Payments startup Primer has secured $100 million in Series C funding, led by Sofina, with participation from Peak XV Partners and continued backing from Balderton, Accel, ICONIQ, Tencent and Speedinvest.
Primer plans to use the fresh capital to accelerate its investment in artificial intelligence for payments and finance teams, while also deepening its expansion in the United States. The company aims to grow its US revenue to more than one-third of total revenue by 2028.
Founded in 2020, Primer was built around a simple but ambitious idea: modern payments need one unified infrastructure layer before businesses can make full use of intelligence and automation on top of it.
That proposition has become more relevant as large merchants deal with increasingly complex payment stacks. Businesses often work with multiple processors, payment methods, geographies and financial systems. Primer is positioning itself as the operating layer that can sit across the full payment journey, from checkout to payout.
The company says its platform captures more than 400 data points per transaction and manages over 95 percent of customer payment volume on average. For merchants, that means payment decisions can be made with wider context instead of scattered signals sitting across fragmented systems.
Gabriel Le Roux, CEO and co-founder of Primer, said the next phase of payments will be shaped by AI-led decision-making inside large businesses. He argued that AI systems can only work effectively when the data they rely on is complete and contextual.
“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,” Le Roux said.
He added that fragmented data can lead AI agents to make poor decisions, making unified infrastructure more important as automation becomes central to payment operations.
Primer is also building Primer Companion, an AI-enabled layer designed to help merchants detect problems, identify opportunities and act across payment workflows. Le Roux said the goal is to prevent merchants from “chasing problems or missing opportunities” by giving them full context across every payment.
For Sofina, the investment comes at a time when payments infrastructure is moving through a structural change. Jean-François Burguet, Head of Digital at Sofina, said merchants are increasingly consolidating onto unified infrastructure while AI becomes central to transaction-level decision-making.
He said Primer’s team has spent the past six years building a platform suited to that shift, earning the trust of demanding merchants and preparing for broader global growth.
The Series C round signals continued investor confidence in AI-led payment orchestration at a time when businesses are looking for better visibility, control and automation across financial operations. For Primer, the next test will be scaling that promise in the US market while proving that AI can move from payment insight to payment action.
Also Read: Vaibhav Suryavanshi’s Rise Is Bigger Than a Net-Worth Number
