San Francisco-based tech company Primer announced Tuesday that it raised $110 million in a Series C round led by Addition.
Primer’s natural language processing (NLP) platform is primarily used for transcription services and, beyond that, can also be used to analyze text and write a summary. Primer’s NLP technology can read and write in English, Russian, Chinese and Arabic. The company’s platform is used by some of the world’s largest intelligence agencies, including those located here in the United States.
“Primer solves information overload by making it easier for intelligence analysts, operators and decision-makers to use all the information available to them to drive situational awareness and operations,” Sean Gourley, founder and CEO of Primer, said in a statement.
Recently, the company launched Primer Automate, a no-code platform for users to build and train their own NLP models. The company’s other tech solution, Primer Analyze, can be used to analyze billions of documents in mere seconds, according to the company.
“NLP is undergoing a revolution as artificial intelligence continues to push the boundaries of machine performance in reading and writing tasks,” Gourley continued. “We are now able to build machines that can achieve human-level performance in many tasks from information extraction to document classification to summarization.”
Primer will use the additional funds to build and deploy larger and better-performing language models, according to Gourley. It’s his goal to deploy said models across a variety of industries from defense and intelligence to finance and healthcare.
In tandem with the raise, the company announced a new partnership with data analytics firm Palantir. Additionally, the Primer platform will soon be made available on Microsoft’s Azure cloud.
“Primer is transforming how we read, write and perform advanced analysis on unstructured data to drive decision-making,” Lee Fixel, founder of Addition, said in a statement.
Following the latest raise, Primer plans to step up its recruiting efforts at home and abroad. Over the past year, the company has more than doubled its headcount from 70 to 175. The company will begin its international expansion in London and Singapore with the intent to expand its global reach across the rest of Europe and Asia. Primer is currently hiring for dozens of roles, including several in San Francisco.
Primer has raised $168 million in venture capital financing to date, according to Crunchbase.
Additional investors Steadfast Capital, Sands Capital and J2 Ventures participated in the round, among others.
