Clear acquires Y-Combinator-backed yBANQ, eyes B2B payments

Clear (formerly ClearTax) has acquired Y-Combinator-backed B2B payments startup 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.

In the last week of June, the fintech company announced that it is rebranding itself from ClearTax to Clear to expand into areas such as invoices, wealth management, and credit from tax-related services only.

The company now envisions building India’s largest B2B business network. It will connect Clear’s customers with their business partners — vendors, customers, distributors, and 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.

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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.

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.”

Announcing the acquisition, Clear, in a statement, said that India’s tax digitisation 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 making 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 percent of India’s business invoices worth more than $300 billion," the statement read.