Crypto Tax Reporting Startup Binocs Raises Funds To Simplify Accounting For Investors

Crypto taxation and Web3 portfolio tracking platform Binocs has raised $4 Mn in its seed round led by BEENEXT, along with Arkam Ventures, Accel, Saison Capital, Premji Invest, Blume Ventures, and Better Capital.

The startup plans to utilise the funds to expand its product, engineering, growth, and marketing teams. It is also expanding its operations in the US, UK, South Africa, and Australia and is targeting institutional investors.

Founded in July 2022 by Tonmoy Shingal and Pankaj Garg, Binocs aims to simplify tax and compliance for Indian retail crypto investors. The startup enables crypto investors to simplify their accounting and aggregates various Web3-based investments such as NFTs, DeFi Protocols, and Smart Contracts.

“At a time when the various regulations around crypto tax are causing apprehension amongst crypto investors, we at Binocs are on a mission to leverage our state-of-the-art technology platform to ease the crypto taxation journey for investors,” Tonmoy Shingal, cofounder, Binocs, said.

Despite crypto being a Web3 currency, it has to comply with a Web2 world of accounting principles and compliance, Singhal said. Hence, Bincos is working to bridge this gap, he added.

Binocs caters to a diverse array of transactions right from Buy or Sell trades to taking, P2P transactions, Airdrops, transactions across wallets, among others.

The startup has recently launched features to track complex trades including Derivatives, Lending and Borrowing across CeFi and DeF platforms. The algorithm breaks down the transaction fee and TDS already paid on the transactions and then calculates tax on the net amount.

Bincos claims its users also can track daily portfolio movements and portfolio value. Besides, they can download quarterly and annual tax computation and account statements.

Earlier in July, another crypto tax startup KoinX raised $1.5 Mn in seed funding from Polygon founder Sandeep Nailwal, iSeed Fund, KubeVC, and other angel investors.

It is to be noted that the Indian government has introduced a 30% tax on income from transactions of virtual digital assets (VDAs) including crypto and NFT in April this year. Later in July, the 1% tax deducted at sources rule for VDA transactions also came into effect.

Although the Indian investors’ interest in crypto reached an all-time high last year, the next tax rules impacted the trading volume of crypto exchanges adversely. The reason has not only been shying away from taxes but not being able to understand the nitty-gritty of taxes. Hence, these crypto tax startups may find a sizable user pool going forward.

As per a survey report by crypto exchange KuCoin, there were roughly 115 Mn cryptocurrency investors in India as of June 2022 who either hold cryptocurrency or have traded cryptocurrency in the preceding six months.