Fintech firm Primer raises £75m led by Sofina with Peak XV Partners
This article covers Primer, a fintech startup, which has raised £75m in a series C funding round to accelerate development of AI-native payments infrastructure and expand its product and teams. The funding will support Primer's bid to centralise payment data and automate decisioning for merchants and finance teams.
Primer, a fintech startup, has raised £75 million in a series C funding round to accelerate development of AI-native payments infrastructure and expansion of its product and teams. The funding will support Primer’s bid to centralise payment data and automate decisioning for merchants and finance teams.
Why it matters
Payments infrastructure remains fragmented: processors, fraud tools, PSPs and finance systems often hold different slices of the same transaction. That fragmentation limits the effectiveness of machine learning and automation because decisioning agents work from incomplete data.
Primer’s round is notable because it backs a play that combines orchestration across the payments lifecycle with embedded AI. If Primer can centralise data and let AI act on it reliably, merchants could reduce fees, reclaim lost revenue from FX leakage and speed up reconciliations—practical wins for e-commerce and marketplace operators.
Inside the product
Founded in 2020 by Gabriel Le Roux, Primer offers 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 and, the company says, handles more than 95% of customers’ total payment volume while capturing more than 400 data points per transaction.
Primer’s AI Companion is presented as an agent that surfaces anomalies, answers operational queries and recommends actions using data collected across the full payments lifecycle. The company says it is building the product to move from recommendations to autonomous execution of experiments and performance improvements within customer-defined parameters.
Product expansions include Global Accounts, Reconciliation and Costs Overview, tools aimed at finance and treasury teams to identify FX leakage, reduce payment fees and improve operational visibility. Primer also offers Primer for Partners, a way for PSPs and other providers to build onto the platform.
Customers named by Primer include GetYourGuide (travel booking), Printful (print-on-demand fulfilment), Conforama (furniture retail), AppsFlyer (mobile attribution) and Dabble (leisure booking). These examples span marketplaces, retail and SaaS businesses that need high-volume payment routing, reconciliation and analytics.
Who are the investors?
Primer’s series C was led by Sofina, with participation from Peak XV Partners and existing investors. The raise totals £75 million.
In the announcement, 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.
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Founder perspective
In the announcement, Gabriel Le Roux, Co-founder & CEO at Primer, said:
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.
Le Roux emphasises building for completeness: stitching transaction-level data together so automated systems make decisions on a single source of truth rather than fragmented inputs.
The bigger picture
Primer says the United States currently accounts for around a fifth of its revenue and that annual recurring revenue is doubling year-on-year. The company expects the US to represent more than a third of its business by 2028 and plans further hires across sales, engineering, customer success and go-to-market functions.
This raise underscores sustained investor appetite for payments infrastructure that pairs orchestration with AI. For UK and European fintechs, it highlights two pressures: the commercial urgency of addressing fragmented payment stacks, and the capital required to scale internationally while building data-rich platforms that support automation. As AI becomes a default layer in finance decisioning, centralised, contextual data will be a competitive advantage for startups and their customers across the region.
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