From anti-bacterial pillowcases to accessible mental health tools and now a fast-growing healthcare startup, Keev isn’t your average consumer brand company.
Founded by Emil Eriksen, Keev is a venture studio that spots underserved markets, validates ideas fast, and builds digital-first businesses that scale globally. With an eye on performance and a relentless test-and-learn approach, the team has launched multiple brands that are thriving across the US, Europe, and Asia.
But while Keev moves fast, its payments infrastructure once held it back. That’s where Primer comes in.
From a late-night idea to a global portfolio
Keev started in the most modern of ways, on the couch.
One evening, Emil, a serial entrepreneur, was speaking with his partner, actress Kylie Verzosa. “We were chatting about how she could build a brand around herself with products she is passionate about instead of relying on partnerships,” Emil recalls.
That conversation planted the seed for what would become Keev.
The first brand to break out was Snoozy, a line of antibacterial pillowcases supporting healthier skin, that found traction in the US with over 20,000 orders in the first year. Then came Uma, a mental health app inspired by Kylie’s desire to make mental health support accessible to everyone.
More recently, Keev has launched a jewelry line designed to close the gap between luxury design and affordability, followed by &you, a digital healthcare platform targeting the Philippine market. Already, the platform is seeing 50% to 100% week-on-week growth with an estimated market size of $22b by 2030.
Keev’s portfolio might look eclectic, but there’s a clear throughline: each brand taps into a real need and is built to scale. “We follow curiosity, spot gaps in the market, and back ideas with data,” Emil explains.
Launching brands in a hyper-competitive market
If product-market fit is the foundation, marketing is the engine of the business. As a founder, Emil is deeply embedded in the numbers. Customer acquisition costs (CAC), conversion, and payback time are the metrics that determine whether a brand is worth scaling.
“We validate everything through performance,” Emil says. “The real world is where we figure out if there’s a viable business behind the brand.”
That lens has helped Keev stay ahead in an increasingly chaotic landscape. While others chase complexity—dynamic funnels, AI-generated everything—Emil has found that what cuts through today looks surprisingly familiar.
“There’s this idea that marketing has to be complicated now,” he says. “But honestly, what’s working best for us right now are bold, simple creatives with a clear message, back to basics.
“Marketing is always about leaving an impression and doing what others don’t. If everyone’s doing user-generated content, maybe the static ad stands out now. You just have to be willing to flip the script sometimes.”
Flipping the script on payments
The conviction to zig when others zag also applies to Emil and the Keev team’s thinking about payments.
“Throughout my career as an entrepreneur, it’s always been the same story: payment systems struggling to keep pace with the business. And that story was starting to play out with Keev.”
Emil explains that as Keev scaled its brands across regions, the team began integrating with multiple payment service providers (PSPs) to support different markets, currencies, and customer payment preferences. Then came the challenges: account suspensions, failed transactions, missing features, and outages, which all harm revenue growth.
To make matters worse, every new provider meant a new integration. Every small product change risked breaking something across the stack. Developers were constantly pulled into maintenance work, just to keep payments running.
“Whenever we made a small change, we had to update every single integration,” he says. “It was tedious. It was fragile. And it slowed us down. We needed another option.”
Enter Primer.
“Most of the payment space still feels years behind what fast-moving brands need. Primer is the first solution that gives us the flexibility and control we’ve needed for a long time,” he says.
Learn more about why fast-growing scale ups are turning to Primer.
How Primer powers Keev’s payment strategy
The bar for any tool is high for a company that moves as quickly as Keev. It needs to be fast, flexible, and intuitive enough to keep up with a team that’s constantly testing, tweaking, and scaling.
“Primer didn’t just meet that bar, it cleared it,” says Emil.
What first stood out to Emil was the usability. “I like the look and feel of the product,” he says. “It’s very user-friendly and much easier to work with than other platforms offering similar functionality. That simplicity matters for somebody like me who’s spent years dealing with rigid systems and clunky dashboards.”
Instead of maintaining separate integrations for every PSP across different brands and markets, Keev now runs everything through a single connection to Primer. From there, the team builds and manages logic using workflows, setting rules to route payments based on its unique needs. It’s all visual, configurable, and doesn’t require developer time.
Updates are made once and instantly applied across every processor, removing hours of repetitive development work. And if a provider undererforms or drops support, switching is simple, safeguarding revenue.
“Primer takes a lot of work away from the developers,” Emil says. “And it gives me a much easier way to verify that everything’s working as it should. I’m not relying on someone saying, ‘trust me.’ I can actually see it.”
Keev is also benefiting from Primer’s advanced feature set, including its decoupled 3DS, which is helping the team apply a smarter, more nuanced authentication strategy aligned with its goals. At the same time, Fallbacks are allowing Keev’s brands to automatically recover certain failed transactions by retrying them to alternative providers to protect revenue.
What’s next for Keev?
Keev is already scaling fast, but the real opportunity lies ahead. With &you gaining traction in the Philippines and plans to expand further across Southeast Asia, the team is building with even more ambition. And with Primer powering a more flexible, resilient payments infrastructure, it can now move even faster without compromising performance.
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