We are thrilled to partner with Anirudh Singla and Rishabh Shekhar to build Pepper Content into the world’s largest content marketplace. Lightspeed is leading the Series A financing, alongside Titan Capital and luminary angels.
Anirudh has wowed us with his drive. After starting Pepper as a second-year college student and closing sales to tens of corporate clients, he also somehow found the time to work with multiple media organizations, including Yourstory. We met him earlier this year, before he graduated from BITS Pilani.
The bigness of his vision excites us:
If software is eating the world, then content is consuming the world. Every company is now a content company.
- It’s going across industries: retail/e-commerce, media & entertainment, gaming, healthcare, financial services, education, consumer/FMCG brands, travel & tourism, real estate, telecom, IT & software…
- It’s in multiple formats: articles, social media posts, blog posts, product descriptions, books, whitepapers, designs, animations…
- It’s in multiple media types: text, audio, video…
- Across multiple outlets: websites, apps, blogs, newsletters, e-commerce websites, messengers (eg Whatsap, Wechat), social media (eg Youtube, Facebook, Instagram, Snap*, Sharechat*, Tiktok), APIs…
- And it’s in multiple languages…
In the ‘90s, company content used to be produced in marketing and learning & development (L&D) departments. Today, in 2020, content is generated non-stop at warp speed throughout organizations, for multiple marketing channels, online sales, customer onboarding, and customer service & success.
Toolsets from Abstract*, Adobe, Canva, Figma, Google, Grammarly, Kubric*, and Sketch have democratized creation beyond the experts to millions of creators and designers globally. However, skilled creators are still hard to find, hard to evaluate, and hard to manage. Enterprises either have to find freelancers through word-of-mouth or open freelance marketplaces, manage several agencies, or manage a sub-scale internal team of creators. All of this is a gigantic headache for most CXOs.
Pepper’s software-driven market platform curates a growing community of 30,000+ creators such as writers, graphic designers, language specialists, and editors. Pepper simplifies content operations and gives enterprises the ability to strategize, create, distribute, and manage all their content projects in one place. As a result, enterprises can get content on-time, on-budget, and on-spec, with the ability to scale-out as needed.
Pepper’s customers include 400 of India’s largest corporates and multinationals across multiple sectors. Examples include commerce (Amazon, Swiggy), financial services (Max Bupa, PayTM, Edelweiss), healthcare (Apollo), and software (Adobe, Cerner).
Pepper has a product and roadmap that is organizing and automating this market in a way that has not been done before. And the company is now building a fantastic management team to go after markets in India, Asia, and beyond…
Best wishes, Anirudh and Rishabh! We are super excited for the journey ahead.
~ Team Lightspeed
* Abstract, Kubric, Sharechat, and Snap are Lightspeed-backed companies.
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