Primer raises $100M to bring AI agents into payments
What's the deal? London-based payments infrastructure startup PrimerDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom → has raised $100M in an oversubscribed Series C round, bringing its total funding to $170M. Sofina led the round, with Southeast Asia-focused Peak XV Partners joining as a new backer alongside existing investors Balderton, Accel, ICONIQ, Tencent, and Speedinvest.
Founded in 2020 by ex-PayPal employees, Primer gives large e-commerce merchants a single platform to manage multiple payment processors, acquirers, and fraud tools. It captures over 400 data points per transaction and handles more than 95% of customer payment volume on average. Checkout.com, Stripe, WorldPay, Klarna, and GoCardless all plug into the platform.
The funds will go toward expanding Primer's AI capabilities — particularly its AI agent, Primer Companion, launched in November 2025 — and accelerating US growth. The company plans to grow US revenue from roughly one-fifth to more than one-third of its business by 2028 and hire up to 50 people in the region.
Why now? Payments teams at large merchants increasingly want AI to handle routing, reconciliation, and fraud decisions autonomously. But AI agents need complete, unified data to work properly — exactly what Primer's orchestration layer provides.
"In the next few years, every payment decision in a large business will be initiated, optimised or audited by AI," said Gabriel Le RouxDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, chief executive officer and co-founder. "When you deploy agents across fragmented data, they don't just underperform, they make the wrong decision."
What could go wrong? Letting AI agents act autonomously on payments introduces real risk. A bad routing decision or a false fraud flag can cost merchants revenue and customer trust. Primer says it will operate within merchant-set parameters, but the guardrails are only as good as the data and rules behind them.
The US expansion also pits Primer against deeply entrenched incumbents and well-funded competitors on their home turf.
The signal: This round reflects two converging trends — the rise of payments orchestration layers that sit above individual processors, and the push to embed AI agents into financial operations. Investors are betting that the companies controlling the unified data layer will be best positioned to power autonomous decision-making in payments. Peak XV's participation also hints at growing merchant demand for this kind of infrastructure across Asia-Pacific markets.
Read more: Primer · Business Wire · Tech Funding News · UKTN · FinTech Futures · TechNode Global · Sifted
Image credit: Primer
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