The French startup Primo announces a fundraising of 6.9 million euros from Headline and Global Founders Capital. The company, which centralizes the management of devices, SaaS applications, identities and IT support, now wants to enable AI agents to execute these operations end-to-end, under the control of IT teams.
Artificial intelligence is now making its way into the company’s most operational IT functions. No longer just to answer a question or suggest a procedure, but to order a computer, prepare a workstation, or even assign application access to an employee and revoke them when they leave.
Founded in Paris in 2022, the company announces a fundraising of 6.9 million euros from Headline and Global Founders Capital. It boasts more than 400 clients in ten countries, including Theodo, Dust and Skello, and annual recurring revenue of more than 3.4 million euros, up by a factor of four over one year.
The financing should enable the company to double its workforce and accelerate its international development. More than 40% of its customers are already located outside France.
A team built around the IT experience of growing companies
Primo was launched by Martin Pannier, who runs the company, with Antoine de Mereuil and Nicolas Nallet. Samuel Lebeau, notably through Swile, joined the adventure as technical director and co-founder. From the outset, the team targeted a very concrete problem for startups, scaleups and SMEs: internal IT is still organized as a succession of silos (asset management, purchasing, security, applications, identities, support), while the events that trigger it are common.
The arrival of an employee is the most obvious example, a company must buy or ship a computer, configure it, create accounts, assign licenses, apply security rules and organize reception. Conversely, a departure requires checking that no access remains open. In many organizations, these operations still rely on tracking tables, manual tickets and coordination between HR, IT and managers.
Primo first built a platform to bring together these building blocks: devices, employees, identities, SaaS access, inventory, tickets and internal policies. The company now presents itself as an “AI-native” IT platform, in which agents have the data and integrations necessary to act.
Switch from assistant to running agent
Thus an AI assistant can tell a collaborator the procedure to obtain access to Figma or resolve a connection problem. Primo wants to allow an agent to verify the user’s rights, apply the rules defined by the company, then restore access or transmit the request to an administrator.
In the case of onboarding, the agent can detect the arrival in the HRIS, order the equipment in accordance with company policy, prepare the position, assign the applications associated with the job and create the reception ticket. The same mechanism can be used in reverse when leaving to deactivate accounts and cut off sensitive access.
However, the model does not constitute the main part of the product advantage. The value lies in the context layer: knowing who the employee is, what hardware they use, what applications their role authorizes, what rights can be granted automatically and what actions require validation. Without this repository, the agent remains a conversational assistant connected to scattered tools.
“We are building a platform where IT becomes a lever, and where AI agents do the repetitive work while teams focus on what matters,” summarizes Martin Pannier, co-founder and CEO of Primo.
Security, condition of autonomy
Entrusting an action to an agent does not present the same level of risk depending on whether it involves responding to a ticket, ordering a computer or granting an administrative privilege. This is why Primo promotes governed automation, the company determines which operations can be executed autonomously and which must remain subject to approval by a manager.
This is the point on which the company will have to prove itself. The promise of AI agents in IT is not only measured in time saved. It depends on the granularity of rights, the quality of audit logs, the ability to explain a decision and the possibility of interrupting or correcting an action.
Primo has a positioning advantage here: the company already offers an IT management product before asking its clients to entrust agents to it. But progress towards truly autonomous tasks must be accompanied by security and compliance guarantees equivalent to those required of a human administrator.
Headline, GFC and two SaaS entrepreneurs in the capital
The operation is financed by Headline and Global Founders Capital, two investors already present in Primo’s capital since the company’s commercial launch. Jonathan Userovici, partner at Headline, believes that the main issue is not the ability of an AI to formulate a response, but its ability to execute a reliable operation at the heart of the information system.
Primo’s capital also includes Arthur Waller, co-founder and CEO of Pennylane, as well as Romain Niccoli, co-founder and CEO of Pigment. Their presence gives the startup support who knows the constraints of deploying B2B software to growing companies: integration into workflows, security, complex sales and internationalization.
Faced with American platforms, a place to be taken in Europe
Competition is already structured in the United States, Rippling is arguably the closest competitor in its ambition to connect the HR lifecycle with identity, device, inventory and application management. The American company also offers to manage these layers from a unified platform.
JumpCloud starts more from the corporate identity and directory. Jamf and Kandji dominate Apple fleet management more specifically, while NinjaOne and the major terminal management editors remain very present in administration, supervision and support. Microsoft constitutes another indirect but central competitor for companies already equipped with Intune, Entra and Microsoft 365.
In Europe, competition is more fragmented, with companies like the French Fleet positioning themselves in equipment, logistics and aircraft management. But few European players claim at this stage a platform that simultaneously covers the fleet, SaaS access, identities, support and a layer of execution agents.
For Primo, the challenge will therefore not necessarily be to replace all the tools already installed, but to impose its platform as the orchestration layer which connects this software, applies internal policies and allows a company to delegate a growing part of its IT operations.
The raising of 6.9 million euros should finance this transition from an IT management tool for growing teams to an infrastructure capable of having AI agents work within a secure perimeter.
