Clear raises $75 Mn in Series C from Kora Capital, Stripe and others

Fintech startup Clear (formerly ClearTax) has raised $75 million in its Series C round led by Kora Capital. Fintech giant Stripe, Alua Capital, Think Investments and existing investors also participated in the round.

This marks Stripe's second investment in India. Stripe had recently acquired Bengaluru-based automated payments reconciliation startup Recko. With this round, Clear has raised a total of $140 million in equity since its inception from the likes of Y Combinator, Composite Capital, Elevation Capital, Sequoia Capital, and Founders Fund.

The newly-raised funds will be used to accelerate Clear’s expansion into the B2B credit and payments space plus expansion into international markets, said Clear in a press release.

It’s worth noting that Clear was reportedly in talks with Tiger Global to raise a $100 million round. While the talks did not materialize for undisclosed reasons, the new investors have led the round at around $700 million valuation. 

Clear offers software to help in tax filing and other services such as invoices, wealth management, and credit for businesses. For small and large businesses, its product suite covers invoicing, GST, range of managed services and credit whereas for tax professionals, it offers GST, Income Tax and TDS solutions.

In July, the company had acquired Y Combinator-backed enterprise payments startup yBANQ in a cash and stock deal to foray into B2B payments.

According to Clear, its SaaS platform has registered a 5x growth in the last 18 months adding more than 3,000 large enterprise customers and saw a surge in usage with over 1 million small businesses on the platform. The company claims to process over 10% of India’s business invoices with a GMV of $400 billion.

Founded in 2011 by Archit Gupta, Srivatsan Chari and Ankit Solanki, the company aims to serve over 10,000 large enterprises and 10 million small businesses over the next couple of years.

For the fiscal year ending on March 31, 2020, Clear had recorded Rs 34.03 crore in its revenue from operation which was 1.7X more than the previous year. During the period, the company’s total expenses soared two-fold to Rs 130.35 crore and it incurred a loss of Rs 94.98 crore in FY20 as compared to 44.29 crore in FY19. Clear is yet to file its annual financial statements for FY21.