On June 9, Content marketplace Pepper Content announced that it had raised $14.3 million in a Series A round led by Bessemer Venture Partners. The startup looks to strengthen its US presence and expand into new territories.

The round also attracted new investor Tanglin Venture Partners and existing investors Lightspeed and Titan Capital, as well as DoorDash’s Gokul Rajaram, Oyo’s Ritesh Agarwal and Abhinav Sinha, Teachable founder Ankur Nagpal, Nutanix and DevRev co-founder Dheeraj Pandey, among others Individual participation, Cred founder Kunal Shah and Helion Ventures co-founder Ashish Gupta.

Founded in 2017 by Anirudh Singla and Rishabh Shekhar, Pepper Content helps companies create content through its talent marketplace network of freelance content creators, including writers, graphic designers, language translators, videographers, editors and illustrators, enabling them to expand their content marketing efforts.

The company built a system of automated tools to check these content snippets for grammar and readability issues and also developed review and quality layers as part of the workflow.

The startup claims to have over 100,000 freelancers on its platform and works with over 2,500 clients, over 1,000 of which are enterprises and fast-growing startups.

Clients include large corporations and organisations such as Adani Enterprises, NPS Trust, Hindustan Unilever, and Procter & Gamble, as well as tech giants and financial services companies such as Binance, Google and Adobe, as well as insurance companies such as HDFC Bank, CRED, Groww, SBI Mutual Funds and Tata Capital. It has a team of 150 people, including 60 people in the product engineering department.

The startup uses an AI-based match recommendation algorithm to match the most relevant creators with any given project based on attributes, including industry and work experience. It has also developed tools for freelancers that allow them to provide high-quality output with fast turnaround times.

One of its key products is an AI-based content writing assistant called Peppertype.ai, which helps generate short content in seconds. The company claims that more than 200,000 users in 150 countries currently use the product. Overall, Pepper Content claims to produce around 65,000-70,000 pieces per month. The company makes money by charging a portion of transaction fees.