Pepper Content Bags $4.2 Mn From Lightspeed, Looks To Expand Services To Southeast Asia

Mumbai-based content marketplace Pepper Content has raised $4.2 Mn in Series A funding round led by Lightspeed India to expand its presence into Southeast Asia and enter newer content categories like video and audio.

Several prominent angel investors across India and Silicon Valley also participated in this round. This includes Upwork founder Beerud Seth, Coinbase CTO Balaji Srinivasan, Unacademy founder Gaurav Munjal and Haptik founder Aakrit Vaish, former Times Internet’s CSO Miten Sampat, Caparo Group’s Akhil Paul, AngelList’s Utsav Somani and former SAP Labs Indian MD Dilip Khandelwal.

Founded in 2017 by BITS Pilani graduates Anirudh Singla and Rishabh Shekhar, Pepper Content is a content creation platform that connects talent creators to the organisations looking for content. The company offers customised content solutions by mediating content from a talent pool of creators through an AI-enabled platform. It aims to help content creators collaborate with businesses that are looking for content marketing needs.

The company claims that nearly 30K creative professionals such as content writers, graphic designers, language specialists, and editors have applied to be part of Pepper Content, but it only works with the top 10% talent. The platform has helped creators create more than 100K content pieces, earning $400K in creator fees. Its clientele includes 400 customers, including Amazon, Swiggy, Paytm, Edelweiss, Apollo Hospitals, Adobe and Cerner.

Commenting on the fundraise, 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.”

Prior to this, Pepper Content had raised INR 2.2 Cr as a part of its seed funding round led by Titan Capital in February 2020. Other investors had also participated in this round, including IAN and NASSCOM’s cofounder Dr Saurabh Srivastava, Slideshare cofounder Amit Ranjan, Indifi’s cofounder and CEO Alok Mittal, chairman of Dentsu Webchutney Sidharth Rao, cofounder and CEO of Innov8 Ritesh Malik, CEO of Agilio Labs Sanjay Tripathy, WYSH’s cofounder Manan Maheshwar, Diabeto’s cofounder Hemanshu Jain and YourStory Media.