Taxing, Yet Rewarding

How ClearTax is transforming from an income tax filing platform to a full-stack fintech player

- RAJIV SINGH

It was not a calculated move. And Archit Gupta knew it. But in 2011, what mattered most for the software engineer—a 27-year-old startup employee in the Bay Area in San Francisco—was to back his counter-intuitive instinct. The early-stage firm Gupta worked for was acquired, and the IIT-Guwahati alumnus didn’t want another job; the idea of starting on his own began to brew in his mind. The logical move would have been to set something up in the Bay Area itself, the Mecca of startups. The less predictable move was to go back to India and take fresh guard. A quick chat with his father, a chartered accountant, made Gupta see the elephant in the room: Vexing tax problems for consumers and enterprises. “I knew there was a problem, which meant an opportunity,” he says.

The volley of problems was as diverse as the country to which he was planning to go back to. First, in India, taxpayers accounted for a meagre one percent of the population; this meant a limited market to cater to. Second, most of those filing taxes were doing it with the help of a chartered accountant. This meant there was no technology used in the process, either by the government or by consumers. Fintech, in fact, was an alien word. Third, instilling trust among taxpayers to use an online platform for paying taxes was well-nigh impossible. Fourth, feedback from both colleagues in the Bay Area as well as friends back in India was unanimously dissuading.