Primer Raises $110M Series C

Led by Lee Fixel's Addition, Primer has secured funding to propel its next phase of growth, including international expansion and strategic alliances with Microsoft and Palantir to serve mission-critical US Government needs

SAN FRANCISCO, June 22, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Primer, the leading Natural Language Processing (NLP) firm, today announced the close of a $110M Series C round led by Lee Fixel's Addition. New strategic investors include Steadfast, Sands Capital, and Hank Crumpton, former Ambassador-at-Large and US Coordinator for Counterterrorism. Existing investors Lux Capital, DCVC, Amplify Partners and more also participated. Primer also announced an integration with Microsoft Corporation to make Primer natively available within Microsoft Azure, as well as a partnership with Palantir Technologies, Inc. to make Primer available within the Palantir platform to deploy operational AI to US Government missions.

Organizations collect and create much more data than human analysts can handle. As a result, much of it remains unexplored or underutilized. Primer's industrial-grade NLP platform enables organizations to create structure and pull insights from vast amounts of data to support faster decision-making. Primer's NLP technology can effectively read and write in English, Russian, Chinese and Arabic. This technology has been proven in national security and intelligence domains to meet the highest standards. Recently, a financial technology company found that Primer's out-of-the-box Named Entity Recognition model outperformed the competition on average by 42%. The new funding will enable Primer to step up recruiting efforts both in the US and globally, as it seizes on the vast addressable market for NLP. Starting with new offices in London and Singapore, the company is set to expand its footprint across Europe and Asia.

Following the Series C, Lee Fixel has joined Primer's board. Lee brings deep expertise in scaling high growth companies, having served on the boards of Warby Parker, Flipkart, and Freshworks. He has also led key investments in Palantir, Stripe, and Spotify.

"Primer is transforming how we read, write, and perform advanced analysis on unstructured data to drive decision-making," said Lee Fixel. "Primer's impressive growth is underpinned by the strength of its NLP technology.  We look forward to supporting the company as it continues to drive innovation across both the public and private sector."

"NLP is undergoing a revolution as artificial intelligence continues to push the boundaries of machine performance in reading and writing tasks," said Sean Gourley, CEO & Founder of Primer. "We are now able to build machines that can achieve human level performance in many tasks from information extraction, to document classification to summarization. Series C capital will allow us to build larger and better performing language models and make those available across industries, from defense and intelligence to finance and health care."

"Having dedicated most of my life to intelligence and having spent decades leading critical missions where information was essential in shaping our understanding of the operational landscape, I understand the value of Primer's technology," said Hank Crumpton, former Ambassador-at-Large and US Coordinator for Counterterrorism. "Primer is already reshaping the way we assess and scale intelligence capabilities. I'm proud of the team and their mission to realize the responsible power of artificial intelligence."

Today, Primer also announced a partnership with Palantir to empower analysts, decision-makers, and warfighters with sophisticated AI-enabled decision-making technology to succeed in their missions, from HQ to the tactical edge. By making Primer's world-class AI and NLP available within the Palantir platform, federal clients can tackle the vast troves of data that exist in today's world?a major hurdle for organizations seeking to extract key networks and facts from highly dynamic situations. Palantir's Apollo for Edge AI technology brings the power of AI micromodels to the edge, unlocking rapid mission system reconfiguration to provide AI insights for warfighters in the field. Drawing on readily integrated enterprise data in the Palantir platform via open APIs, Primer's NLP capabilities surface hard-to-find insights from that data in near real-time and with full historical context. Primer's industrial-grade NLP engines are a natural partner to Palantir, with Primer's AI continuously providing insights that empower users to understand key nodes and relationships with Palantir's platform. With this seamless integration, users automatically receive AI insights as new data comes in and can make decisions with a complete view of their operations with unprecedented speed.

To better serve the most sensitive, mission-critical needs of the U.S. government and its allies, Primer is joining forces with Microsoft to make Primer available within Microsoft's Azure cloud computing platform. Primer and Microsoft will also collaborate on serving larger and more complex customers and contracts together, making it easier for intelligence teams to integrate Primer's technology into their existing workflows, including those running on the Azure Government Secret and Azure Government Top Secret services.

The company will build on the recent commercial release of Primer Automate, a no-code solution for users to build and train their own NLP models on their data. Automate offers a number of NLP Engines straight off-the-shelf. Primer Analyze further democratizes access to intelligence through a scalable, self-curating knowledge base that can analyze billions of documents in seconds. This unique capability allows analysts to quickly search through large-scale document caches and databases to extract the information that matters the most. Primer's products and models sit on top of its proprietary NLP technology, which is built on transformer-based neural networks, making its solutions models faster, more accurate, and easy to retrain.

With Primer, organizations can now train, retrain, build and deploy world-class AI and NLP technology for their specific needs. Continuously driving its technology forward, Primer is proud to bring industrial-grade NLP solutions to more organizations worldwide.

About Primer
Primer builds machines that can read and write. We make it easy for organizations to bring industrial grade NLP into their mission-critical operations. Primer's technology is deployed by some of the world's largest government agencies, financial institutions, and Fortune 50 companies. For more information, please visit https://primer.ai/