Primer.

Primer is a San Francisco company that turns a list of target accounts - or a written-out ideal customer profile - into a real, deployable advertising audience. It resolves identities, stacks enrichment data, and hands the platforms something they can match against at 3 to 5 times the rate of a raw spreadsheet. Then it does the part everyone forgets: it measures whether any of it produced pipeline.

Roughly 29 people work here. The customer roster runs to 30-plus enterprises - Rippling, Carta, Verkada, Air, Vouch, ChartHop, Superside. The G2 rating sits at 4.6. None of that is the interesting part. The interesting part is the problem they decided was worth a company.

Keith Putnam-Delaney had run growth at Dropbox and Eden before deciding that the in-house data tool he kept wishing for should be a real product. His co-founder, Juan Vasquez, took the CTO seat and the engineering problem that came with it. They started part-time on an MVP in mid-2019, bootstrapped it to a launch in 2020, and only then raised outside money - the unfashionable order of operations.

The bet was specific. Not "marketing needs more AI." Not "let's disrupt advertising." The bet was that B2B buyers don't live only on LinkedIn - they scroll Meta, Google and Reddit like everyone else - and that the team who could reliably get the right audience onto those channels, and then prove it worked, would own a category.

Primer's platform runs a cycle. First it builds an audience from your CRM, its own B2B database, and the companies de-anonymized from your website traffic. Then it syncs that audience straight to the ad networks - Meta, Google, LinkedIn, Reddit, DV360. Finally, it measures results at the company and contact level, with holdout groups that show actual incremental lift rather than the vanity of a click.

Primer's stated ambition is to undo martech fragmentation - the sprawl of disconnected point tools that made the original problem possible. The endgame its investors describe is becoming the system of record for marketing data: the place where audiences are defined, activated and measured, rather than the fourteenth tab a marketer keeps open and resents.

The company keeps the values plain - experiment and analyze, work flexibly, be the rising tide, learn with empathy. It's remote-friendly and small on purpose. The team carries alumni from Dropbox, Clearbit, Modsy and Verkada, which is to say people who have already watched this movie from the customer's seat.