Clear acquires Xpedize, doubles down on supply chain financing

Bengaluru: Online taxation and fintech software provider Clear, formerly ClearTax, on Wednesday announced it has acquired supply chain financing technology firm Xpedize.

The size of the deal is Rs 100 crore, people aware of the development told ET.

This is Clear’s second acquisition after it bought B2B payments platform Ybanq last July. With this, Clear is looking to double down on the collateral lending opportunity and touch $1 billion in overall loan disbursement value by the end of FY’23.

As a part of the deal, Clear will give an exit to Xpedize investors including HDFC Capital and YourNest Venture Capital.

It will absorb Xpedize’s 27 employees and rebrand the product to Clear Invoice Discounting, the company said.

Clear’s focus on invoice discounting comes as it eyes an international expansion. It raised $75 million from US-based payments giant Stripe and others last October. It has also set a target of $3 billion in merchant-loans disbursals by FY24, ET reported on February 28.

“We are one of the largest invoicing platforms in India, and invoice discounting is one of the cross-sell opportunities that we started building out. Hence, acquiring Xpedize made a lot of sense,” Archit Gupta, founder and chief executive of Clear, told ET.

Gupta said the plan is to focus on providing financing to dealers and distributors of Clear’s 3,000 large enterprise customers. It will then focus on providing financing solutions to the 1.1 million small and medium businesses that use its platform for invoicing and other GST-related solutions.

Xpedize has a base of over 10,000 small and medium enterprises (SMEs) to which it provides loans against invoices.

The company is in talks to onboard close to 10 banks and financial institutions to provide financing solutions to its users. It also plans to add new business lending offerings including dealer financing and direct lending to small and medium businesses. Clear is also looking to scale its invoice discounting solution to 40,000 enterprises and merchants in the coming fiscal.