Simple Returns

Archit Gupta took the slow and steady route in helping people self-file taxes. In seven years, ClearTax has grownboth in scale and scope.

- Sayan Chakraborty

Ten minutes was what Archit Gupta thought he had. Six minutes was what he got. At the end of that meeting in the summer of 2014, at Y Combinator’s office in Mountain View, California, an otherwise sanguine and stoic Gupta was somewhat baffled.

Because for about an hour before his turn, Gupta had seen half a dozen potential candidates consume their quota of 10 minutes before Paul Graham, Trevor Blackwell and Robert Morris, co-founders of the Silicon Valley startup accelerator. For some, the interview even stretched a little beyond the stipulated time.

Having been ejected out of the chamber in half the time, Gupta was almost convinced that his startup ClearTax—the firm had enabled about 1 lakh income tax returns (ITR) filings the year before—had not made the cut. After all, a stint at Y Combinator, which has been the breeding ground for Airbnb, Dropbox, Stripe, Quora, Instacart, Zenefits, Reddit and Coinbase, would have done a world of good for his fledgling venture.

But dejection gave way to euphoria when Graham called later in the day to say that ClearTax had been shortlisted to become a part of Y Combinator’s batch of 2014. For Gupta, Ankit Solanki and Srivatsan Chari, the other co-founders of ClearTax who had accompanied Gupta to the interview, it was a long night at one of the local Irish pubs.

ClearTax was the first Indian startup to be selected by the accelerator; it was also the first homegrown firm to be backed by AngelList Founder Naval Ravikant, PayPal Co-founder Max Levchin and the Founders Fund, a venture capital fund floated by another PayPal co-founder, Peter Thiel.

“Our product was imagined differently from anything available in India. We made the process extremely simple. When you come to a platform, you should think it is hospitable, that it is treating you well,” says Gupta, 33.