The five year-old company will use the proceeds from the round to launch a slew of consumer-focused tax-saving products, including mutual funds and other equity-linked saving schemes. It will also be adding to its leadership team, said Archit Gupta, Chief Executive of ClearTax.
“We have taken the long route, and now we are extremely excited to have some of the biggest thought leaders and investors on board as our partners,” Gupta said. “We are an instrument-agnostic platform that will allow consumers to choose their rate of return and select what to have in their tax savings basket.”
The transaction, which closed last week, marks FF Angel’s first India investment, and comes a month after Bengaluru-based Defmacro secured $1.3 million in a seed funding round from a group of Silicon Valley investors including PayPal cofounder Max Levchin and Scott Banister, an early investor in Facebook and Uber.
According to Gupta, ClearTax has over 1 million consumers e-filing their tax returns, and the company is targeting bringing on board 5 million users by the end of the current fiscal, and recording transactions worth $1 billion over the same period.
The startup provides a full stack of services, including helping with filing of tax returns, incorporating companies and undertaking service tax registrations, for a fee. The company was also among the first domestic startups to participate in the prestigious Valley-based startup accelerator Y Combinator’s programme in 2014.
ClearTax also counts One97 Communications, the parent company of mobile digital payments and ecommerce platform Paytm, as an early investor, with the latter having reportedly invested about $50,000 last year.
FF Angel has been an early backer in a number of well-known ventures, including tech-focused web publication PandoDaily and Wi-Fi & Bluetooth-enabled home device maker Nucleus, among others.
Founded by Peter Thiel, Ken Howery and Luke Nosek in 2005, Founders Fund is known for having taken some of the boldest bets in ventures that are now regarded as Unicorns, a list that includes, Palantir, SpaceX, Airbnb, Spotify and Lyft.
The three founders, along with Tesla’s Elon Musk, LinkedIn’s Reid Hoffman and Yammer’s David Sacks, are considered to be leading members of the infamous “PayPal Mafia”, members of which have gone on to found and develop some of the leading technology companies in the world.
Source: The Economic Times