Former Paypal execs raise £14m for start-up venture Primer
Primer, a London-based fintech founded by two former PayPal executives, has landed £14 million in a Series A round led by Accel.
Primer has raised a total of £17.8 million in just under a year since it was founded in January
The start-up consolidates merchants payments stacks using low-code and an online checkout application programme interface (API).
In other words, it allows businesses to switch between payment service providers (PSPs), payment methods, fraud providers, chargeback services, subscription billing engines and rewards. As well as test new services. But all without touching any code themselves.
It calls itself a “Zapier for payments”.
A big year of funding
Primer’s co-founders, Paul Anthony and Gabriel LeRoux, met at Braintree – a Chicago-based payment gateway bought up by PayPal back in 2013.
Other investors in their new venture include Balderton, SpeedInvest and Seedcamp.
RTP Global is a new investor alongside Accel, which has previously backed Spotify and the co-founders’ former company, Braintree.
The Series A round comes just six months after its £3.2 million seed round. And less than a year since its £600,000 pre-seed round.
This means Primer has raised a total of £17.8 million in just under a year since it was founded in January.
The start-up says it will use the latest funding to fuel international business development and scale its “remote-first” team. It already claims to have conducted technical research with 80 of “the world’s largest merchants” prior to its launch.
Primer’s co-founders, Gabriel LeRoux and Paul Anthony
Primer has grown its team so far to 23 employees across six countries.
Solving a growing problem
Co-founder Anthony says he and LeRoux “saw first-hand” the technical burden online merchants face trying to offer a slick payments experience for customers globally.
“Our low-code approach enables merchants’ payments teams to manage and expand their payments ecosystems,” explains Anthony.
Whilst at the same time maintaining a “sophisticated payments logic with a familiar workflow UI [user interface]”.
Primer’s lead investor, Accel, thinks such an offering could solve “today’s fragmented payments world” for merchants.
“The massive acceleration in cross-border commerce as a result of the pandemic has only further highlighted this need,” says Accel partner, Sonali De Rycker.
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