‘Millennials make 60% of our user-base’: ClearTax Founder-CEO Archit Gupta

Tax filing platform ClearTax recently raised $2 million in a pre-series A round from the angel arm of Silicon Valley-based Founders Fund and Sequoia Capital.

The platform currently helps people with tax and TDS filing. It currently has a base of over 10,000 chartered accountants while being used by one million tax payers. The startup has some serious targets in terms of tax filing this year.

Business Insider spoke to Archit Gupta, Founder and CEO of ClearTax about his future plans and what got Paypal co-founder Max Levchin interested in ClearTax.

How do you plan to invest the money?
Two or three areas – growing on product front, engineering and marketing. We’re also investing in a new offering – a tax-saving product, ClearSave. Our user-base shows it’s a major pain-point.

What got Paypal co-founder Max Levchin interested in ClearTax?
We are currently the market leader in India (competition includes Makeyourtax and Taxmantra), a lean team hungry for execution, and a clear tech background. I guess we also connected as founders.

How do you plan to tap into the 20-something market?
If you look at the millennial audience, that’s 60% of our user-base. They prefer coming online to dealing with a neighborhood agent.

Targets for the current fiscal.
We have a million users from a tax filing perspective. We plan to help around 3-4 lakh users save taxes by the end of the fiscal. As we build out more platforms, more users will come online. We do have CAs onboard if the user wants a paid service.

Your commission is a slim 0.7-0.9%. How do you plan to make any money?
Ours is a product-driven approach and not a tele-calling service. We anticipate customers would opt for a subscription on the Cleartax platform. This will then help them with tax saving, tax filing and other services. In the absence of that, the more volume we get, the more efficient we become.