simple and easy to understand. The user simply has to upload the Form 16 pdf to begin tax filing. This software reads all of it and fills out the tax return automatically and instantly. Thus, ClearTax eliminates any human factor intervention in computing and filing of tax returns. The customer gets a fully-prepared tax return in just a matter of seconds.
And that’s not it. There’s more that the company brings to the table. The portal also helps users through complex scenarios like job transition, in this case, the user will receive multiple form 16s so that this software can help you accommodate the changes too. Say, for example, one has forgotten to claim HRA, it takes care of that as well.
On the same grounds, the customer can apply for tax refunds, calculate capital gain/loss if the user has sold stocks or MFs, then Cleartax helps you carry forward losses to multiple years, incorporate companies, and also undertake service tax registrations easily and efficiently.
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ClearTax - Founders & Team
Cleartax is founded by 3 friends Archit Gupta, Srivatsan Chari, and Ankit Solanki.
Archit Gupta
He is the founder and CEO of ClearTax. Before setting up ClearTax, he worked at Data Domain Inc which was acquired by EMC2. He holds a bachelor's degree in computer science from IIT Guwahati and a master’s in computer sciences from the University of Wisconsin Madison. He worked in Silicon Valley for three years and this is when he was exposed to the startup culture in the valley. He is also known to be pursuing a Ph.D.
Srivatsan Chari
He is the Co-founder & Head of Product at ClearTax. He did his bachelor's in Computer Science (Hons) from Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani.
Ankit Solanki
He is the Co-Founder & CTO at ClearTax. He holds a bachelor's degree in Information Technology from the S.I.E.S. Graduate School of Technology.
Ravi Sandepudi
Ravi Sandepudi is ClearTax's 'Entrepreneur-in-Residence'. He is an alumnus of BITS-Pilani and The Wharton School (University of Pennsylvania). Prior to ClearTax, he was associated with PayPal, Google and Simility.
ClearTax - How It All Started?
During his masters and the later years, Archit was living in San Francisco and used to visit home for the summers. During one of his visits, in 2010, he happened to have an informal talk with his father, a Chartered Accountant in Delhi. The conversation was about how doing taxes was a tedious and difficult task for both individual consumers and CAs. And how the available computing software makes tax filing so problematic and complex that led to the genesis of an idea that the whole process is time-consuming and hectic.
Within no time, Archit started fixating on the problem and started thinking to himself that it'd be great if he could figure out a way to create a software for India to help ease the tax filing process. And in the following months, he moved to India to solve this problem.
There were multiple layers of complexity to this problem and it wasn't easy as it seemed from the top. Since he was from the computer field, this tax and finances came out to be a new experience for him and hence it took him a while to get used to the aesthetics. It required for Archit to spend a lot of time with CAs, combined with a lot of learning, understanding, and going deep into the deeper insights about the industry. It was like starting from scratch for Archit. And thus Cleartax was born.
“When I started thinking about ClearTax, I was not thinking what the market would be or how big it would be. All I thought was it was a need that should be solved.” said Archit Gupta, founder and CEO of ClearTax.
ClearTax - Startup Launch
“I had no marketing budget at that time. So all I did was send emails to friends or people I knew to try the product. But within two hours of the website going live, somebody had filed a tax return. That was a crazy moment for us.” said Archit Gupta, owner of ClearTax.
And that’s how he launched ClearTax. From that moment onwards, there was no looking back for Cleartax. In the coming 11 days after the launch, more than 1,000 people came on the site to file their tax returns on the portal. The funder and the core team were on the edge all the time and kept working day and night to keep adding feature after feature at breakneck speeds as and when the consumers would call up and ask for more support features. Some of the examples of added features on consumer demand are rental income or provision for two salaries.
In just the following year of inception, Cleartax had more than 30K-40K users filing their returns on the platform. The figures kept jumping from 100K to 300K, to 1 million, five years down the lane. From San Francisco to Delhi and from a cushy academic career to an entrepreneur, it’s been a heck of a journey for Archit Gupta.
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ClearTax - Funding and Investors
ClearTax has raised a total of $65.3 Million in funding. It’s last funding, Series B, was raised in October 2018 for $50 Million, Composite capital Management being the lead investor.
Here is a list of all the funding rounds of ClearTax:
| Date | Stage | Amount | Investors |
|---|---|---|---|
| August 2014 | Pre Seed Round | - | Sumon Sadhu |
| April 2016 | Angel Round | $1.3 million | Max Levchin, Scott Banister |
| May 2016 | Seed Round | $2 million | Founders Fund, Sequoia Capital |
| June 2016 | Series A | $12 million | SAIF Partners |
| October 2018 | Series B | $50 million | Composite Capital Management |
ClearTax - Growth and Revenue
ClearTax posted a revenue of INR 60 crore in FY20, a 163% surge over the previous year's (FY19) INR 22.8 crore.
- As of 2020, ClearTax has 10% market share in income tax (IT) filing, as claimed by Archit Gupta.
- ClearTax featured in the World's 250 Most Promising Fintech Startups by CB Insights. There are 2,174 fintech startups in India according to a recent MEDICI Global Report.
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ClearTax - Startup Challenges
As mentioned above, Archit had to start from scratch about anything and everything about tax filing and returns which were initial challenges that the founder had to face. Secondly, Archit had to go on to bootstrapping the company because back then, the capital was very difficult to raise. Given that, he also had a very big challenge on hand, that was to build a product software company based out of India with almost no precedents to look up to in the field.
ClearTax - Acquisitions
ClearTax has acquired 3 organizations.
| Acquired | Date |
|---|---|
| Tootl | April 2018 |
| Dose FM | October 2019 |
| Karvy - GST filing Services | March 2020 |
Karvy - GST filing Services provides tax filing services, Dose FM is India's first audio entertainment app, and Tootl is one place to follow and update yourself with all your general and niche interests.
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ClearTax - Competitors
Cleartax has competitors in individual services that it caters to. H&R Block and Webtel are the significant competitors in the tax filing space that ClearTax directly competes with. When it comes to the GST space, the startup directly or indirectly competes with Cygnet, Tally, and Computex. It's mutual fund platform competes with entities like Paytm Money, ETMONEY, Groww, Zerodha amongst others.
By stepping its foot into stock broking and wealth management services via 'Black App', it will face direct competition from Zerodha, Upstox and Paytm Money, Motilal Oswal and ICICI Securities.
ClearTax - Advisors and Mentors
As ClearTax took this journey, they have added mentors and Investors like Max Levchin, founder of Paypal, Vijay Shekhar Sharma of Paytm, Neeraj Arora of Whatsapp, Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund, Sequoia, and Ryan Peterson of Flexport.
ClearTax - Latest News | Black App
Cleartax will step its foot into stock broking and wealth management services, thereby eyeing a share of India’s fast-growing retail investment market.
It is planning to pump around INR 100 crore for development and promotion its new app called 'Black'.
This move will make ClearTax a direct competitor to firms like Zerodha, Upstox and Paytm Money, Motilal Oswal, ICICI Securities etc.
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ClearTax - FAQs
Who is ClearTax Owner?
Cleartax is founded by 3 friends, Archit Gupta, Srivatsan Chari, and Ankit Solanki.
How much is ClearTax Funding?
ClearTax has raised a total of $65.3M in funding over 5 rounds. It’s last funding, Series B, was raised in October 2018 for $50 Million, Composite capital Management being the lead investor.
Who are the competitors of ClearTax?
H&R Block, Webtel, Cygnet, Tally, Computex, Paytm Money, ETMONEY, Groww, Zerodha amongst others.
How much is ClearTax Revenue?
ClearTax posted a revenue of INR 60 crore in FY20, a 163%surge over the previous year's (FY19) INR 22.8 crore.
ClearTax - Conclusion
ClearTax mission is to simplify finances, save money and time for millions of Indian businesses and people. ClearTax is a technology company that builds trusted, useful and insightful platforms for our clients to run their finances and improve their relationship with money. People have put their trust in these companies. ClearTax is the trusted partners for tax experts and businesses across industries such as manufacturing, retail, FMCG, financial services, e-commerce and healthcare. The company is on a mission to simplify financial lives for all Indians.
Author: Rishabh Rathi
Source : https://startuptalky.com/cleartax-success-story/
Date : 2021-04-11T13:30:00.000Z