Gabriel Le Roux, Co-founder & CEO at Primer: Primer gives companies more control over how they accept customer payments

0:00Hello and welcome back to the Scaling New York show. I'm Sid Johnson. Today on the show, we've got Gabriel. Gabriel is the co-founder and CEO of Primer. How are you doing today? Thank you for joining me.

0:08Gabriel Le Roux:I'm very good. Thanks. Thanks for having me on the show. It's my absolute pleasure. Look, let's get into it. For those who don't know, what have you built? So, yeah, I'm Gab. I'm the co-founder and CEO of Primer. Primer is a unified payments infrastructure. what we allow online businesses to do is through one single unified api integration and infrastructure to connect to any services they want across the payment lifecycle so think about it you're like an online business you want to accept payments but you also want to create some redundancy connect to local vendors in some markets you want to connect to special for providers you want to have a central place to read all your data you want to have a a unique platform to reconcile all your payments to optimize for fx this is what we do right um and so we've been doing that for the last six years and we are working with uh companies across across the world really um primarily uk emia apac and the us amazing look you raised not a small round earlier this year,$100 million CBC.

1:19How was that round?

1:22Gabriel Le Roux:How was that round? Well, listen, it was a great round, as you said. Very exciting for Primer. And, you know, testament to all the great work we've been doing over the last couple of years. We, you know, this is our CBC. Prior to that, we had raised with Iconic, who's a large fund out of the US. They're also like quite big now in Europe. Axel, Balderton, Speed Invest, Seat Can, this time we raised with Safina and Peak15. And listen, I think the reason why we raised is because of the unique positioning we have on the market. There is a real shift happening in payments right now. So payment is that thing that people don't really know about.

2:05Gabriel Le Roux:If it works, great. The only time you'll hear people complaining about payments in ways it's not working. And we've all been there. And that's something that we're solving as Primer as well. But I think for the last couple of years, the only tech you had to accept payments was the PSPs. And they're great and work very closely with them. But when you're a merchant, you want to actually have the ability to connect to many, many services to power your payments. And that's something that I've heard a million times when I was, prior to founding Primer, I was at Braintree, a PayPal company. And I heard that a million times, right?

2:40Gabriel Le Roux:Hey, we want to connect to all these services. We want to create that unique commerce experience. We want to create some redundancy. And we've been creating that category of unified payments infrastructure. And we've shown that this category is actually gaining a lot of traction over the years. And that's why we've been able to raise recently. And we are becoming like even more relevant in the world of payments with everything that is happening right now in terms of AI and agentic payments, right? You need that single infrastructure to connect to many services. You need to have like one single funnel where like all your data is being consolidated.

3:22Gabriel Le Roux:Because you can't create like intelligent payments if you have like all your payments being fragmented across like all those different services. and that plus attraction we had internationally has allowed us to uh to raise this uh this amazing round so let's talk about the impact of ai then because you know you've been building since before you know the gpt for several years in fact before that moment came out then that that kind of happened exploding onto the market and you've been building since then how has the product changed since kind of ai has come to the market and we hear a lot about agentic payments we hear a lot about the impact that ai is going to have in this world how has it changed the way that you're Or, yeah, what you've built and the way that you're thinking about the business going forward.

4:03Gabriel Le Roux:Yeah. So we've, the primer has been always about how can you make sure that you're going to consume your payment data in the most efficient way possible for your business, right? and we've always actually been thinking about machine learning and ai even before like you know any of like the this sort of like revolution has been happening like you know over the last couple of years um very very early in the primary journey we started working on machine learning models to optimize for payment success um and we've been applying that to our product we are like in a very unique position in terms of our positioning as a platform because when a merchant is using Primer they are sending us on average 95 plus percent of their payments so what does it mean?

4:58Gabriel Le Roux:It means that we're not a point solution so we're really acting as this underlying infrastructure which is actually quite critical if you think about it And that's something that very, very few, if any, companies have been able to achieve across payments. Typically, they see 30%, 50%, 20%, 60 % max. The reason for that is because as a merchant, you want to use many services to power your payments. We have more data points than the PSPs because we know what happens before, after, if a payment fails, where does it go, how the payments event is going to be consumed and all that. So what we thought with my product team is how can we take all that and productize it to make it relevant to our users and the users of the primary dashboard and primary products.

5:54Gabriel Le Roux:And so last year, we've launched a product called Companion. And that's our own AI agent, which sits in the dashboard and essentially act as a second brain for your payments and finance team. and what companion can actually do is things that would take you hours and hours and hours to do because you have to crunch the data you have to sort of like debug you have to do some deep analysis and all these things and now at the tip of your finger the agent can start running your payment strategy right which is like you know something very unique that you can only do if you have full context context in the age of AI is hypercritical that's really interesting so you found yourself almost like sitting on this data goldmine and to your point context and data is like really the lifeblood of AI without it you you can't really do many interesting things when you when it came to building and designing companion how did you know that I guess the agentic use cases that you built it for how did you pick and choose what you wanted it to do it's a very good question so we spent a loads of time talking to our customer um I'm going to say something that is super cliche but But I mean, you know, the merchant is king at Primer and their success is our success.

7:11Gabriel Le Roux:So I spend a ton of time speaking to customers, looking at how they use the product. If they reach out to our support team, I look at, you know, what are the questions they have? We look at how they use certain parts of our product as well. And the sort of like behavior that we identified by looking at how they were interacting with our product is that for years they had like no visibility on their data. So think about it. If today you would actually record that podcast and you would have to connect like seven different tools to do it, right? You would have like 17 different dashboard. like you would have to sort of like try to understand what's happening look at the data across all those different dashboard and all that maybe like load reports on your viewer view view viewers sorry maybe gonna cut that one uh viewers like uh uh to understand like you know their interaction with your part all that it it is it is very very complicated right and what we've done is we've been allowing our customers to have a single place to understand what's happening across their payments end-to-end.

8:22Gabriel Le Roux:So all the data that was super scattered in the past is now centralized within Primer. So we have a protocol observability to do that. And now you can have, it's not a black box anymore. You can slice and dice. You can understand behavior. You can create custom charts. You can apply filters and all that. So you have a central place. But what we realized with some of our users was they were having access to that, but they were not pushing the boundaries of what they could achieve with that data, right? So you had a bit of a, okay, like I'm doing a little bit here and there, and then you had a, okay, and so what now?

9:00Gabriel Le Roux:What else can I do? And what we realized was, okay, what we can do is essentially like augment their capacity as users of Primer and and consumer of our data by providing them that sort of superpower with companion and for now and and and to then allow them to uh yeah uh consume and interact with that data in a much more sophisticated way and how did that launch or release go and any like lessons learned from yeah i mean no we've we've we've learned how to launch product by now uh and you sort of like launch them in phases you have like obviously your design partners uh with whom you launch the product um you listen to their feedback you look at the behavior then you improve it and then you know essentially like as we launch the product we look at adoption um and and you know like if there's gaps we productize those gaps um and you know we have some customers now uh telling us that they are essentially only interacting with companion it's becoming like the soul-like interaction with primer uh some of them are calling calling companion their best friend which are funny funny um and so yeah it's been it's been uh uh phenomenal to see like the adoption of this product and has that shifted the way that you are positioning yourself in the market is companion becoming or can you see a world in which companion becomes the flagship product to get people excited and interested in the the primer suite more generally well the the primer suite is geared towards like you know many different type of users obviously we have you know a the the the core product which is geared toward like payments team um and help them like orchestrate their payment stack connect to all these services um obviously companion like is uh is obviously for them and like you know any members of their team which are going to be uh interacting with the data but you know we've been solving not just the payments team but also for like any other teams which will actually interact with uh with a with with payments so we have like a fit up suite for finance and treasury teams and essentially the way we're thinking about companion is it's it's a product that should be across all the primer suite of products and support like anyone interacting with Primer.

11:33Gabriel Le Roux:So I think it's going to become like a critical part of our product suite, but it's a product among a lot of other products. And since launching and releasing new products and seeing the market and the world change, how has your overall go-to-market function or approach changed?

11:55Gabriel Le Roux:um it's a good question um we've been always um very data-driven on how we're looking at go-to-market um i've been doing sales for the last 12 years at heart like you know this is where i started my career uh and uh i am a a firm believer of like you know ensuring that you have a good grasp of who you're going after uh what are the customer that uh are going to resonate with the product that you have now and the product you're going to have in the future and have a lot of data to back your go-to-market strategy and so that's something that you know has always been like a core part of how we approach and go-to-market um we obviously like you know spending a lot of time uh using a lot of ai tools ourself to do some mapping to have like you know ways to qualify deals to create custom outreach, but to also optimize for our positioning when some people are searching on ChatGPT or Cloud.

13:03Gabriel Le Roux:So there's a lot of leads that are coming from these platforms now. And so that's the way we've been approaching go-to-market. The big thing with Primer is that we've been global from day one. So a very, very, very few companies in the world of payments have done that. And it was like, you know, super tough. Like in the early days, I was spending like so much time, like, you know, early in the morning talking to the Singapore team and Singapore customer or in Australia to very, very late at night to speak with the US team and our US customers. but um but we've done that because we had the very very strong conviction that the huge shift happening in payments wasn't just a thing happening in the uk or europe right it was a it was a global shift and so that's the big thing that we've achieved over the years is how can you quickly build a product and a go-to-market motion that is actually global and we've achieved that which is why right now we work with you know companies across the world any i don't know key hints or tips or like real lessons learned that enabled you to scale so quickly so early because you know it's a it's a complicated space in itself but i imagine doing it all at once in the early days you're like spinning a thousand plates i don't know any hints or tips or mistakes that you made um well i think the first the first hint or the first tip is you need to understand culture i think you know it's very very like uh i guess like the mistake you could do if you start to launch globally is thinking like oh like you know everything is going to work the same way like to some degree right like well selling in one place is going to be the same as selling another place right it's it's a huge mistake selling in france selling in germany selling the uk selling the us selling in singapore very different very very different right you need to understand like you know how to speak the language of your uh your counterpart in the room uh you need to understand like you know how they interact to uh to value selling um so that's the first thing and i have the uh um i have the experience selling globally so for me it wasn't that very natural thing but that's something you have to teach like you know to to teams which may not be like you know used to that right yes you can hire locally but you're going to have cross-functional teams which are going to interact with many customers and you have to make sure that they understand that um i think in terms of like the uh the the the mistake you can do as well and we've we've been taking a very cautious approach as primer when it comes to that is hire too fast too soon right like you make sure that you understand the market very well uh make sure that you have like very very strong proof points before like you know uh hiring like too many people in the same place um and uh and and make sure that you know your product is well suited for that market right um and so yeah we've we've we've done these things like reasonably well um and and now we actually like you know doubling down on some of these markets and let's let's talk about that then you've raised 100 million like i said it's a it's a large round you've got this kind of war chest now to to take you to the next level what does that look like where are you doubling down?

16:15Is it product, market expansion, growing the team? Tell me.

16:19Gabriel Le Roux:Yeah, so we are, we're always going to continue to invest in product and innovation. So we are like, you know, pushing on doing more when it comes to our AI offering. So that's like one thing. We are working like hard as well on like innovating for other users of the product, product the finance treasury team we've launched a reconciliation product a few years back for financing treasury teams we've launched our global accounts product last year which allows you to open up bank accounts directly on primer optimize for your fx exposure pay out to your suppliers all that so that's something that you know we are uh going to continue to to invest in and and on the the go-to-market side, we've been working with US companies for the last couple of years, for the past few years.

17:14Gabriel Le Roux:And we actually, like, again, we have those proof points. We've seen a lot of traction in the US. And now we're actually doubling down on the market and looking to hire more account execs, but also the teams which should support them on the ground over there, customer success, solution engineers, and all that. Could you see a potential relocation for yourself at some point you never know i'm in the plane every two weeks or every week so uh it might it might happen at some point it might happen amazing one final question what is the metric or two that you check every day every week that is how you keep a sort of finger on the pulse of the business no it's it's it it's it's a very difficult question to answer I look at a ton of metrics every single day.

18:05Gabriel Le Roux:I mean, listen, like there's many things that we're looking at. You look at NPS. You want to make sure that customer satisfaction stays very high. It's mission critical, right? I tell to my team, you know, it's not just about selling a product. It's by selling an experience, selling like a partnership. And we need to make sure that we always stay at the top of our game. and we need to act as an extension of our customers team. You know, payments is a mission critical part of your stack, right? And so it needs to be, you know, it needs to work. You need to make sure that you have the right support, all that.

18:40Gabriel Le Roux:So I will look at NPS all the time. I mean, obviously like you don't do NPS every single day, right? You have cycles NPS, right? But that's something I will look at. I'll look at adoption of our products. We have our attachment rate, which is the amount of product that, you know, customers are using has been tripling over the last like three years um and that's something that you know i i i stay very close to um we're looking at the ramp when someone starts using primer and then like you know growing to the to the full usage so time to ramp so yeah there's many many many kpis i look at i think kpis will differ across businesses but uh yeah product usage which satisfaction are definitely, you know, top of mind for me.

19:22You seem like data and metrics were like an integral part of the business. Yeah. Was that the case from day one? Or is that something you started to implement from seed series? No, no, no, no.

19:34Gabriel Le Roux:Day one. You can't run a business if you don't understand what's happening. It's like you can't run a car if you don't know how the car is like, you know, if everything is functioning in your car, right? you need to make sure that you don't have any blind spots as well and one thing that we've invested like very very early on at primer is data on the product but data on the go-to-market side right from the very very beginning of of our journey we we invested in a um a sales ops function and i remember like people being like what why do you need someone in sales ops why do you need to invest in your crm i was like well how do you think you'll understand your pipeline your customer what's happening across your business if you're not like you know capturing you know all those data points why is someone using you if they don't want to use you why where are they located like all these things right and on the product side like how do they interact with your product how long it takes for them to activate a feature are they using that product on a weekly basis on a monthly basis and we look at those like you know every single week with my leadership team we have like meetings to look at you know the kpis across the business um so yeah i i do think that you need to be data driven to to run a business especially when you have a multi-product strategy which is our case uh and a business that is global and used by customers across the world Amazing.

21:06I couldn't agree more. I think it's like a lot of my work when I was working in startups was all about metric reporting, data driven stuff. So I love it. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to speak to me. I'll be watching. It's going to be fun seeing you kind of deploy this capital and get to that next stage. So thank you for sharing it with me.

21:21Gabriel Le Roux:Thanks for having me on the show.