Clear, earlier known as ClearTax, raised $75 million in its Series C round led by Kora Capital, Stripe, Think Investments and existing investors as well. The funds, Clear said, will be used for expanding into B2B credit and payments, as well as to expand into international markets. With this round, Clear has raised a total of $140 million, with investors including Y Combinator, Composite Capital, Elevation Capital, Sequoia Capital and Founders Fund.
The company said in a statement that its SaaS platform has grown five times in the last year-and-a-half, with over 3,000 large enterprise customers and a million small businesses.“The Clear platform now processes over 10% of India’s business invoices with a GMV of $400 billion,” the statement said.
Clear, which as ClearTax, started off as a digital tax platform for consumers to file their taxes online, branched out into several products. “Accelerated by a fully digital rollout of Goods and Service Taxes (GST) and mandatory e-invoicing, Clear is India’s dominant SaaS provider in this space,” it said.
It has also ventured into the B2B payments space with an acquisition. The company said in its statement that it aims to serve over 10,000 large enterprises and 10 million small businesses in the next few years.
CFO and co-founder Archit Gupta said, “Kora has strong experience in technology players in emerging markets and Stripe is a global technology company that builds economic infrastructure for the internet - we are excited to learn from both of them”
“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,” he added.