Primer secures £14M: UK fintech founded by ex-PayPal employees wants to help online merchants

Online commerce is growing at a rapid pace driven by tech innovations. The merchants should quickly adapt to the dynamics and deliver a customer experience that keeps them competitive. 

In a bid to help them, Primer, a London-based startup enables e-commerce merchants and online payments facilitators to consolidate their payments services stack, seamlessly connecting third-party services.

Raised £14 million funding

Recently, Primer announced 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. This brings the total funding to £17.8 million. 

The company will use the funds to expand business development efforts internationally and to scale its remote-first product and engineering organisation. 

‘Zapier for payments’

Called a ‘Zapier for payments’, Primer enables e-commerce merchants and online payments facilitators to connect and maintain their entire payments ecosystem through a unified, 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.

Founded by ex-PayPal employees

Founded by ex-PayPal employees, Paul Anthony and Gabriel Le Roux this year, Primer’s unified payments integration, checkout experience, and workflows functionality allows merchants to quickly add new payment methods, unify fraud mitigation efforts and build sophisticated transaction routing with no code. 

As a remote-first company, it was 23 employees across six countries and has gained significance 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. 

Primer co-founder, and Head of Product and Engineering, Paul Anthony added: “During our time at PayPal, we saw first-hand 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.”