London fintech Primer raises $50 million from Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey’s wealth manager Iconiq

A London startup founded last year has attracted $50 million (£36 million) from a Silicon Valley fund that manages the money of billionaires like Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey.

Primer said it had raised the sum from Iconiq Capital and other investors including Balderton Capital and Accel. Iconiq is a Californian wealth manager that invests the billions of tech luminaries like Facebook founder Zuckberg, Twitter’s Dorsey and former LinkedIn boss Jeff Weiner. It recently opened an office in London.

Primer was founded by two former PayPal employees and has built a platform that lets companies manage multiple different payment methods, such as buy now pay later and credit cards. The business was set up just 20 months ago but has been valued at $425 million (£308 million) in today’s funding round. It employs 70 people across 20 countries.

“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,” said Roy Luo, a partner at ICONIQ Growth.

“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.”

Primer’s cofounder Paul Anthony said: “ICONIQ Growth shares our expansive vision, so it’s hugely rewarding to add them to our Board as a trusted, experienced partner and advisor.”

Fellow cofounder Gabriel Le Roux said: “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.”