Clear (from the makers of Cleartax), India’s leading fintech SaaS company, acquired Y-Combinator-backed B2B payments start-up yBANQ in a cash and equity deal. yBANQ helps businesses with payments collection, reconciliation, and automated bookkeeping. With this acquisition, Clear aims to accelerate its journey into B2B payments and credit.
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 solve for use cases across procurement, invoicing, payments, and collections. B2B payments is a critical enabler for the network, which will be accelerated 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.”
yBANQ was founded in 2019 by Abhishek Ayyagari, Ganesh Mallya, and Ahamed Shah Wahidullah, who were previously associated with popular fintech startups like PayPal, Citrus Payments and PayU. yBANQ has a 10 member team across product and engineering who will join Clear post the deal.