Content marketplace, Pepper Content, on Tuesday said it has raised $4.2 million as part of its Series A funding, led by Lightspeed India and angel investors across India and the Silicon Valley.
These include Beerud Sheth, founder, Upwork, Balaji Srinivasan, chief technology officer at Coinbase, Gaurav Munjal, founder, Unacademy, Utsav Somani, partner, AngelList, among others.
According to Pepper Content, the company plans to use the funds to foray into newer content categories such as video and audio, expand into new geographies including Southeast Asia, while continuing to scale up its current product portfolio for customers and creators alike.
Three-year-old, Pepper, is a content creation platform that connects creators to organisations. 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.
Currently, over 30,000 creative professionals such as content writers, graphic designers, language specialists, and editors have applied to be part of Pepper Content, which works only with the top 10% talent. Further, Pepper’s curated creators have generated more than 1,00,000 content pieces through the platform, earning $4,00,000 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, and healthcare and software firms.
“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 strategize, create, distribute and manage all their content projects at one place,” said Anirudh Singla, co-founder, and CEO at Pepper Content.
In the last three months, amid the pandemic, Pepper has on-boarded 150 enterprises and SME customers and is growing at 25% month-on-month, in terms of revenue and creator growth.
“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,” said Dev Khare, partner at Lightspeed India.
Pepper has generated over $6,00,000 in revenues since inception and is on track to achieve an annual revenue run rate of $1 million.
