UK fintech founded by ex-PayPal workers hits $425M valuation with $50M funding

The 20-month-old London payments technology startup Primer has closed a Series B funding round that values the payments infrastructure startup at $425 million. 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 all participated in the round.

The fintech disruptor, which was 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.

Roy Luo, Partner at ICONIQ Growth, joins Primer’s Board. He commented: “Over the past two decades, the pace of new payment solutions entering the market has been accelerating dramatically to support global consumer demand for trends like mobile payments, digital wallets, 1-click checkout, buy now pay later, and so on. However, no one payment solution is close to accommodating all the changes and innovations that merchants need to keep up. So, for merchants’ payment and engineering teams, this dynamic forces immense technical complexity in tying together multiple payment methods, gateways, fraud detection, and more.”

With this platform, merchants can build new and better buying experiences with ease. Plug-in any desired payment solution with 1-click connections, define logic across the entire payment lifecycle with a drag-and-drop workflow editor, and create seamless, “smart” checkout experiences that meet today’s customer expectations. For the first time, merchants can connect and control their entire payments stack, and build their ideal payment flows autonomously from scratch.

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.”

Click here to read the full article.