In today’s rapidly evolving digital landscape, the convergence of human creativity and artificial intelligence is redefining how businesses approach marketing. In a conversation with Tech Achieve Media (TAM) along the sidelines of TiECon Delhi 2025, Apurva Dalmia, Vice President – Head of Finance and Legal at Pepper, shares how the company is harnessing this synergy to deliver scalable, cost-effective, and high-quality marketing solutions.
TAM: Could you tell us a little about Pepper and what makes it unique in the marketing ecosystem?
Apurva Dalmia: Pepper is a B2B marketing services company that’s powered by AI at its core. We operate much like a traditional agency, but with technology embedded deeply into our operations. Our model combines human talent with the power of AI to augment human potential, offering speed, scalability, and cost-effectiveness that traditional agencies often struggle to achieve. Conventional agencies have to keep expanding purely on the basis of human resources to grow. With Pepper, it’s different as our technology layer allows us to scale efficiently without proportionally increasing manpower.
TAM: How long has Pepper been in this space, and how has its journey evolved over time?
Apurva Dalmia: Pepper has been around for more than six years. Our founders, who are alumni of BITS Pilani, started the company while still in college as a blog-writing platform. Over time, we evolved into a managed marketplace connecting B2B demand with creative supply.
Interestingly, we were early adopters of generative AI technology, long before ChatGPT became mainstream. What many people use generative AI for today, we were experimenting with several years ago. As we grew, we transitioned from being a pure marketplace to a managed services company. Today, we have robust in-house teams across creative, SEO, and content domains, allowing us to control the brand experience end-to-end. We realized that if we are not part of the brand’s decision-making process, from strategy to post-execution ROI measurement, we lose critical control and value. So, our goal is to be a one-stop solution for brands.
TAM: Which markets are you currently focused on, and what are your expansion plans?
Apurva Dalmia: The US is our largest market and one where we’re doubling down our efforts. In India, we already work with most major brands, almost every well-known logo has either worked with us in the past or is a current client.
We’re also seeing growing interest in Southeast Asia and the Middle East. However, we prefer a measured approach to expansion. We don’t believe in entering new geographies hastily. For us, sustainable growth is key, and we don’t want to burn cash for the sake of scaling. In fact, we’ve built a self-sustaining business model that operates efficiently, almost like a bootstrapped company.
TAM: How large is your team currently, and how are you preparing for future growth?
Apurva Dalmia: We’re a team of over 200 professionals today. Over the past year, we’ve significantly expanded our in-house creative and SEO teams to serve clients more efficiently.
Our aim is to deliver five times the output of a traditional agency with the same team size, and that’s the power of our AI-driven model. We’ve made forward-looking investments in people and capabilities, positioning ourselves well for the next three to four years of growth.
TAM: What are some of the challenges you face as you expand operations, and how do you address them?
Apurva Dalmia: One of the biggest challenges in our industry is not the first sale, but it’s account retention and expansion. While acquiring clients is important, long-term growth depends on how effectively you retain and grow those accounts.
That’s where we’ve been investing heavily, which is in delivery excellence, customer success, and capability building. Initially, like many startups, we believed that scaling sales was the key to growth. But we’ve learned that retention and relationship depth are just as important. Our philosophy is simple: we don’t want to be known as a company serving a thousand clients with minimal contracts. We’d rather work deeply with a hundred quality clients, delivering multi-million-dollar value to each.
TAM: What goals has Pepper set for itself in the near future?
Apurva Dalmia: While our long-term goal is to take the company public in the next five years, we are focused on execution in the present. Strong execution is what differentiates successful companies in our space. In the near term, our goal is to achieve profitability. We’re already close to breaking even and expect to become cash-positive within the next couple of quarters. The focus is on sustainable, efficient growth rather than scaling for the sake of it.
TAM: Finally, what role do you see AI playing in shaping the future of marketing agencies like Pepper?
Apurva Dalmia: AI is no longer a support tool but it’s becoming the core engine of marketing. For us, AI is not replacing creativity but enhancing it. By automating repetitive tasks, providing data-driven insights, and personalizing content at scale, AI allows our human teams to focus on high-impact creative and strategic work. At Pepper, our vision is to redefine how creative work is done, which is to make marketing not only faster and smarter but also more human through the intelligent use of technology.
