[Funding alert] Pepper Content raises $14.3M led by Bessemer Venture Partners, eyes global expansion

Global full-stack content marketplace Pepper Content on Thursday said it raised $14.3 million (Rs 110 crore) in a Series A round led by  Bessemer Venture Partners.

The round also saw participation from Tanglin Venture Partners, Lightspeed India Partners, and Titan Capital, and seasoned angel investors like Gokul Rajaram (DoorDash), Ritesh Agarwal (Founder and CEO, Oyo), Abhinav Sinha (Global COO and CPO, OYO), Ankur Nagpal (Founder, Teachable), Dheeraj Pandey (Founder, Nutanix), Ashish Gupta (Founder, Helion.vc), and Kunal Shah (Founder, CRED). 

The startup will use the funds to bolster its presence in the US market, along with diversifying offerings to newer categories like graphic design, language translations, and video content creation.

Founded by Anirudh Singla and Rishabh Shekhar, Pepper Content enables marketers to connect with writers, designers, translators, videographers, editors, and illustrators across the world, using its AI algorithms.

The startup claims to have grown 16X in revenue in the last 14 months. It aims for a high double-digit ARR growth by the end of this year.

Anirudh Singla and Rishabh Shekhar, Co-founders, Pepper Content, said,

"As we enter the next phase of our journey of revolutionising content creation across the globe, we are excited to have partners like Bessemer Venture Partners and other credible marquee investors. What Salesforce has done for sales, we will do for the content ecosystem.”

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So far, the startup has onboarded over 1,000 enterprises and fast-growing startups. It works with more than 2,500 customers, including Adani Enterprises, NPS Trust, Hindustan Unilever, P&G, HDFC Bank, CRED, Groww, SBI Mutual Fund, TATA Capital, Binance, Google, and Adobe.

Launched in October 2017 out of a dorm room in BITS Pilani, Pepper Content has a 150-member team, along with a creative talent network of more than 100,000 freelance professionals.

Anant Vidur Puri, Partner at Bessemer Venture Partners, said,

"We firmly believe that the future of work is on-demand driven, and we love the approach that Pepper is taking to build a powerful content marketing stack that helps startups and enterprises to work more strategically with expert on-demand freelance talent and enable workflows and collaboration tools to create great quality content.”

Dev Khare, Partner at Lightspeed India, said, "Pepper's value proposition to be the scale-out partner to enterprises globally for high quality, on-demand, and on-budget content production has really found its mark. We believe Pepper's SaaS offering to help creators and enterprises to create, collaborate, and drive content operations has found strong market resonance in the US and globally."