Primer secures £14 million Series A funding round led by Accel 

• Consolidates payment service providers (PSPs), payment methods, fraud platforms and other services across the  payments stack through a unified API, checkout and sophisticated workflows functionality 

• Funding will be used for international business development and scaling Primer’s remote-first team 

Primer, the low-code payments infrastructure and online checkout API, today  announces a £14 million Series A funding round led by Accel. Existing investors Balderton, SpeedInvest and Seedcamp  also participated, and were joined in the round by RTP Global. 

The investment brings Primer’s total funding to £17.8 million, coming just weeks after the initial launch of the  company’s platform, and 10 months since the company’s founding. Primer will use the funds to expand business  development efforts internationally, and to scale its remote-first product and engineering organisation. 

Merchants have increasingly sophisticated needs from a payments sector that is fragmented and complex. Described  as a “Zapier for payments”, Primer enables e-commerce merchants and online payments facilitators to connect and  maintain their entire payments ecosystem through a unified, best-in-class payments API and checkout. These  connections can include payment service providers (PSPs), payment methods, fraud providers, chargeback services,  subscription billing engines, BI tools, loyalty and rewards platforms. 

Primer’s unique value comes from its automation engine style of approach. Both payments and non-payments  services can be seamlessly connected to the checkout experience and payments flow via workflows, enabling  merchants to unify their fraud mitigation efforts, build sophisticated transaction routing, and solve complex flows  — all with no code. Payments teams can manage the bulk of complexity across their payments ecosystem, and  further enhance the checkout experience without requiring engineering resources. 

Primer was founded by ex-PayPal employees, Paul Anthony and Gabriel Le Roux in January of this year. As a  remote-first company, it has 23 employees across six countries, and has gained significant traction amongst  mid-market and large enterprise e-commerce merchants across Europe. 

Sonali De Rycker, Partner at Accel, will join Primer’s board. On the investment, she said:

“Primer’s platform addresses  a multitude of issues that merchants have to solve as they grow their business in today’s fragmented payments  world. The massive acceleration in cross-border commerce as a result of the pandemic has only further highlighted  this need. 

We’ve been enormously impressed with Paul and Gabriel. They have the payments experience and network to bring  a distinctive and disruptive product to market. We’re excited to be supporting them and the wider Primer team.” 

Primer co-founder, and Head of Product and Engineering, Paul Anthony added:

“During our time at PayPal, we saw  firsthand the technical burden online merchants face trying to offer the best payments experiences to their  customers globally. Our low-code approach enables merchants’ payments teams to manage and expand their  payments ecosystems, and maintain sophisticated payments logic with a familiar workflow UI. We’re delighted to  be working with Sonali and the wider Accel team to go to market internationally, and achieve our longer-term  technology vision sooner.” 

For more information, visit primer.io