The developer of PrimerPro is SIL International, or SIL. SIL is a faith-based nonprofit organization founded in 1934. It was originally known as the Summer Institute of Linguistics, Inc. SIL is committed to serving language communities worldwide through research, translation, and materials development.

SIL has a group called Language Technology. This team supports language development by providing specialized software and fonts. They also provide support and training for its software applications, including PrimerPro.

PrimerPro was developed to assist literacy workers by making it simpler to develop primers. It does tedious work which native authors and literacy specialists traditionally had to do themselves. Authors can instead focus on creative story writing using a list words supplied for each lesson, and PrimerPro will subsequently check the story.