Leading Primer’s $40M Series B
I first met Sean at a coffee shop in Potrero Hill in 2014. Sean had just left Quid where he’d been CTO and cofounder. I’d just joined Lux. We spoke about the future of ML and AI, whether “deep learning was real” (in 2014, still an open question!), and what would come post the renaissance in computer vision (we both settled on computers understanding language). Emails, calls, more coffees, and a Lux sponsored seed round later and Sean had built a vision for Primer: to leverage Natural Language Processing and Natural Language Generation to accelerate human understanding of the world.
Almost exactly a year ago we launched Primer from stealth bringing to market 3 years of a world class artificial intelligence team’s brilliance and announcing Lux’s partnership across the first two rounds of funding (the seed and the A).
Our technology, which I playfully describe to my partners as a self writing, self healing, and self updating Wikipedia is, in fact doing just that. In August we partnered with Wikimedia enabling Primer machines to find and write wikipedia entries for some of the world’s top female scientists who’d historically been overlooked:
Our thesis: that every Fortune 1000 company and large government will demand this technology within the next decade. As proxy, in the last year alone we’ve closed customers across the world’s largest banks, top pharma, multiple governments, and expanded into legal as well. All with under 7 people between sales, marketing, and BD. Our customers span the globe and comprise the world’s most sophisticated corporations, influential institutions, and key decisions makers. As data and text scale exponentially they need our technology to help them structure it, make sense of it, and act with it.
As such I’m thrilled to pre-empt any “formal process” and massively double in leading Primer’s $40M Series B. Alongside Lux we’re excited to bring on syndicate investors Bill Maris from Section32, Mubadala Ventures, and existing insiders DCVC, Amplify, Avalon, and Bloomberg Beta. The Series B allows Primer to continue growing its global customer base, double down across all verticals, and scale the core team in SF while setting up satellites in DC and NYC. Read more about the round and Primer’s growing ambitions here!
