Coinbase, Robinhood top leadership invest in tax management platform Clear

Clear founder and CEO Archit Gupta

Tax filing and management platform Clear, formerly known as ClearTax, has received investments from global product and engineering executives on the back of exponential growth witnessed by the company over the past year.

Aparna Chennapragada, Chief Product Officer at US-based financial services company Robinhood, Surojit Chatterjee, Chief Product Officer of US cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase and Balaji Srinivasan, ex-Chief Technology Officer of Coinbase have invested undisclosed amounts in Clear in their personal capacity, the company said.

On the investment, Archit Gupta, founder and CEO of Clear said, “The investment comes as a significant endorsement for Clear and the transformation the company has undergone over the last year to expand into international markets."

This comes just two months after the SaaS (Software as a Service) platform bagged $75 million in a Series C funding round led by Kora Capital, Irish-American payments company Stripe, Alua Capital and Think Investments, among others.

"Their appreciation for what it takes to build a product with a global vision in markets which are dominated by legacy firms comes from their own experience of building fintechs for the world,” Gupta added.

During the funding round in October 2021, Gupta had said that the company's SaaS platform has grown by five times in the past 18 months, attracting investors. He had added that the funds raised will be used to accelerate Clear's expansion into business-to-business (B2B) credit and payments.

Founded in 2011 by IIT Guwahati alumnus Archit Gupta, Clear has raised a total of $140 million in equity capital since its inception. Its other investors include Y Combinator, Composite Capital, Elevation Capital, Sequoia Capital, and Founders Fund.

Last year, Clear expanded its operations in Saudi Arabia with the launch of e-invoicing solutions and has plans to enter other parts of the Middle East and Europe soon. It is also planning on offering compliance products for the international segment.

Coinbase's Chatterjee said, "I am excited to invest in and partner with the Clear team in its journey to expand its offerings globally."

Clear started off as a digital tax platform for consumers. After the fully digital rollout of Goods and Service Taxes (GST) and mandatory e-invoicing, the company also became a SaaS provider in this space. Today, it has over six million individual users, more than 50,000 tax professionals, a million small businesses and 3,300 large enterprises as its clients.

Clear said it wants to build the largest global B2B business network that connects customers with their business partners - vendors, customers, distributors, accountants - on a single platform.