Primer Secures $100M Series C to Fuel US Expansion and Autonomous AI Payments
May 20, 2026 – 3:38 pm
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 aims to grow revenue to over a third of total revenue by 2028, with plans to hire up to 50 roles in the region.
Primer is a financial technology company that offers a unified payment infrastructure, enabling businesses to optimize and control every step of the payment journey. The platform provides complete visibility and management across the entire payment operations system, integrating payment orchestration, reconciliation, security, FX, and financial operations services into a single open layer.
The company aims to address a persistent issue: businesses relying on multiple fragmented providers and tools throughout the payment process. Currently, Primer‘s 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, with backing from existing investors including Balderton, Accel, ICONIQ, Tencent, and Speedinvest. With this new funding, the company has raised a total of €146.6 million, with platform adoption in over 30 countries.
Primer was founded in 2020 by Gabriel Let Roux (formerly of Braintree) and Paul Anthony (formerly of PayPal), initially backed by Balderton and Accel in pre-seed and Series A rounds. Since then, they have secured multiple investment rounds and released new products such as Fallbacks and Network Tokenization.
In 2025, Primer launched its proprietary AI agent, AI Companion, along with Global Accounts, allowing businesses to optimize and control finance across their operations. With this AI agent, they aim to address a new challenge posed by the rise of AI: data fragmentation across multiple systems, which can lead to vulnerabilities and flawed decisions.
"In the next few years, every payment decision in a large business will be initiated, optimized, or audited by AI. That shift is already underway. The question is whether the data those systems run on is complete," said Gabriel Le Roux, CEO and co-founder of Primer. "That’s why the next era of payments can only be built on complete, contextual intelligence. And that’s what Primer delivers."
The company 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 envision will become the next-generation foundation for payments and finance teams.