Clear(Tax) has bagged $75 million from world's highest valued fintech startup Stripe and others to fuel its international expansion

• Clear, formerly known as ClearTax, has raised $75 million in a funding round led by Kora Capital.
• The intends to use this fundings to accelerate its expansion into B2B credit and payments space, and expand internationally.
• All this is a part of Clear’s plans to accelerate its growth and become a full stack financial service provider.

Fintech software-as-a-service (SaaS) company Clear, formerly known as ClearTax, has raised $75 million in a funding round led by Kora Capital.

United States-based online payments processing platform Stripe — which was valued at $95 billion — also participated in the round, along with Alua Capital, Think Investments and existing investors of the Indian company. Stripe is the highest valued fintech startup in the world, as per CBI Insights.

Clear was founded by Archit Gupta, Ankit Solanki and Srivatsan Chari in 2011 as ClearTax. It started its journey as a fintech startup that offers solutions for income tax filing online, and has introduced several new products in the last couple of years.

It now has solutions and products for four groups — consumer, small medium business (SMB), enterprises and tax experts such as chartered accountants (CA) or accountants.

The Bengaluru-based startup claims to have over 6 million Indians registered on its platform, along with 50,000 tax professionals, 1 million small businesses and 3,000 large enterprises.

Clear intends to use this fundings to accelerate its expansion into business-to-business (B2B) credit and payments space. In a previous conversation with Business Insider, co-founder Srivatsan Chari highlighted that Clear had acquired Y Combinator-backed business-to-business (B2B) payments startup yBANQ to enter the B2B payments and credit market.

The company will also look to expand into international markets.

All this is a part of Clear’s plans to accelerate its growth and become a full stack financial service provider. For this, the company would be focusing on two strategies — hiring and acquisitions, Chari had highlighted.

He noted that Clear is currently building several products — particularly for small and medium enterprises (SME) domain and enterprises — in-house. However, they will be acquiring more businesses to enter more niches and segments.

“There are capabilities or certain industries, like payments, where you want a lot of experience or technologies. So that's basically where acquisitions come in, so it is going to be a multi-pronged strategy. We are going to build and we will be acquiring also to just leapfrog our growth,” Chari told Business Insider in July 2021.

“India is on a massive digitisation journey and we are fortunate to be in the perfect storm of electronic invoicing, GST, UPI, cheap mobile internet and rapid adoption of technology due to Covid-19. We are doubling down on our SaaS platform to help businesses with collateral free debt and payments. This funding also gives us fuel for our international expansion,” Archit Gupta, Clear’s founder and chief executive (CEO), added in the latest press note.

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