Full-stack content marketplace Pepper Content raised $14 million in a Bessemer-led Series A funding round in June last year. The sizable financing round came on the back of over four-fold growth in the firm’s operating scale in the fiscal year ending March 2022.
Pepper Content’s revenue from operations jumped 4.6X to Rs 19.03 crore during FY22 as compared to Rs 4.16 crore in FY21, according to its annual financial statement with the Registrar of Companies.
Founded in 2017, Pepper Content helps connect content creators and brands. It has served more than 2,500 customers, including global firms like Amazon, Adobe, and Google, and over 120,000 content creators, according to the company’s website. The startup recently launched a content marketing platform (CMP) to empower the content marketing industry, estimated to be worth $400 billion.
Apart from its operating revenue, Pepper Content also made nearly Rs 65 lakh from bank deposits which took its overall revenue to Rs 19.68 crore in FY22.
To fuel growth, Pepper Content spent aggressively on employees and promotions, as a result, its total expenditure ballooned 3.7X to Rs 42.43 crore in FY22 in contrast to Rs 11.36 crore in FY21. Coming to the bottomline, its losses shot up 3.2X to Rs 22.75 crore during FY22 against Rs 7.17 crore in FY21.
Pepper Content spent 48.6% of the total expenditure on employee benefits during the year. This cost swelled up 3.4X to Rs 20.63 crore in FY22 from Rs 6.12 crore in FY21.
The growth in operations can also be evident from content creation cost, which spiked 4.4X to Rs 14.05 crore and also emerged as the second largest cost during FY22. It also incurred promotional, information technology and legal fees of Rs 2.2 crore, Rs 1.51 crore and Rs 1.32 crore, respectively, during the same period.
On a unit level, Pepper Content spent Rs 2.23 to earn a rupee.
The Mumbai-based firm has raised around $19 million (Rs 145 crore) to date from the likes of Lightspeed, Bessemer Venture Partners, Tanglin Venture Partners and Titan Capital, among others.
