[Funding Alert] Pepper Content raises $4.2M Series A investment led by Lightspeed India

Pepper Content, the Mumbai-based content marketplace and a 2019 Tech30 alum, has raised $4.2 million in Series A funding led by Lightspeed India and leading angels across India and Silicon Valley. With this fund raise, the team aims to enter into newer content category like video and audio and expand into Southeast Asia.

Some of the angels who participated in this funding round are Beerud Sheth (Founder, Upwork.com), 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). 

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In a conversation with YourStory, Anirudh Singla, Co-founder and CEO, Pepper Content said, "We are seeing great scale and are almost dominating text-based content."

"With this fundraise, we have a strong product focus and we want to look at all kinds of content and get a strong grip on the content creation market. We already have all kinds of content creators, we just need to scale the product to suit all their different needs," he added.

In February 2020, the startup had raised Rs 2.2 crore as part of its seed funding round led by Titan Capital. The other marque investors who participated in the round were — YourStory Media; Dr Saurabh Srivastava, Co-founder of IAN and NASSCOM; Slideshare Co-founder Amit Ranjan; Indifi's Co-founder and CEO Alok Mittal; Sidharth Rao, Chairman of Dentsu Webchutney; Ritesh Malik, Co-founder and CEO of Innov8; Sanjay Tripathy, former CMO, HDFC Life, and CEO of Agilio Labs; Manan Maheshwari, Co-founder of Wysh; and Hemanshu Jain, Co-founder of Diabeto.

Founded in 2017 by Anirudh Singla and Rishabh Shekhar out of their dorm room in BITS Pilani, Pepper Content aims to help content creators collaborate with business that are looking for content marketing needs.

Dev Khare Partner at Lightspeed India said in a press statement shared by the company, “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”.

The statement added close to 30,000 content writers, graphic designers, language specialists, and editors have applied to be part of Pepper Content. The team added that they have a high selection criteria and only top 10 percent talent work on the platform. The team added that the creators on the platform have created over 100,000 content pieces, earning over $400,000 in the first two years.

"We have seen a great acceleration of enterprise and mid-market business become consumers for Pepper. We are working with the likes of Amazon India, Adobe, Max Bupa, Swiggy, Edelweisse, Apollo Hospitals, and others. They have realised there is no need to pay high rates to content agencies, while they can team up with us to give them quality at scale," explained Anirudh.

The platform now works with over 400 customers and in the last three months has onboarded over 150 enterprises and SME customers, and is growing at a 25 percent month-on-month in terms of revenue and creator growth.

Bipin Shah, Partner at Titan Capital who were early backers for Pepper Content, added, "We've closely partnered with Anirudh, Rishabh, and the Pepper team right from their inception when the founders were still students at BITS Pilani. The maturity, speed, and agility that the team exhibited has impressed us a lot and also convinced us that Pepper is all set to build a very large global business in the burgeoning passion economy."