India fintech start-up Clear raises $75m Series C
Indian financial technology start-up Clear, previously known as ClearTax, has raised a $75 million Series C round featuring Kora Capital, Alua Capital, and Think Investments.
US and Ireland-based payments technology provider Stripe also participated. It follows a $50 million round in 2018 led by Composite Capital, a Hong Kong hedge fund set up by David Ma, a former partner at Hillhouse Capital.
Total equity funding to date comes to $65 million, with previous investors also including Founders Fund, SAIF Partners, Sequoia Capital India, and Y Combinator.
“India is on a massive digitization 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,” Archit Gupta, Clear’s founder and CEO, said in a statement, referencing the goods and services tax regime and the creation of government digital payments infrastructure, also known as the united payments interface.
“We are doubling down on our SaaS [software-as-a-service] platform to help businesses with collateral-free debt and payments. This funding also gives us fuel for our international expansion.”
Clear claims to be India’s largest tax and financial services software platform. It offers a range of tax claim, invoicing, B2B payments, and waybill management services for the spectrum of enterprises, from start-ups to large corporations. Clients include Swiggy, Ikea, Bosch, and Standard Chartered.
The company claims to have grown 5x in the past 18 months, adding more than 3,000 large enterprise customers and one million small businesses to the platform. It is now said to process about 10% of India’s business invoices, with gross merchandise value of $400 billion.
In addition to an international expansion, the fresh capital will support new business lines in B2B credit and payments. The goal is to build up a customer base of more than 10,000 large enterprises and 10 million small businesses over the next couple of years.
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