Pepper raises Rs 2 cr from Snapdeal Founders’ Titan Capital, other investors; startup plans to expand team in Mumbai

Content marketplace platform Pepper raised Rs 2.2 crore as part of its seed round led by Kunal Bahl and Rohit Bansal-backed Titan Capital. Other marquee investors who participated in this round included YourStory, Saurabh Srivastava (co-founder of IAN and NASSCOM), Amit Ranjan (co-founder, Slideshare), Alok Mittal (co-founder & CEO, Indifi and former Jobs Ahead founder), Sidharth Rao (chairman, Dentsu Webchutney), Ritesh Malik (co-founder & CEO, Innov8), Sanjay Tripathy (former CMO, HDFC Life and CEO, Agilio Labs), Manan Maheshwari (co-founder, WYSH) and Hemanshu Jain (co-founder, Diabeto). [caption id=“attachment_6013191” align=“alignleft” width=“380”] Representational image. Reuters[/caption] With the infusion of new funds, Pepper is looking to expand its team in Mumbai and focus on product and its technology platform that will enable content creation ‘on-demand’. Founded in November 2017 by then second-year BITS Pilani students, Anirudh Singla and Rishabh Shekhar, the Mumbai-based startup aims to be India’s largest content marketplace platform and plan to make content creation, right from strategy to execution, accessible through an on-demand virtual workforce at any scale, vertical, and language. Speaking about the platform, Anirudh Singla, CEO of Pepper, said, “With Passion Economy as a growing trend, it is important that you are able to enterprise your creators and help them grow. Through Pepper’s technology platform, it will not only be able to scale content creation to the tunes of hundreds of thousands of content pieces but also be able to create a framework that allows virtual collaboration of creators through tools on the platform. We are building the future of work for content.” Anirudh further said Pepper is now also expanding into graphics as a vertical and are launching a first-of-its-kind ‘content-as-eCommerce’ model which brands itself as the fastest content experience ever. Brands, SMEs and individuals can now order content in custom formats and get automated deliveries in available content genres, verticals and languages. Alok Mittal (co-founder & CEO, Indifi) who invested, said, “Pepper got my attention as soon as it was pitched to me. But what made me convinced were the founders, who at such an early age have made it into something formidable. They have been able to crack a lot of things, unit economics being one and I believe that is the best start anyone can have for their company.” Amit Ranjan (co-founder, Slideshare) an investor, said, “Pepper is building out an innovative digital content marketplace catering to the needs of Indian corporates, SMEs and startups. It is aggregating, organising and standardising the supply side of the content to meet the ever-burgeoning and diverse demand from industry. Pepper has notched up an impressive revenue run rate, is building relevant editorial tools and looks poised to scale up their business model.”