Content marketplace platform, Pepper Content has raised $4.2 million in a Series A funding round, led by Lightspeed India and leading angels across India and the Silicon Valley.

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Pepper aims to leverage this funding to enter into newer content categories such as video and audio, and expand into new geographies like Southeast Asia while continuing to scale up its current product for customers and creators alike.

Founded by two young BITS Pilani undergraduates, Anirudh Singla and Rishabh Shekhar from their dorm room in October 2017, Pepper has already generated over $600,000 in revenues and is on track for a $1 million ARR.

Pepper offers customised content solutions by mediating content from the best talent pool of creators across the nation through an AI-enabled platform.

The venture has claimed that this is in line with the rise in gig-driven careers for creators and the new norm of the remote-working environment.

Over 30,000 creative professionals including content writers, graphic designers, language specialists and editors have applied to be part of Pepper Content. Pepper’s curated creators have created over a lakh 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 like Max Bupa, PayTM, and Edelweiss; healthcare providers such as Apollo Hospitals; software firms such as Adobe and Cerner.

Commenting on this funding announcement, co-founder and CEO at Pepper Content Singla said, "Our mission is to disrupt the entire content creation industry at scale and create a stronger, high quality, and more organized 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 strategize, create, distribute and manage all their content projects at one place."

Dev Khare, Partner at Lightspeed India stated, "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."

Marquee angels across India and Silicon Valley have participated in this fundraise. Some of these including 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).

(Edited by : Jerome)

First Published:Oct 13, 2020 7:47 PM IST