Chennai, NFAPost: Content marketplace platform Pepper Content has raised $4.2 million in Series A funding, led by Lightspeed India and leading angels across India and Silicon Valley.
Pepper aims to leverage this funding to enter into newer content categories such as video and audio, expand into new geographies like Southeast Asia while continuing to scale up its current product for customers and creators alike.
Launched in October 2017 out of a dorm room in BITS Pilani, the company’s vision is to enable creators to leverage their strengths in the best manner, by helping them connect and collaborate with businesses looking to solve their content marketing needs flexibly. This is in line with increasingly gig-driven careers for creators and the new norm of remote work environments.
Over 30,000 creative professionals such as content writers, graphic designers, language specialists, and editors have applied to be part of Pepper Content, which has a high selection bar and works only with the top 10% talent. Pepper’s curated creators have created more than 100,000 content pieces through the platform, earning $400,000 in creator fees in the first two years.
Pepper today works with over 400 customers, including commerce platforms such as Amazon and Swiggy; financial services, and insurance companies such as Max Bupa, PayTM, and Edelweiss; healthcare providers such as Apollo Hospitals; software firms such as Adobe and Cerner. In the last three months alone, Pepper has onboarded over 150 enterprises and SME customers and is growing at a 25% Month-on-Month in terms of revenue and creator growth.
Pepper Content Co-founder and CEO Anirudh Singla said, “Our mission is to disrupt the entire content creation industry at scale and create a stronger, high quality, and more organised ecosystem for content creators.”
“Imagine us being able to build virtual content teams for any company globally, by providing them a product that simplifies content operations and gives the customer the ability to strategise, create, distribute and manage all their content projects at one place,” he added.
Lightspeed India Partner Dev Khare said, “We are proud to partner with Anirudh and his team with a vision to use the Pepper market platform to enable any company around the world to source content on-demand, with high quality, and at scale. Not only is every company a software company these days, but every company is a content company”.
In addition, marquee angels across India and Silicon Valley have participated in this fundraise. Some of these are Beerud Sheth (Founder, Upwork), Balaji Srinivasan (Coinbase CTO, ex-GP at a16z), Gaurav Munjal (Founder, Unacademy), Aakrit Vaish (Founder, Haptik), Miten Sampat (ex-CSO, Times Internet), Akhil Paul (Caparo Group), Utsav Somani (iSeed/AngelList) and Dilip Khandelwal (Ex-MD, SAP Labs India).
