Clear (formerly ClearTax) acquires Y-Combinator-backed B2B payments startup yBANQ

Clear (umbrella entity of Cleartax) is one of India’s leading fintech SaaS companies. It has acquired Y-Combinator-backed B2B payments startup yBANQ in a cash and equity deal. The B2B fintech yBANQ helps businesses with payments collection, reconciliation, and automated bookkeeping. With this acquisition, Clear aims to accelerate its journey into B2B payments and credit.

ClearTax India has last month unveiled ‘Clear’. Under the umbrella name, it will offer services across taxes, invoices, wealth management and credit for businesses. In its decade-long journey, the company has expanded from an e-filing tax platform to being a full-stack financial services provider. With the ‘Clear’ identity, the company said it will continue to offer great products; thus, nurturing its legacy of accuracy, security and reliability, complementing the ClearTax brand. ClearTax will continue its tax offerings (Income Tax and GST).

About yBANQ acquisition

India’s tax digitization wave combined with tighter government norms such as GST, e-invoicing and TDS has consolidated Clear’s dominance in the compliance space. It has now diversified to make software for invoices, payments and credit, for millions of businesses, their supply chains, accountants and employees. In its 10-year-long journey, Clear now sees a material portion of India’s economic graph on its platform; processing 10% of India’s business invoices worth more than $300B.

The company envisions building India’s largest B2B Business Network. It will connect Clear’s customers with their business partners - vendors, customers, distributors, accountants - on a single platform. Through this network, Clear will also solve for use cases across procurement, invoicing, payments, and collections. B2B payments is a critical enabler for the network, thus, Clear aims to accelerate this through the latest yBANQ acquisition.

Speaking at the announcement, Archit Gupta, Clear’s Founder and CEO, said “As a seed-level startup, yBANQ built strong products in the payments space in a very short span. We are confident that it will add considerable momentum to our ongoing efforts in B2B payments and credit space,” said Archit Gupta, CEO, Clear.

Abhishek Ayyagari, Ganesh Mallya, and Ahamed Shah Wahidullah co-founded yBANQ in 2019. They were previously associated with popular fintech startups like PayPal, Citrus Payments and PayU. Currently, the company is a 10 member team across product and engineering. They will all also join Clear post the deal.