Indian financial services platform clear raised $75 million in investment from the US giant stripe and many other participants in its series C funding round. Clear, formerly known as ClearTax, expands its products line from tax returns filing to investments in mutual funds and wants to be more inclusive for small and medium enterprises (SME).
Stripe disclosed its second investment in an Indian startup just a few days after the news of Stripe acquiring payments reconciliation platform Recko surfaced on the internet. The Series C funding round saw participation from Alua Capital, Stripe, Think Capital, Kora Capital, and a few investors who already have made investments in the Indian startup Clear.
With the newly bagged funds, Clear presumably has an approximate market value of $750 million. ‘We are probably one round (funding round) away from joining the unicorn’s club,’ says the Co-founder and serving CEO of clear Archit Gupta on the pretext of receiving new investments.
The SaaS platform plans to utilise the recent investment amount to boost its expansion strategies for business-to-business (B2B) credit and payments facilities. The ten-year-old startup is also looking forward to foraying its business into the international market, especially in Saudi Arabia and Western Europe.
Archit Gupta said his startup would bring $75 million raised funds into play to enlarge its services and also plans to expand overseas. He further said that clear, which is already operational in the Middle East, aims at extending its financial assistant services in Europe shortly.
According to Archit Gupta, Clear’s SaaS (Software as a Service) platform has seen a 5X growth over 18 months and processes about 10 per cent of invoices of India’s large, medium and small businesses with a General Merchandise Value (GMV) of $400 billion. During the last 18 months, Clear has taken 3 thousand large enterprises onboard, it said. Furthermore, the SaaS platform has more than 5 million taxpayers, 1 lakh tax practitioners and 6 lakh plus small businesses relying on its Artificial Intelligence monitored financial services.
‘We are happy to greet Stripe, Kora and other new investors. Kora holds profound expertise in tech companies in developing markets, and Stripe is an international fintech giant that constructs economic infrastructure for online businesses – we are eager to learn from both of them,’ said Archit Gupta.
Nitin Saigal, founder and Chief Information Officer of Kora, said in an announcement that they are delighted to ally with Clear as they innovate at scale in the Indian SaaS ecosystem, allowing businesses to automate their invoicing and taxation workflows.
The SaaS platform, founded in 2011, has many prominent entrepreneurs and investors backing it, including the Co-founder of Affirm Max Levchin, WhatsApp’s Head of Business Neeraj Arora, the founder of IronPort Scott Banister, and the founder of Paytm Vijay Shekhar Sharma. Additionally, SAIF Partners, the founder of AngelList Naval Ravikant, PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund, Composite Capital and Sequoia Capital have investments in the startup. Clear has bagged $140 million in funding since its establishment in 2011. Clear is one of the first few startups funded by Y Combinator.
