Primer, a London-based payment startup, has announced a €86.2 million Series C funding round to expand its AI payments and finance platform. The capital will also support its market development in the US, where the company plans to grow revenue to more than a third of total revenue by 2028, supported by plans to hire up to 50 roles in the region.
Primer is a financial technology company that provides a unified payment infrastructure, enabling companies to optimize and control every step of the payment journey.
The platform offers complete visibility and control across the entire payment operations system, integrating payment orchestration, reconciliation, security, FX, and financial operations services into a single open layer.
The company was built to solve a persistent problem: businesses having to rely on multiple fragmented providers and tools throughout the payment journey. Currently, the platform covers the merchant’s entire payment lifecycle, recording over 400 data points per transaction and handling more than 95% of customer payment volume on average.
The investment round was led by Sofina and Peak XV Partners, and backed by existing investors, including Balderton, Accel, ICONIQ, Tencent, and Speedinvest. With this new investment, the company has raised a total of €146.6 million, with platform adoption spanning more than 30 countries.
Primer was founded in 2020 by Gabriel Let Roux (formerly of Braintree) and Paul Anthony (formerly of PayPal), and was initially backed by Balderton and Accel in pre-seed and Series A rounds. Since then, it has secured multiple investment rounds and released new products, such as Fallbacks and Network Tokenization.
In 2025, Primer launched its own proprietary agent, AI Companion, alongside Global Accounts, allowing companies to optimize and control finance across their businesses.
With the introduction of their AI agent, they aim to solve a new issue specifically created by the rise of AI: data fragmentation across multiple systems, which can ultimately lead to major vulnerability and potentially flawed, widespread decisions.
“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,” said Gabriel Le Roux, CEO and co-founder of Primer.
The company reports that it processes billions of transactions annually for enterprise clients such as Get your guide, Dialpad, Printful, Conforama, Printify, Jackpot.com, and Maisons du Monde, among others.
This new capital infusion will support the expansion of Primer’s AI-native infrastructure, which they expect will become the next-generation foundation that payments and finance teams will run on.
The plan is to scale its capabilities to run experiments, optimize performance, and operate autonomously to support contextual, AI-driven decision-making.
“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.” Le Roux added.
Aakash Kapoor, principal at Peak XV, stated: “As payments enter a new architectural era, that depth of context becomes critical for AI agents to make decisions.”
The US represents a massive growth opportunity for the startup, already accounting for roughly one-fifth of Primer’s revenue, with annual recurring revenue (ARR) in the region doubling year-on-year.
