Primer secures a $425m valuation after Series B fundraise led by ICONIQ

By Joy Dumasia

Primer has closed a Series B funding round that values the payments infrastructure startup at $425 million only 20 months after being founded. Primer, founded in early 2020 by ex-Paypal/Braintree employees and employs more than 70 people across 20 countries, has built the world’s first automation platform for payments.

The $50M Series B fundraise was led by ICONIQ Growth, the San Francisco based investment firm that has backed global tech companies such as Adyen and Marqeta to Snowflake and Datadog. Existing investors, including Accel, Balderton Capital, Seedcamp, Speedinvest, and RTP Global, participated in the round. 

With Primer, merchants can build new and better buying experiences with ease. Plugin any desired payment solution with one click connections, define logic across the entire payment lifecycle with a drag-and-drop workflow editor and create seamlessly “smart” checkout experiences that meet today’s customer expectations.

Primer also creates a whole new, open distribution channel for services across the payments landscape to go to market. Any third party developer can build connections to integrate new services, from payment methods and fraud tooling to data warehousing and customer messaging platforms. Merchants ‘click and connect’ to the ever-growing list of services within their Primer dashboard, requiring no additional code.

Paul Anthony, Co-Founder at Primer, said: “Our past experience running hundreds of deep-dive technical workshops with some of the biggest online companies like Uber, Spotify and Airbnb, has given us unique insight into the deeply-rooted technical fragmentation that exists in global payments. Primer offers all the underlying infrastructure for merchants to create new, better buying experiences for their customers. But, we’ve barely scratched the surface of how payments automation will disrupt payments for good. Our mission is to make payments a first-class product area in any business. ICONIQ Growth shares our expansive vision, so it’s hugely rewarding to add them to our Board as a trusted, experienced partner and advisor.”