Payments infrastructure has a data problem. Most businesses run transactions across several processors, fraud tools, and acquirers, and each one holds only a piece of the picture. Primer was built to solve exactly that. The London-based startup just closed a $100 million Series C, bringing its total funding to $170 million, to push its unified payment infrastructure further and expand its AI capabilities.
The oversubscribed round was led by Sofina, with Peak XV Partners joining alongside returning investors Balderton, Accel, ICONIQ, Tencent, and Speedinvest.
The Core Problem Primer Solves:
Most merchants do not run on a single processor. They use Stripe for some markets, Adyen for others, and a local banking partner somewhere else. Each integration creates its own data trail, its own blind spots. When payments and finance teams try to apply AI on top of that fragmented setup, the model works with incomplete information and makes decisions based on a partial view of reality.
Primer’s approach is to sit across the entire payment lifecycle, from checkout to payout, and capture a complete data picture. The platform currently logs more than 400 data points per transaction and manages over 95% of total payment volume for its customers. That level of coverage is what makes AI useful rather than unreliable.
AI Companion Gets Autonomous:
Introduced in late 2025, Primer Companion is the company’s proprietary AI agent, currently used by merchants to analyze transaction data, surface performance anomalies, and troubleshoot localized payment declines or backend inefficiencies.
With the Series C capital, Primer is building Companion into something more active. The plan is to run experiments, optimize performance, and operate autonomously within merchant-defined parameters, shifting the tool from one that informs decisions to one that executes them. Customers like Maisons du Monde are already using Companion as their primary interface when working inside Primer.
Expanding into the US Market:
US revenue currently sits at about one-fifth of Primer’s total, and the company is targeting that figure to exceed one-third by 2028. To get there, Primer plans to hire up to 50 people across sales, engineering, and customer success in the region.
The US is the world’s largest payments market, and Primer sees it as a concentrated version of the fragmentation problem it was built to address. Large enterprise merchants operating at scale are increasingly recognizing that disconnected infrastructure limits what AI can actually deliver for their teams.
What the Platform Covers Today:
Primer’s product spans three broad areas: accepting payments through checkout and workflow tools, optimizing through network tokenization and fallback routing, and managing through reconciliation, observability, and a new costs overview feature. The Global Accounts product, launched in 2025 alongside Companion, extends that control into FX and treasury operations.
Companies like GetYourGuide, Dialpad, Rail Europe, Printful, Lime, and loveholidays across ecommerce, travel, FinTech, and digital platforms are already on the platform. Primer also operates a partner network where PSPs and payment providers can build on top of its infrastructure and offer the same data and AI capabilities to their own merchant clients.
The payment orchestration space has grown more competitive, but Primer’s thesis is that the data layer is the real differentiator. Connecting more processors and offering routing tools is table stakes. Having unified, clean, complete transaction data that an AI agent can act on is the harder problem, and the more valuable one to solve.
For founders and operators building products with payment complexity, Primer’s platform is worth understanding alongside the broader category of unified payment infrastructure tools. If you want to explore how payment orchestration fits into your stack, that’s a good place to start.
Primer has now raised $170 million since its 2020 founding, operates in more than 30 countries, and is building toward a version of payments where AI does not just surface insights but takes action. The infrastructure to support that is what this round is funding.
