Primer is Building AI-Native Infrastructure that the Next Generation of Payments and Finance Teams will Run On

Primer, unified intelligence for payments, led by Gabriel Le Roux and the team, has raised $100M Series C led by Sofina, with participation from Peak XV Partners and all existing investors.

AI is reshaping payments and finance by enabling faster decision-making, earlier issue detection, and more confident real-time actions.

However, its effectiveness depends on unified data, which has historically been fragmented across processors, acquirers, fraud tools, and finance systems, leaving teams operating from different versions of the same transaction rather than a single source of truth.

This fragmentation creates inefficiencies and, in the AI era, can also lead to flawed decisions with direct impact on revenue, margins, and growth. It is a structural challenge the industry is beginning to address, and one that Primer is designed to solve.

Solving fragmentation in payments led to the founding of Primer in 2020, after years of observing the limitations of single-provider payment models at Braintree.

The company was built to replace fragmented, take-it-or-leave-it systems with a unified, open infrastructure layer spanning the full payments lifecycle, from checkout to payout, giving merchants greater control, visibility, and flexibility across processors, fraud tools, and checkout experiences.

By connecting the entire payments stack, Primer provides a complete view of how money moves through a business, enabling stronger decision-making and unlocking the potential of AI across payments and finance operations.

Today, Primer processes billions of transactions annually for customers, including GetYourGuide, Dabble, Printful, Conforama, and AppsFlyer, covering more than 95% of customer payment volume and capturing over 400 data points per transaction.

This level of unified data enables AI systems to move beyond basic optimization into true understanding, identifying signals and patterns that fragmented systems cannot access and supporting more accurate, context-aware decision-making across payments and finance operations.

Deploying AI across every payment flow, Primer’s AI Companion already delivers value by surfacing anomalies, answering complex queries, and recommending actions using full contextual transaction data that fragmented systems cannot access.

The system is gaining strong adoption among customers, with use cases expanding from insights to execution, enabling experimentation, performance optimization, and increasingly autonomous workflows within defined parameters. This capability is also extending into finance and treasury functions through upcoming products like Global Accounts, Reconciliation, and Costs Overview, helping teams identify inefficiencies such as FX leakage and payment fees while improving visibility and control.

As the ecosystem expands through partners and providers, Primer is positioning itself as an intelligence layer for payments and finance, unifying data, AI, and infrastructure across the entire money movement stack.

The United States is the largest payments market and a key focus for Primer, where fragmented infrastructure is increasingly seen as a constraint on AI-driven business operations.

The US now accounts for about one-fifth of Primer’s revenue, with ARR doubling year over year, and is expected to exceed one-third of the business by 2028 as the company continues investing in its go-to-market and product teams.

The next era of payments will be defined by AI, but its effectiveness will depend on whether the underlying data is truly unified across systems.

Today, most businesses still operate on fragmented infrastructure, limiting the intelligence they can build and the outcomes they can achieve.

The next era of payments will be shaped by unified intelligence, and by platforms like Primer that are building the foundation for it.