The next era of payments runs on unified intelligence

AI promises to give payments and finance teams capabilities they’ve never had before. The ability to move faster, catch problems earlier, and make smarter, more confident decisions in real time.

But AI is only as powerful as the data it is working with. 

And in payments, that data has long been fragmented. Processors, acquirers, fraud tools, and finance systems each see only a fraction of the transaction.

The result is payments, finance, and treasury teams all working from the same transaction, but rarely from the same truth.

Historically, this has led to inefficiencies. But in the age of AI, it creates something far more concerning.

When you deploy AI across fragmented data, it makes bad decisions that can have serious consequences for revenue, margin, and growth.

It’s a structural problem the industry is only beginning to confront. And it's exactly the problem Primer solves.

That’s why we’ve raised a $100M Series C led by Sofina with participation from Peak XV Partners and all existing investors. We’ll use the funding to accelerate investment in our product and team as we build the AI-native infrastructure that the next generation of payments and finance teams will run on.

Solving the fragmentation problem in payments

I co-founded Primer in 2020 after spending years at Braintree watching the same problem play out across every merchant we worked with.

Merchants didn’t want to rely on a single payment service provider (PSP). They wanted the best processor for each market, the right fraud tools for their risk profile, and the best checkout experience for their customers. What they had instead was a take-it-or-leave-it model that forced compromise at every stage.

So I left to solve it, building a single, unified, and open layer across the entire payments lifecycle—from checkout to payout—giving merchants the control and visibility they’d never had before.

Today, we’ve unified the payments ecosystem and built the infrastructure that allows AI to reach its full potential for payments and finance teams.

Because when you sit across the entire payments lifecycle, you see something fragmented systems never can: the complete picture of how money moves through a business.

Today, that foundation processes billions of transactions annually for companies like GetYourGuide, Dabble, Printful, Conforama, and AppsFlyer, handling more than 95% of our customers' total payment volume—most platforms see a fraction of that—and capturing over 400 data points per transaction.

When you deploy AI on top of that, the results are fundamentally different. A model with full context doesn't just optimize, it understands. It catches what others miss. It acts on signals that fragmented systems simply don't have access to.

That's what complete data makes possible. And it's why Primer is the platform positioned to bring the full power of AI to payments and finance teams.

Deploying AI across every payment flow

AI Companion, our proprietary AI agent, is already delivering value every day: surfacing anomalies, answering complex queries, and recommending actions grounded in the complete context that no fragmented system could provide.

I’ve already heard from customers that Companion is becoming central to how they operate. For example, Jérôme Connac, Head of Payment at Maisons du Monde,   recently told me he now works exclusively with Companion when using Primer.

The thesis is already proving itself. Now we’re scaling it.

We're building Companion to move from informing decisions to executing them, running experiments, improving performance, and acting autonomously within parameters you define. 

This isn’t AI as a feature. It’s AI as the entire experience.

And we're bringing that same power to finance and treasury teams. As we build out Global Accounts, Reconciliation, and Costs Overview, that same intelligence extends beyond payment acceptance into the broader movement of money—helping finance and treasury teams identify FX leakage, surface and reduce payments fees, and operate with far greater visibility and control.

Our vision is for Primer to be the intelligence layer every payments and finance team runs on.

The same is true for our partners. PSPs and providers are now building onto Primer through Primer for Partners. As that network grows, they'll benefit from the same data advantage and AI capabilities, creating more value for their merchants and for the ecosystem as a whole.

Expanding our presence in the US

The United States is the world's largest payments market. It's also one of the clearest expressions of the problem Primer was built to solve.

I’ve spent a lot of time in the US over the last few years speaking with some of the world’s biggest and most innovative companies. Increasingly, the conversations are converging around the same realization: fragmented infrastructure is becoming a constraint on what their businesses can do next.

These companies already operate at an enormous scale with highly sophisticated payment stacks. But as AI becomes central to business operations, they’re recognizing that fragmentation fundamentally limits what intelligence can deliver.

Today, the US accounts for around a fifth of Primer’s revenue, with annual recurring revenue (ARR) doubling year-on-year. The opportunity ahead is enormous, and we’re investing aggressively to capture it.

By 2028, we expect the US to account for more than a third of our business. To support that growth, we’re continuing to invest across sales, engineering, customer success, and go-to-market, building a team capable of serving the next generation of enterprise merchants.

The next era starts now

Every payments and finance team will use AI. The real question is whether the data underneath it is complete enough to let it deliver.

Most businesses aren’t there yet. Their data still sits across fragmented systems that were never designed to work together. And the intelligence they build will always be limited by what those systems can actually see.

The next era of payments will be built on unified intelligence. The next era of payments will be built on Primer.