London FinTech Primer Raises $50M

FinTech payments startup Primer raised $50 million from ICONIQ Capital, the wealth manager of technology billionaires like Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey. Other backers included Balderton Capital, RTP Global, Seedcamp, Speedinvest and Accel.

Headquartered in London and founded in 2020 by Gabriel Le Roux and Paul Anthony, both former employees of PayPal, Primer offers end-to-end payments infrastructure that works with multiple payment methods, including buy now pay later (BNPL). The startup has a workforce of 70 people across 20 countries and is now valued at $425 million.

See also: Connected Economy Demands New End-to-End Banking Infrastructure

“The pace of new payment solutions entering the market has been accelerating dramatically to support global consumer demand for trends like mobile payments, digital wallets, 1-click checkout, buy now pay later and so on,” Roy Luo, a partner at ICONIQ Growth, said on Tuesday (Oct. 19).

“However, no one payment solution is close to accommodating all the changes and innovations that merchants need to keep up. So, for merchants’ payment and engineering teams, this dynamic forces immense technical complexity in tying together multiple payment methods, gateways, fraud detection and more,” Luo added.

Related news: Klarna Makes Preemptive Move, Overhauls BNPL Program

Primer acts as a developer framework for integrating payments on both web and mobile, enabling merchants to build seamless commerce experiences and advance their payments operations. The company said that it works on something that is a “first of its kind” just about every day.

Anthony said that ICONIQ “shares our expansive vision” and will join the company’s board.

“We have people deployed in 20 countries but need to grow our teams even more quickly to support the demand we’re seeing among both merchants and the third party services across multiple countries and sectors that want to work with us,” Le Roux said.