As part of a significant reorganisation, ClearTax has laid off 25% of its workforce, with new hires being among the most affected. Two months after being employed in June, the software developers were let go on August 1st, according to multiple “OpenToWork” and “LaidOff” profiles on LinkedIn.
IIT Graduates Laid Off Within 60 Days
Anoop Singh, a 2025 graduate of IIT Guwahati and one of the laid-off workers, posted something on LinkedIn that he “never thought he would have to.” Singh, a software engineer who started working for the company in June of this year, said that it felt “profoundly unfair”, in part because he was not given a “real chance to prove his long-term value”.
ClearTax’s Official Response to Layoffs
A ClearTax representative responded by stating that the company recently implemented a more extensive strategic organisational restructure that affected approximately 16% of its personnel, including a few early-career individuals.
This was a difficult choice, and ClearTax sincerely appreciates the contributions of all those impacted. Through outreach to industry partners, the corporation also announced that it had extended improved severance payouts, maintained health insurance, and actively provided outplacement support.
The layoffs are described in Clear’s statement as a strategic decision to “reshape teams to enhance agility and future-readiness”, but LinkedIn profiles from impacted employees show sudden departures, some within 60 days of joining the company.
ClearTax’s Growth and Expansion
Originally founded as ClearTax, the company changed its name to Clear in 2021 to better represent its expanded product line, which now includes corporate analytics, financial automation, and compliance solutions.
Serving CFOs and finance teams, Clear has established itself as a growth-stage fintech company with operations in India, the United Arab Emirates, Singapore, France, Belgium, and other international countries.
Concerns About Early-Career Hiring Practices
The layoffs raise concerns about internal recalibrations notwithstanding recent expansion. The scope and suddenness of the layoffs, particularly of campus hires, have sparked conversations about hiring accountability and transparency in the tech industry, even if Clear’s letter to People Matters emphasised that the company is still “financially strong”.
IT Graduates Living with a Nightmare
A wider issue in India’s IT employment market is brought to light by the incident as well: the risk early-career professionals confront in the face of shifting corporate goals.
A lot of the impacted IIT grads are currently looking for new jobs, but many are wary because of the experience. Concerns have been voiced by some in the academic and human resources communities regarding how businesses handle the welfare and expectations of new hires, especially those who are hired through stringent campus placement procedures.
The obligation to engage empathetically and communicate clearly remains crucial when businesses reorganise to accommodate future demands, particularly when young professionals’ careers and confidence are at stake.
Company Profile is an initiative by StartupTalky to publish verified information on different startups and organizations. The content in this post has been approved by ClearTax.
Tax filing is a tedious task! Be it a layman or a CA, it’s time-consuming and cumbersome to a great extent. Then came a startup in 2011 that made this process simpler for the people. Founded by Archit Gupta, Srivatsan Chari, and Ankit Solanki in 2011. ClearTax services range from tax preparation, e-filing, accounting, to investment planning solutions for individuals and businesses.
ClearTax has been rechristened to Clear on June 28, 2021. The brand has decided on the name ‘Clear’ to represent the whole gamut of services that it offers, which has now expanded to embrace invoices, wealth management, and credit.
Read this article to know more about ClearTax company, ClearTax founders, team, ClearTax journey, startup challenges, ClearTax competitors, ClearTax company details, ClearTax funding, and its investors.
ClearTax is built on the massive digitization process of the tax systems in India that the country is adopting. It is a Bangalore-based Financial Technology platform that provides solutions for income tax filing, GST, and mutual fund investments. ClearTax, with its tax and investment platform, aims to simplify the financial lives of the Indians. The Clear interface is designed in a way that the customers can easily find the services they want through an easy Cleartax login and a seamless operation.
The ClearTax journey started out by helping individual consumers, CAs, and businesses to prepare and file their tax returns by easy and effective means. For individual users, the process at ClearTax India is super simple and easy to understand. The user simply has to upload the Form 16 pdf to begin tax filing. This software reads all of it and fills out the tax returns instantly via an automatic process. Thus, ClearTax company eliminates any human factor intervention in computing and filing tax returns.
The customer gets fully prepared tax returns in just a matter of seconds. That’s not all of it about ClearTax. There’s more than the company brings to the table.
The portal also helps users in complex scenarios like job transitions. In such cases, the users receive multiple form 16 so that the Clear software can help them accommodate the changes too. Say, for example, if one has forgotten to claim HRA, then it will take care of that as well.
On the same grounds, the customer can apply for tax refunds, and calculate capital gain/loss if the user has sold stocks or MFs. Cleartax services help them carry forward losses to multiple years, incorporate companies, and also undertake service tax registrations easily, and efficiently.
NIL GST Return Filling
ClearTax has launched the all-new NIL GST Return Filling feature in December 2019. This will help the users including CAs and businesses file their NIL GST Returns without any hassles. Around 20 lakh MSMEs and other small businesses file GSTs each month, here a simple filling process in place would certainly make things really easy for them.
To start filling their NIL GST Return, all that the user has to do is download ClearTax GST Desktop App. After it is installed, ClearTax GST Desktop App will help them file GSTR-1 and GSTR-3B seamlessly and in simple and easy steps. Thus, a taxpayer can avoid all unnecessary interactions with any other portal because they will get everything available on the ClearTax GST software including the submission of returns. Thus, the users can file GSTR-1 with minimal manual effort and directly on ClearTax, which will be supported by both Digital Signature Certificate (DSC) and Electronic Verification Code (EVC). It automates the entire process, making it 3X faster, thereby saving ample time. The ‘Nil return filing’ feature that ClearTax announced back in 2019, comes with important validations and a cautionary window too, which allows the users to reconsider their filing of GST returns with no data. This will stop users from erroneously submitting a Nil return that otherwise was not one.
Cleartax, after being rebranded to Clear, has also included:
Cleartax GST – An all-in-one GST toolkit that is designed to simplify the GST filing.
ClearE-invoicing – A trustworthy e-invoicing solution that enables the users in bulk invoicing.
ClearServices – An expert consultation service to help the users identify their problems and attain their solutions.
Some of the main products of Clear include:
Enterprise Products – Cleartax GST, E-invoicing, Max-ITC, E-way bill and more.
ITR Filing – Cleartax tax filing feature allows the customers to file ITR within 3 minutes or helps them to file their ITR by Clear experts.
ClearOne – Via ClearOne, Clear offers invoicing and payment solutions for businesses.
Cleartax has announced that it will partner with crypto exchanges to help users manage their crypto portfolio effortlessly. As soon as the government announced a 30% tax rate and a 1% deduction at source for gains and transfers via virtual currency, ClearTax rushed to declare that it will aid the users in managing their current cryptocurrency portfolio and taxes. Founder and CEO of Clear, Archit Gupta mentioned that this particular offering was in the works for some time now and this makes ClearTax the first platform in India that offers this solution.
Clear Products and Services
ClearTax – Founders & Team
ClearTax founders are Archit Gupta, Srivatsan Chari, and Ankit Solanki who were friends before starting the company.
Ankit, Archit, and Srivatsan | Founder, Cleartax
Archit Gupta
Archit Gupta is the founder and the current Clear CEO. Before setting up ClearTax, he worked at Data Domain Inc., which was acquired by EMC2. The ClearTax owner holds a bachelor’s degree in Computer Science from IIT Guwahati and a Master’s in Computer Science from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. This ClearTax founder worked in Silicon Valley for three years, and this is when he was exposed to the startup culture in the valley. He was pursuing a Ph.D. degree when he decided to drop the program and eventually founded Clear.
Srivatsan Chari
He is the Co-founder of ClearTax. This ClearTax founder did his Bachelor’s in Computer Science (Hons) from Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani.
Ankit Solanki
He is the Co-Founder of ClearTax. ClearTax founder holds a bachelor’s degree in Information Technology from the S.I.E.S. Graduate School of Technology.
Ravi Sandepudi
Ravi Sandepudi is ClearTax’s ‘Entrepreneur-in-Residence’. He is an alumnus of BITS-Pilani and The Wharton School (University of Pennsylvania). Prior to being appointed as Clear’s entrepreneur-in-residence, he was associated with PayPal, Google, and Simility.
Clear has an employee strength of somewhere between 1001-5000 employees, as per their Linkedin profile.
During his master’s and later years, Archit was living in San Francisco and used to visit home during the summers. The Cleartax journey started during one of his visits, in 2010, when he happened to have an informal talk with his father, a Chartered Accountant in Delhi. The conversation was about how doing taxes was a tedious and difficult task for both the individual consumers and CAs. Furthermore, they also discussed how the available computing software makes tax filing so problematic and complex leading to the genesis of the idea that the whole process is time-consuming and hectic.
Within no time, Archit started fixating on the problem and started thinking to himself that it’d be great if he could figure out a way to create software for India to help ease the tax filing process. And in the following months, he moved to India to solve this problem.
There were multiple layers of complexity to this problem and it wasn’t easy as it seemed from the top. Since he was from a computer science background, tax and finances seemed to be something new to deal with, and hence, it took him a while to get used to the rules of the game. It required Archit to spend a lot of time with the CAs, put together a lot of learning, understanding, and get deeper insights into the industry. It was like starting from scratch for Archit, but ultimately Clear was born.
“When I started thinking about ClearTax, I was not thinking what the market would be or how big it would be. All I thought was it was a need that should be solved.” said Archit Gupta, owner of ClearTax.
ClearTax – Startup Launch
“I had no marketing budget at that time. So all I did was send emails to friends or people I knew to try the product. But within two hours of the website going live, somebody had filed a tax return. That was a crazy moment for us.” said Archit Gupta, ClearTax CEO.
And that’s how he launched the ClearTax company. From that moment onwards, there was no looking back for Cleartax. In the coming 11 days after the launch of ClearTax services, more than 1,000 people came to the site to file their tax returns on the portal. The founder and the core team were on the edge all the time and kept working day and night to keep adding feature after feature at breakneck speeds as and when the consumers would call up and ask for more support features. Some of the examples of added features on consumer demand are rental income or provision for two salaries.
In the year following the inception of the company, Cleartax had witnessed more than 30K-40K users filing their returns on the platform. The figures kept jumping from 100K to 300K, to 1 million, five years down the lane. From San Francisco to Delhi and from a cushy academic career to an entrepreneur, it’s been quite a journey for Archit Gupta.
Clear goes by the tagline “Save money. Save time,” which rightly represents its motto because it aims to simplify finances, save money and time for millions of Indian businesses and people. The ClearTax logo was a smiling robot along with ClearTax written in Black colour before it was rebranded to ‘Clear’.
The current logo of the brand simply has the word clear, followed by “from makers of ClearTax”, to hint at the previous name of Clear, which the company is famous as!
Clear Logo
ClearTax – Business and Revenue Model
ClearTax operates on the B2C, B2B, and B2G models. The company is known to charge its customers for filing. The ClearTax Revenue model is self-e-filing-based, while it operates on a freemium model. ClearTax has a Chartered Accountant-assisted service for filing individual tax returns. The company has a concierge-like service for NRI tax returns through which ClearTax’s revenue comes from.
Its services and the Cleartax Business model are designed especially for freelancers and small businesses. The clear Business model helps these freelancers and businesses plan their expenses and claim them systematically, and this way, the company helps them save much more on their taxes than it charges.
The Clear income tax returns (ITR) filing feature, which was free of cost, has now been declared as chargeable, after 10 years of being a free service. This feature would now charge a nominal fee from the users, effective from May 2022. Such a facility would also be included now among the revenue drivers of Clear from the next fiscal year onwards.
Clear has successfully raised around $140.3 million in funding over 7 rounds. Clear raised its Venture Round on January 13, 2022, where it raised an undisclosed amount. The previous funding round that Clear raised was via a Series C round, which was raised on October 25, 2021, where the company raised around $75 million from its lead investors like Kora Capital, Stripe, Alua Capital, and others.
The new funding that Cleartax has received will be used to fuel the company’s expansion into the B2B credit and payments space and into the international markets, as per the company’s statement in a recent press release.
Founders Fund, Elevation Capital, Sequoia Capital, SAIF Partners, Composite Capital Management, Tiger Global, and Stripe are some of the lead investors of Clear.
Here is a list of all the funding rounds of ClearTax:
Date
Stage
Amount
Investors
January 13, 2022
Venture Round
–
–
October 25, 2021
Series C
$75 mn
Kora Capital, Stripe and others
October 23, 2018
Series B
$50 mn
Composite Capital Management
June 17, 2016
Series A
$12 mn
SAIF Partners
May 25, 2016
Seed Round
$2 mn
Founders Fund, Sequoia Capital
April 26, 2016
Angel Round
$1.3 mn
Max Levchin, Scott Banister
August 19, 2014
Pre Seed Round
–
Sumon Sadhu
ClearTax – Growth and Revenue
ClearTax revenue was recorded at Rs 60 crore in FY20, a 163% surge over the previous year’s (FY19) Rs 22.8 crore.
Here are some of the key growth highlights of the Clear:
The company claims to process around $300 billion worth of B2B invoices annually
Clear claims to save more than Rs 1000 crore for the Indian businesses each year
Clear boasts of a 50 million+ e-invoices run rate
The company has saved over 1.8 million man-hours to date
ClearTax is featured in the World’s 250 Most Promising Fintech Startups by CB Insights. There are 2,174 fintech startups in India according to a recent MEDICI Global Report
As mentioned above, Archit had to start from scratch about anything and everything about tax filing and returns which were the initial challenges that the founder had to face. Secondly, Archit had to opt for bootstrapping because back then, the capital was very difficult to raise. Given that, he also had a very big challenge on hand, which was to build a product software company based out of India with almost no precedents to look up to in the field.
ClearTax – Acquisitions
ClearTax has acquired 6 organizations to date. Clear acquired CimplyFive in an all-cash deal for an undisclosed amount on July 5, 2022. CimplyFive, which is a cloud-hosted application that helps automate company laws and SEBI Listing Obligations and Disclosure Requirements (LODR) compliance, will help Clear with compliance risk management software that will help the enterprise customers of Clear eliminate numerous procedural non-compliance that occurs. After the acquisition, as per the deal, the CimplyFive team and founder will function as an independent platform.
Xpedize was the previous company that (ClearTax) Clear acquired on March 16, 2022, for an undisclosed amount. Before that, Clear acquired yBANQ on July 7, 2021, in a cash and stock deal with which it forayed into the B2B payments space. Here’s a look at the Clear acquisitions:
Cleartax has competitors in individual services that it caters to. H&R Block and Webtel are the significant competitors in the tax filing space that ClearTax directly competes with. When it comes to the GST space, the startup directly or indirectly competes with Cygnet, Tally, and Computex. Its mutual fund platform competes with entities like:
By stepping its foot into stockbroking and wealth management services via ‘Black App’, ClearTax has further expanded its list of competitors in India to include:
As ClearTax assumed this journey, they have kept on adding mentors and Investors like Max Levchin, founder of Paypal, Vijay Shekhar Sharma of Paytm, Neeraj Arora of Whatsapp, Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund, Sequoia, and Ryan Peterson of Flexport.
Tax filing is a tedious tax for most of the people with its multiple tabs and tax consequences. A tiny mistake or late filing can have a negative impact on your pockets as well. To make Income Tax filing easier, there are a lot of online software available. It not only makes the process of filing easier but also keeps track of your records and may even point out any mismatches in the data entered.
With these software, the process of ITR filing has become a way easier task. Tax filing software and Tax Preparation companies takes care of all the compliance issues that can arise and can be even used for live tax calculation which significantly reduces the time required for filing Income Tax. This article introduces a few online software and websites that will help you to file your ITR hassle-free.
Through its special features and appreciable security, H&R Block is a very popular choice among Indian tax payers. It provide consultations for your returns if necessary. If your entries are really complicated, you can make use of this service. Above all that, this software ensures that the data entered are extremely secure. H&R Block also helps in filing the returns in a short span of time. If you are looking for hassle free tax filing and post taxation support, this is your way to go.
myITreturn is a government authorized e-return intermediary that is registered with the Income-tax department of India. This subsidiary of Skorydov Systems Private Limited was launched in 2006. One of the distinguishing features is its inclusivity. It helps people to file Income Tax Returns in 9 different languages (English, Hindi, Gujarati, Marathi, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam, Bengali and Punjabi).
This product of Vittena has gained its popularity amongst its target audience in a very short span of time. It is because VitteTax is India’s first interactive tax planning tool. It helps you to plan your taxes depending on your expenses or incomes. It is customized. This app serves the best for pensioners, self-employed people, NRIs, people seeking foreign employment, Salaried people etc.
This most trusted and largest tax filing website offers online preparation and filing of ITRs of individuals. However, there is no free service available from them. Their charges start from Rs.499. However, SBI customers have an advantage as they can get a 50% off on the charges. Like any other paid websites, they have different plans depending on the requirements of the individual like Plus, Assisted and Optimizer. And there are three categories of filing like Salary e-file, Investor e-file and Business e-file. If you are looking for a reliability guaranteed source, this is the best option due to its reputation and popularity.
ClearTax
ClearTax – Manage and File taxes online
If your requirements are more than just managing and filing your taxes, then ClearTax is a good option. And if your additional requirement is to manage your business compliances, then you need not think twice before using this software. Their service helps you save taxes using various investment strategies. The color on ClearTax further increases with the fact that they offer solutions for GST as well. Their services are so efficient that they automatically adjust the taxes paid in advance and also select the relevant ITR forms.
EzTax
Eztax – Online Income tax filing
This online tool makes income tax filing easy by helping people plan, prepare and save taxes. It is extended to both individuals and businesses. If you upload the photo of your form-16, it automatically reads from it. They have a tax optimizer that further improves your potential investment returns. Along with that, you are saved on your income tax by Eztax’s optimization of capital gains, salaries, property etc.
Taxsmile.com
Taxsmile – File ITR returns online
Taxsmile is yet another online platform where you can file your Income Tax returns. They have various options available depending on your requirements. The process of tax filing is free if you can do it by yourself. On the other hand, if you need the assistance of the software, pay Rs.500, upload your form 16 and Taxsmile will do the rest of the job. It is not only for people settled in India, but also for NRIs and corporates.
It is the ultimate destination for all your tax filing related concerns- fully automated. It also provides accounting solutions for individuals and businesses. It has connected itself with GST, TDS, ITR filing systems so as to simplify the process and enable the person to manage everything from one place. Additionally, they also facilitate importing of all important data from excel to tally. TaxRaahi is fully equipped with its inbuilt HSN (Harmonized System of Nomenclature) codefinder, user-friendly interface and tools that can compute TDS.
All India ITR
All India ITR – Income tax Filing Software
All India ITR is an e-intermediary that is certified by the Indian government. It is an app which is available on both Android and iOS. All India ITR offers 100% paperless and smooth processes. All you have to do is to upload the images or PDFs of form-16 and the app will auto read the document. Along with that, it fills the forms automatically and makes income tax filing hassle free.
ITR Filing Online Software – Conclusion
It has to be accepted that the software that is mentioned above has significantly reduced the struggle of filing Income Tax. The technological advancement and innovations have created a sense of security and reliability surrounding these online tax filing and preparation services. However, to be on the safer side, it is important to understand the nature and reviews of the software you are using. It is widely advised to use paid services rather than free services due to security concerns. Other factors you should consider before finalizing a software are –
Ease of usage
Extent of payment integration
Quality of customer support
License cost
Security features and Reviews.
These software has done their part in making tax filing easier. Now it’s our turn to show our responsibility by filing income tax correctly and on time.
