Over the past decade, European fintechs have primarily sought to reinvent the financial user experience. Neobanks, corporate cards, payment applications or integrated banking services: the battle was being played out in the interface, the fluidity and the disintermediation of the historical players. A new generation of companies is now emerging with a radically different logic. Their ambition is no longer to become visible to the general public, but to control the invisible technical layers on which future autonomous financial systems will operate.
The raising of 86.2 million euros announced by Primer illustrates this change. The funding round, led by Sofina with the participation of Peak XV Partners and historical investors, brings the company’s total financing to 146.6 million euros.
Founded in London by former executives of PayPal and Braintree, Primer develops an orchestration infrastructure for large international companies. Officially, the platform makes it possible to centralize several payment providers, anti-fraud tools and transactional systems in a single architecture. But behind this technical proposal lies a more profound evolution of the market: payments are gradually becoming a problem of contextual intelligence.
“Fintech has gone through a major reset in recent years. The market no longer rewards growth at all costs. Today, investors are looking for operational discipline, sustainable businesses and platforms with a clear reason to exist,” explains Gabriel Le Roux, CEO and co-founder of Primer.
The company’s positioning precisely reflects this evolution. For a long time, the value of payment platforms was essentially based on their ability to efficiently move financial flows: increase acceptance rates, reduce acquisition costs or improve transactional performance. With the emergence of AI agents, the sector’s center of gravity is now shifting towards transactional data and the ability to contextualize automated decisions.
Primer attempts to position itself as this layer of abstraction capable of unifying signals dispersed between several PSPs, acquirers, anti-fraud tools and financial systems. The company says merchants using its platform now process more than 95% of their payments through its infrastructure.
“We have tripled our take rate and adoption of our products. We have achieved a 100% retention rate. And today, merchants using Primer process more than 95% of their payments through our platform,” says Gabriel Le Roux.
This approach strongly distinguishes Primer from the first European fintech wave. Historical players like Adyen or Checkout.com have mainly built proprietary infrastructures seeking to internalize financial flows. Primer adopts a different philosophy, much closer to modern cloud architectures: fragmentation is considered permanent.
The company does not seek to replace existing bricks but to become the control layer above them. In many ways, Primer is more like a software orchestration platform than a traditional fintech. This development is indicative of a broader transformation of the European market: a new generation of B2B startups is now building specialized technical layers intended to power companies’ future AI workflows.
One of the most significant elements of this strategy remains the development of its artificial intelligence capabilities. Primer wants to gradually evolve its platform from a transactional visibility tool to a system capable of automating certain operational decisions.
Gabriel Le Roux’s speech also reflects a desire to position Primer as a long-term infrastructure rather than a simple growth startup. “This marks the beginning of the next chapter for Primer,” he says. “And you’ll be hearing a lot more from us in the coming months.” »
The American expansion announced by the company finally confirms another characteristic of this new European fintech generation: immediately thinking on a global scale. The United States already represents about a fifth of Primer’s revenue, and the company plans to recruit up to fifty additional employees there.
In payments, as in other segments of enterprise AI, competition is no longer just about interfaces or transaction costs. It now concerns a much more structuring question: who will control the decision-making layers on which the future autonomous agents of the digital economy will operate.
