Primer, a payments infrastructure startup, has raised £75 million Series C led by Sofina with participation from Peak XV Partners and existing investors. The funding will be used to accelerate investment in its product and team as it builds AI-native infrastructure for payments and finance teams.
Founded in 2020 by Gabriel Le Roux, Primer built a unified layer across the payments lifecycle that gives merchants visibility and control across processors, fraud tools, finance systems and payment service providers. The platform processes billions of transactions annually for customers including GetYourGuide, Dabble, Printful, Conforama and AppsFlyer, handling more than 95% of customers’ total payment volume and capturing more than 400 data points per transaction.
Fragmented payment infrastructure limits the effectiveness of AI systems because transaction data sits across disconnected platforms. AI Companion, Primer’s AI agent, is designed to surface anomalies, answer operational queries and recommend actions using transaction data gathered across the full payments lifecycle. Primer says it is building the product to move beyond recommendations into autonomous execution of experiments and performance improvements within customer-defined parameters.
Alongside payment acceptance, Primer is expanding products including Global Accounts, Reconciliation and Costs Overview to support finance and treasury teams with identifying FX leakage, reducing payment fees and improving operational visibility. PSPs and providers are also building onto the platform through Primer for Partners.
The United States currently accounts for around a fifth of Primer’s revenue, with annual recurring revenue doubling year-on-year according to the company. Primer expects the US to represent more than a third of its business by 2028 and says it is continuing to invest across sales, engineering, customer success and go-to-market teams.
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. We don’t want merchants chasing problems or missing opportunities. With full context across every payment, Primer Companion can act on their behalf, knowing what’s happening, why, and what to do next.
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.
