Primer, a unified payments infrastructure platform founded by former Braintree and PayPal executives, has closed a $100m Series C funding round as it looks to establish AI as the operating layer for global payments and finance.
The round was led by Sofina, with Peak XV Partners joining as a new investor, alongside continued participation from all existing backers, including Balderton, Accel, ICONIQ, Tencent, and Speedinvest. The raise brings Primer’s total funding to $170m.
Proceeds will be directed towards accelerating the company’s AI capabilities and fuelling its expansion across the United States, where Primer intends to grow its share of total revenue to more than one third of the business by 2028.
To support that push, the company plans to hire up to 50 people in the region. The US already accounts for roughly a fifth of Primer’s revenue, with annual recurring revenue there doubling year on year.
Central to the company’s AI strategy is Primer Companion, a proprietary AI agent launched in 2025 that helps merchants handle complex payment queries and surface contextual insights.
Following the fundraise, Primer plans to extend the agent’s capabilities so it can run experiments, optimise performance, and operate autonomously within parameters set by each merchant, effectively shifting it from a tool that supports decision-making to one that can execute decisions independently.
Primer was established in 2020 on the premise that payments infrastructure needed to be unified before artificial intelligence could be effectively layered on top. Today, its platform spans a merchant’s full payments lifecycle, from checkout to payout, capturing over 400 data points per transaction and handling more than 95% of customer payment volume on average.
Primer CEO and co-founder Gabriel Le Roux said, “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 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.”
Sofina head of digital Jean-François Burguet 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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