Mumbai: Pepper Content, a content marketplace platform, which recently raised $4.2 million funding from Lightspeed India Partners and other marquee angels, has taken up a tailor-made 200 seater managed workspace from Flexi space provider Smartworks in Mumbai. The transaction was facilitated by international real estate advisory firm Savills India through its new coworking space listing platform (www.workthere.in).

Located in the Times Square building in Andheri East in Mumbai, the new workspace is being set up as Pepper Content’s India headquarter. Founded in 2017 by Anirudh Singla and Rishabh Shekhar, the Mumbai-based start-up currently has seen over 45,000 content creators apply to their platform and worked on more than 1,50,000 assignments. They recently launched Peppertype.ai as well, an AI (artificial intelligence) assisted content creation platform launched by Pepper Content. It has over 20,000 users and 90% of them are based out of USA. They are on a stellar growth trajectory, and this workplace gives them ample opportunity to expand and modulate the space as per their needs.

Anirudh Singla, Founder & CEO, Pepper Content said, “That although remote work has its benefits, bringing an early stage team back in office has a kind of energy that is unmatched. We are seeing 2x productivity and having 10x the fun working from the same office space. The office has been developed extremely well and we are very happy as to how the final product looks like!”

Flexible workspaces have gained strong traction among corporate occupiers in India in the last few years, witnessing a growth of 28% over the last five years. As per Savills India’s report, leasing by co-working providers is expected to increase by 42% to 4.9 million in 2021, contributing around 10% to the overall office leasing in 2021 and 2022. To capture this growing demand, Savills launched its global online listing platform for flexible, co-working and managed office spaces in India last year. The platform currently has a listing from over 40 brands with over 70,000 seats spanning six cities, including Delhi NCR, Mumbai, Pune, Chennai, Bengaluru and Hyderabad.

Commenting on the deal, Neetish Sarda, Founder- Smartworks said: “We are delighted to onboard Pepper Content in our largest facility in Mumbai- Times Square. Our thoughtfully designed digitally-enabled managed workspaces offer our members agility and seamless scalability in these challenging times along with an array of value-added services.” 

Smartworks caters to enterprises and high-growth startups by offering inspiring collaborative and hassle-free managed office spaces. In the last five years of its operations, Smartworks has spread across 31 locations in nine cities with over 65000 seats in India.  

Naveen Nandwani, Managing Director, Commercial Advisory & Transactions, Savills India said, “We are delighted to have successfully facilitated this major coworking deal in less than 2 month of launch of our Workthere platform. With most companies looking to build more agility in the wake of the pandemic, flexi and managed office spaces are perfectly fitting into new office requirements in India. Through our deep sectoral knowledge and on-ground specialized professionals, we hope to help more enterprises in realizing their expansion and growth plans.”