Primer, the low-code payments infrastructure and online checkout API, today announces 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. 

The investment brings Primer’s total funding to £17.8 million, coming just weeks after the initial launch of the company’s platform, and 10 months since the company’s founding. Primer will use the funds to expand business development efforts internationally, and to scale its remote-first product and engineering organisation. 

Merchants have increasingly sophisticated needs from a payments sector that is fragmented and complex. Described as a ‘Zapier for payments’, Primer enables e-commerce merchants and online payments facilitators to connect and maintain their entire payments ecosystem through a unified, best-in-class 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. 

Primer’s unique value comes from its automation engine style of approach. Both payments and non-payments services can be seamlessly connected to the checkout experience and payments flow via workflows, enabling merchants to unify their fraud migration efforts, build sophisticated transaction routing, and solve complex flows – all with no code. Payments teams can manage the bulk of complexity across their payments ecosystem, and further enhance the checkout experience without requiring engineering resources. 

Primer was founded by ex-PayPal employees, Paul Anthony and Gabriel Le Roux in January of this year. As a remote-first company, it was 23 employees across six countries, and has gained significant 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 fragments payments world. The massive acceleration in cross-border commerce as a result of the pandemic has only further highlighted this need. 

We’ve been enormously impressed with Paul and Gabriel. They have the payments experience and network to bring a distinctive and disruptive product to market. We’re excited to be supporting them and the wider Primer team.” 

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.” 

For more information, visit primer.io.