Cheers to 2021. Bring on 2022.

“2021 was a banner year for Primer with tremendous business growth, product innovations, and new NLP solutions for a growing set of government and commercial customers worldwide. 2022 promises even more as we continue to commercialize industrial-grade NLP for mission-critical applications.”
– Sean Gourley, Primer CEO

2021 was an exceptional year for Primer. We raised the bar in significant ways across all aspects of the company, honing our ability to deliver industrial-grade NLP solutions that are trusted by public sector and business institutions to transform “information overload” into “mission-critical intelligence” for faster human decision making and better outcomes. 

Primer’s customers are people on the front lines in high-stakes, fast-changing environments – spanning finance, retail, national security, and more – who rely on timely and reliable insights to make more informed decisions, faster. They’re analysts, operators, and business leaders – and the developers and data scientists who support them – responsible for tasks such as monitoring global events in real time, anticipating supply chain disruption, mitigating risk to brand reputation, improving stakeholder experiences, identifying disinformation campaigns, and other hard problems where a 360-degree understanding of all available data is vital. 

Primer stands side by side with our customers to help them apply advanced NLP technology to massive amounts of unstructured data – with greater speed, ease, accuracy, and agility – to achieve competitive advantage and mission-critical objectives. Today, up to 80% of an organization’s data is unstructured, according to Deloitte. It remains vastly untapped despite being critically important to providing a holistic view of an organization’s operating portfolio. That’s a gap Primer is uniquely qualified to address. 


While it’s still early days for NLP, the market is growing fast – estimated to reach $127 billion USD globally in 2028 – and we’re committed to building Primer for the long term. I’m pleased to share several examples of the investments we made last year in the people, products, and partnerships that enable Primer to achieve our mission to always better serve our customers.

2021 Primer Highlights

  • Secured $110M in Series C financing to support our strategy of becoming a world leader in NLP solutions for mission-critical applications. Funds are being used to accelerate our product development and delivery capabilities to meet a growing set of customer use cases worldwide. 
  • Expanded and deepened our customer base worldwide in both public sector and commercial markets, with major contributions from our new London and Singapore offices. With customers such as Walmart, Microsoft, and national security organizations I hope we’ll be able to name publicly soon, Primer is trusted by a growing number of world-leading organizations to support their language-driven intelligence initiatives.
  • Launched significant new product capabilities – including Automate, Engines, and Command – part of Primer’s end-to-end NLP platform that makes it easy for data scientists and developers to rapidly label, build, and deploy intelligent applications on their data at scale. Primer’s pre-trained NLP models are available “out of the box” and customizable, bringing additional velocity to builders who want to deploy NLP models into production for their unique use cases. 
  • Hired top-notch talent at all levels of the company, around the world – an impressive feat in such a fiercely competitive hiring market. We were recognized as a 2022 Best Place to Work for the second year in a row, which is a testament to our commitment to building a company culture that empowers people to thrive. Importantly, our bench of investors and advisors is world class.
  • Formed strategic alliances with Microsoft and Palantir to serve mission-critical U.S. government needs.
  • Selected as a top 10 mid-stage growth company on the inaugural Intelligent Applications Top 40 (IA40) list, recognizing the top private companies Madrona Venture Group, Goldman Sachs, and top-tier venture capital firms believe will define the future of software.

That’s just a sampling of key milestones Primer achieved this past year. We’ve established a strong foundation to build on, and there’s so much more to come in 2022 and beyond. As the world continues to change rapidly, we’ll continue to step up to help our customers meet an ever-widening array of challenges and opportunities. 

My personal thanks and appreciation to all of our employees, customers, and partners – you all contribute to our mutual success. I feel immensely positive, grateful, and proud of what we are building together. It’s my honor to work with and lead such a talented, dedicated team.

I know I speak for all of us when I say we are prepared and energized to meet this year.

– Sean

For more information about Primer and to access product demos, contact Primer here.