Primer, a London-based payments startup, has announced a $100m (£75m) Series C funding round.
The round was led by Sofina, with participation from Peak XV Partners, and continued backing from all existing investors, including Balderton, Accel, ICONIQ, Tencent, and Speedinvest.
The company has clients in 30 countries and plans to grow US revenue to more than a third of its business by 2028 and will hire up to 50 roles in the region to support that expansion.
Trusted by leading companies including Get Your Guide, Dialpad, Rail Europe, Printful, Lime, and loveholidays across eCommerce, travel, FinTech, and digital platforms, Primer has raised $170m (£126m) from investors.
Primer was founded in 2020 by ex PayPal and Braintree employees Paul Anthony and Gabriel Le Roux on the premise that payments needed a single, unified infrastructure layer before they could benefit from the intelligence built on top.
CEO and co-founder of Gabriel Le Roux explained: “I co-founded Primer in 2020 after spending years at Braintree watching the same problem play out across every merchant we worked with.
“Merchants didn’t want to rely on a single payment service provider (PSP). They wanted the best processor for each market, the right fraud tools for their risk profile, and the best checkout experience for their customers.
“What they had instead was a take-it-or-leave-it model that forced compromise at every stage.
“So I left to solve it, building a single, unified, and open layer across the entire payments lifecycle – from checkout to payout – giving merchants the control and visibility they’d never had before.
“Today, we’ve unified the payments ecosystem and built the infrastructure that allows AI to reach its full potential for payments and finance teams.
“Because when you sit across the entire payments lifecycle, you see something fragmented systems never can: the complete picture of how money moves through a business.”
Today, Primer’s platform sits across a merchant’s entire payments lifecycle, capturing over 400 data points per transaction and managing more than 95 per cent of customer payment volume on average.
Processing billions of transactions it provides businesses with a complete and contextual view of their payment flows, thereby unlocking AI’s full potential.
AI shift
Le Roux added: “In the next few years, every payment decision in a large business will be initiated, optimised or audited by AI. That shift is already underway.
“The question is whether the data those systems run on is complete because when you deploy agents across fragmented data, they don’t just underperform, they make the wrong decision.
“That’s why the next era of payments can only be built on complete, contextual intelligence. And that’s what Primer delivers.”
Following the raise, Primer is now doubling down on its investment in AI capabilities, including expansion of its proprietary AI agent – Primer Companion.
Jean-François Burguet, head of digital at Sofina, said: “Payments are reaching a structural turning point, with merchants consolidating onto unified infrastructure and AI moving to the heart of every transaction decision.
“Gabriel and the team have spent the past six years building the platform best suited to that future, earning the trust of some of the world’s most demanding merchants. We’re privileged to partner with them for the long term as they scale in the US and globally.”
Aakash Kapoor, principal at Peak XV, added: “Primer has built a unified infrastructure that manages nearly 100 per cent of payment volume for its clients, giving global enterprises a complete view across multiple processors, acquirers, fraud tools and payment methods.
“As payments enter a new architectural era, that depth of context becomes critical for AI agents to make decisions. We are excited to partner with Primer as they expand globally.”
In 2021, Primer was valued at $425m after closing a $50m Series B fundraise.