With €86 million, PRIMER embodies the new generation of European infrastructure fintechs

Over the past decade, European fintechs have primarily focused on reinventing the user experience of finance. Neobanks, corporate cards, payment apps, and embedded banking services: the battle was fought through interfaces, seamlessness, and the disintermediation of incumbent institutions. A new generation of companies is now emerging with a radically different logic. Their ambition is no longer to become visible to consumers, but to control the invisible technical layers on which the future autonomous systems of finance will operate.

The €86.2 million funding round announced by Primer illustrates this shift. The round, led by Sofina with participation from Peak XV Partners and existing investors, brings the company’s total funding to €146.6 million.

Founded in London by former PayPal and Braintree executives, Primer develops orchestration infrastructure for large international enterprises. Officially, the platform enables companies to centralize multiple payment providers, fraud prevention tools, and transactional systems within a single architecture. But behind this technical proposition lies a deeper market evolution: payments are gradually becoming a problem of contextual intelligence.

“Fintech has gone through a major reset over the past few years. The market no longer rewards growth at all costs. Investors today 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 reflects this transformation precisely. For years, the value of payment platforms rested mainly on their ability to move financial flows efficiently: increasing authorization rates, reducing acquisition costs, or improving transaction performance. With the emergence of AI agents, the center of gravity of the sector is now shifting toward transactional data and the ability to contextualize automated decisions.

Primer is attempting to position itself as the abstraction layer capable of unifying fragmented signals across multiple PSPs, acquirers, fraud prevention tools, and financial systems. The company says merchants using its platform now process more than 95% of their payments through its infrastructure.

“We tripled our take rate and product adoption. We 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 sharply differentiates Primer from the first wave of European fintechs. Legacy players such as Adyen or Checkout.com primarily built proprietary infrastructures designed to internalize financial flows. Primer adopts a different philosophy, one much closer to modern cloud architectures: fragmentation is considered permanent.

Rather than replacing existing infrastructure blocks, the company aims to become the control layer sitting above them. In many ways, Primer resembles a software orchestration platform more than a traditional fintech. This evolution reflects a broader transformation across the European market: a new generation of B2B startups is now building specialized technical layers designed to power future enterprise AI workflows.

One of the most significant aspects of this strategy is the development of its artificial intelligence capabilities. Primer wants to gradually evolve its platform from a transactional visibility tool into a system capable of automating certain operational decisions.

Gabriel Le Roux’s messaging also reflects an ambition to position Primer as a long-term infrastructure company rather than a pure growth startup. “This marks the beginning of Primer’s next chapter,” he says. “And you’ll be hearing a lot more from us in the coming months.”

The company’s planned US expansion further highlights another defining characteristic of this new generation of European fintechs: thinking globally from day one. The United States already accounts for roughly one-fifth of Primer’s revenue, and the company plans to hire up to fifty additional employees there.

In payments, as in other segments of enterprise AI, competition is no longer limited to interfaces or transaction costs. It is increasingly centered on a far more structural question: who will control the decision-making layers on which the future autonomous agents of the digital economy will operate.