Pepper Content
Pepper Content, now rebranded globally simply as Pepper, is a Mumbai-based content marketplace and marketing services company founded in 2017 that connects businesses needing content with a curated network of freelance creators. It began in a dorm room at BITS Pilani, where its founders were still students, as a platform for ordering text content at scale; it grew into a business serving hundreds of brand clients, raised seed and Series A funding, and in October 2025 relaunched itself as an AI-native marketing services company blending freelance creative talent with custom AI agents. In a directory of Indian media agencies and services, Pepper belongs with the production infrastructure of the content economy — the intermediary through which a significant volume of India's brand, editorial and marketing content has been commissioned, created and delivered.
Overview: a marketplace for content creation
Pepper's original model, described consistently across its funding coverage, is a mediation platform: it processes and mediates the demand and supply chain for content services, connecting organisations that require content with a talent pool of thousands of creators without either side having to find and manage the other directly. YourStory's company profile summarised its salient features as quality filtered by technology and hand-picked by an editorial team, speed and scale for bulk content orders, and seamless, technology-powered delivery intended to replace old-fashioned briefing and approval processes with something closer to an e-commerce experience. The content itself spans articles and blogs for brand publishing, and expanded over time into graphics, design, language services, and planned or launched categories including video and audio. For publishers and media-adjacent businesses, Pepper functioned as an elastic content desk: capacity that could be turned up for a campaign, a new vertical or a regional-language push without hiring a permanent team.
Founding at BITS Pilani in 2017
Pepper was founded in November 2017 — some coverage dates it to October that year — by Anirudh Singla and Rishabh Shekhar, who were then second-year students at BITS Pilani. The Mumbai-based startup's founding ambition, stated at its seed funding, was to become the largest content marketplace platform in India and to make content creation, from strategy to execution, accessible through an on-demand virtual workforce at any scale, in any vertical and language. The dorm-room origin became a defining part of its public story: before graduating, the founders had aggregated more than 1.75 crore rupees in revenue and built a network of more than twenty-five thousand content creators. Singla, the chief executive, framed the company in terms of the passion economy — arguing that creators needed to be enterprised and helped to grow, and that Pepper's platform would both scale content creation to hundreds of thousands of pieces and provide a framework for creators to collaborate virtually through tools on the platform. He called it, in a line the company repeated often, building the future of work for content.
How the marketplace works
The platform's mechanics follow from its marketplace design. A business brings a content requirement — a volume of articles, a design need, a language version, a campaign — and Pepper matches it from its creator pool, manages briefing, production and editorial quality control inside its own workflow, and delivers finished work through the platform. The supply side is deliberately selective at scale: at its Series A announcement the company said nearly thirty thousand creative professionals, including writers, graphic designers, language specialists and editors, had applied to join, but that it worked with only the top ten percent of that talent; a later profile raised the applicant pool figure to more than thirty-five thousand creators filtered by its technology and editorial team. By that stage it reported creators had produced more than one hundred thousand content pieces through the platform and earned four hundred thousand dollars in creator fees. The commercial logic for clients is managed quality at marketplace prices; for creators, it is access to steady, paid work from brands they could not individually pitch.
Clients and work for brands and media
Pepper's reported client base grew quickly from startups to some of India's and the world's largest consumer brands. Its Series A coverage listed four hundred customers, including Amazon, Swiggy, Paytm, Edelweiss, Apollo Hospitals, Adobe and Cerner; other client lists in its funding coverage added Facebook, IndiGo and Directi, and named Swiggy, Info Edge, Urban Company, BookMyShow, Times Internet, the India Today Group, Digit, Businessworld, Zivame, Bharat Matrimony and Simplilearn among more than two hundred and fifty brands it was working with at the seed stage. The presence of media organisations — Times Internet, the India Today Group, Digit and Businessworld — among those clients is notable for this directory: Pepper was not only writing marketing copy for commerce brands but supplying content into publishing operations as well, reflecting how blurred the line between brand content and editorial production had become. After its 2025 rebrand, the company named a newer set of global clients — including Unilever, ITC, Amazon, HSBC Bank and Mutual of Omaha — as evidence of growth across North America and India.
Funding and growth
Pepper's funding history tracks its growth in stages. In February 2020 it raised 2.2 crore rupees in a seed round led by Titan Capital, the fund backed by Snapdeal founders Kunal Bahl and Rohit Bansal, with a long list of angel and institutional participants including YourStory Media, Saurabh Srivastava of the Indian Angel Network and NASSCOM, SlideShare co-founder Amit Ranjan, Indifi chief executive Alok Mittal, Dentsu Webchutney chairman Sidharth Rao, Innov8 co-founder Ritesh Malik and others. The seed money was earmarked for expanding the Mumbai team and building the product and technology platform for on-demand content creation, along with expansion into graphics and a content-as-e-commerce model. In October 2020 the company raised 4.2 million dollars in a Series A round led by Lightspeed India, joined by angels including Upwork founder Beerud Sheth, former Coinbase chief technology officer Balaji Srinivasan, Unacademy founder Gaurav Munjal and Haptik founder Aakrit Vaish. The Series A was intended to fund entry into video and audio content categories, expansion into Southeast Asia and further product scaling. Along the way the company was named a Tech30 company at YourStory's TechSparks in 2019 and was a finalist at the Lufthansa Startup Expo run by TiE Delhi NCR.
Leadership
The company has been led throughout by its two founders. Anirudh Singla is co-founder and chief executive, and has been Pepper's principal public voice from the dorm-room phase onward — articulating its marketplace vision at seed stage and, in 2025, its reinvention as an AI-native alternative to legacy agency networks. Rishabh Shekhar is co-founder and chief operating officer, appearing alongside Singla in the company's rebrand announcements. Their youth at founding was central to the company's early coverage: investors quoted in the seed announcement, including Alok Mittal and Amit Ranjan, pointed to the founders themselves — and to unit economics the young team had already cracked — as reasons for backing a business run by founders who had not yet graduated when it began generating meaningful revenue. That founder continuity from a student startup to a multi-country marketing services firm is one of the more distinctive features of Pepper's story.
From marketplace to Pepper: the AI-native rebrand
In October 2025, Pepper Content rebranded globally as Pepper, positioning itself — in its own launch phrase — as an AI-native marketing services company and an alternative to traditional agency holding networks. Coverage by afaqs! and other outlets of the announcement described a refreshed visual identity and expanded services, built around blending the top one percent of freelance creative talent with custom AI agents to deliver faster, more scalable outcomes for chief marketing officers. Singla argued in the announcement that the marketing landscape had outgrown traditional agency systems, contrasting Pepper's AI-native teams with consultancies and network agencies, and saying that where holding companies add cost, Pepper adds scale. The company said that over the preceding three years it had grown more than three hundred percent across North America and India, that it now operated with teams across India, North America and the Middle East, and that it served clients in more than fifteen countries, with a proprietary platform combining elite freelance talent and custom-built AI agents into hybrid teams. The rebrand thus marks a strategic shift in emphasis — from a content-ordering marketplace toward productised, AI-driven marketing services — while keeping the creator network that was its original asset at the centre of the model.
Headquarters and footprint
Pepper is headquartered in Mumbai, Maharashtra, where its team expansion was a stated priority from its seed round onward and where the company has remained based even as its market widened. The founding happened at BITS Pilani, but the operating business was Mumbai-based from its public emergence, which placed it inside India's advertising and media capital alongside the agencies and brands it serves. Following the 2025 rebrand, the company describes operations spanning India, North America and the Middle East and clients in more than fifteen countries — a footprint built first on the logic of its Series A, which targeted Southeast Asian expansion and new content categories, and then on demand from global brands for its organic and performance marketing work. For creators, the footprint has always been virtual by design: the network was built as an on-demand, distributed workforce rather than a studio, which is precisely what allowed a Mumbai startup to sell production capacity across languages, verticals and, eventually, continents.
Role in the Indian content and media ecosystem
Pepper's significance for the Indian media ecosystem lies in how it industrialised freelance content work. India's brand and digital publishing boom created enormous demand for written, designed and localised content, and a supply of talented freelancers with no efficient way to reach enterprise buyers; traditional agencies sat in between at prices and speeds many businesses rejected. By standardising briefing, matching, quality control and payment through a platform, vetting its creator pool and absorbing the management burden, Pepper made outsourced content a routine procurement for hundreds of companies, including media houses. It also changed the creator side of the market: tens of thousands of writers, designers, editors and language specialists applied to a single gateway that could offer them brand work and prompt payment. Critics of marketplace models sometimes worry about quality and the position of freelancers, which is why Pepper's repeated emphasis on selective admission, editorial oversight and creator earnings formed part of its public pitch from the beginning. Whatever one's view, the company is a clear marker of the platformisation of Indian content production.
How to access and use Pepper
Businesses engage Pepper through its website, peppercontent.io, where they can commission content and marketing services — historically by ordering content in custom formats, genres, verticals and languages through its platform, and since the rebrand by engaging its AI-native marketing services for organic and performance growth. Creators join from the other side of the marketplace by applying to its network, where admission is selective and work is allocated through the platform's tools for briefing, collaboration and delivery. Individual readers will not find a Pepper-branded publication to read; like the other infrastructure firms in this section of the directory, its work appears under its clients' brands, from e-commerce and food-delivery platforms to media groups. Users assessing it should note the company's current identity — Pepper, rather than only Pepper Content — and that its offering now extends well beyond the text marketplace described in its early funding coverage, even though that marketplace, founded by two students in 2017, remains the foundation on which the business was built.
