· Venture Capital Tracker · investment-strategies · 1 min read
Primer's $100M Series C: London Payments Infra Bets the US Wants Autonomous AI Checkout
Primer raised $100M Series C from Sofina and Peak XV to scale AI-native payments — US ARR doubling YoY as autonomous finance ops go mainstream.
Payments teams still run experiments in spreadsheets. Primer raised $100M to let AI run them.
What Primer sells
Payments and checkout infrastructure with an AI layer — routing, retries, tokenization, and now AI Companion for autonomous optimization across merchant finance stacks.
Why the US matters
Primer already sees ~20% of revenue from the US with US ARR doubling YoY. This round is explicitly US GTM fuel, not European comfort money.
Investor bench
Sofina, Peak XV, Balderton, Accel, ICONIQ, Tencent, Speedinvest — ~€146.6M total raised across rounds.
Practical takeaway
Founders: Payments infra wins on authorization rates and cost per transaction, not dashboards.
Investors: Cross-border payments AI is a winner-take-most category if you nail enterprise reliability.
Sources
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