Zerodha’s Rainmatter Funds Quicko To Help Online Traders File Taxes

Zerodha’s fintech fund and incubator Rainmatter has invested INR 2 Cr ($280K) in the seed round of online tax planning and filing platform Quicko.

Founded in 2015 by Vishvajit Sonagara, Quicko is a complete tax filing platform for both non-residents and residents of India. The company allows taxpayers — both individuals and businesses — with Income Tax, Goods and Service Tax (GST) and tax deducted at source (TDS) fillings. The platform claims to have more than 50K users.

Quicko’s Founder Sonagara said, “We want to encourage more people to file their tax return by simplifying the tax filing process. Our mission is to simplify taxes for everyone and we have built our platform for Individuals & businesses across India keeping this in mind.”

Founder and CEO Zerodha, Nithin Kamath, added, “In India, traders are generally confused about their tax calculations. Taxes on Trading can get tricky sometimes as the rules vary depending on Asset Class such as Real Estate vs Equity vs Derivative, nature of the trading activity (speculative vs non-speculative), turnover limits & applicability of tax audit.”

With this funding, the company plans to build its income tax return filing service for the online trading community as well. In addition, the company will get access to the online stockbroking platform Zerodha’s customer base.

With this partnership, Quicko will allow Zerodha’s customers to upload their profit and loss (P&L) data and file their income tax returns. The company claims to have helped over 11K customers in the past year.

Quicko claims to provide its services at a cheaper rate than any chartered accountant. The company’s founder Sonagara told ET that Quicko charges traders INR 2,500 for tax filings, whereas a traditional chartered accountant charges INR 15-20K for the same.

Zerodha set up Rainmatter in April 2019 to boost stock market investments by funding entrepreneurs. The company in its press release said, “Less than 1.5 crore Indians invested in the stock markets last year, out of which less than 70 lakh directly into stocks. For an economy like ours to truly reach its potential, we need people to back entrepreneurs by investing in their companies be it directly (stocks) or indirectly (mutual funds).”

Through Rainmatter, Zerodha invests between $100k -$1M for a minority stake in startups that are trying to bring more Indians to invest in stocks, mutual funds, ETFs, Bonds, G-Secs, and participate in the economy more directly.