Joseph Phillips and William Corbera, who both come from business backgrounds, have been friends for over a decade.
Corbera co-founded RevoPay, a payment processing platform that was acquired by payment solutions company OSG in 2022. Phillips, for his part, led the national sales team at Seamless before launching sales at ServiceTitan, an online management tool for construction contractors .
In 2020, Phillips and Corbera—having worked in payments-related work for many years—decided to team up to found their own payments-focused business called Payabli. Payabli builds the infrastructure that allows companies, specifically software companies, to integrate and facilitate API payments.
“Payabli creates payment acceptance and issuance solutions [and] payment tools,” Corbera told TechCrunch. “We’re turning payments companies into software companies by giving them payment facilitation capabilities without the heavy burden, administrative burden and excessive cost of becoming a payment facilitator.”
Payabli is essentially trying to disrupt traditional payment facilitators like Stripe, Adyen and Paytrix: companies that allow customers to accept online payments using their platforms. Payment processors act as intermediaries between businesses and their banks, providing the backend for payment processing.
Payabli offers the standard suite of “pay” payment acceptance tools, including tools that allow a company’s customers to make recurring or scheduled payments or request invoices. However, it also provides “payment” tools to help companies themselves pay vendors and suppliers, such as virtual credit cards, physical checks and bank consolidations.
Payabli’s services also extend to various “payment transactions” products, including products designed to mitigate risk and fraud, manage disputes and compliance, and facilitate underwriting.
“Payments and other fintech programs are the low-hanging fruit for software companies to unlock new revenue and create stickier, more valuable customer relationships,” Corbera said. “This doesn’t just apply to software companies, but to any entity that coordinates the movement of money between payers and payees.”
Payabli’s go-to-market approach has won the approval of VCs, who have poured significant capital into the startup. Payabli announced this week that it has raised $20 million in a Series A funding round led by TTV Capital, Fika Ventures and Bling Capital, bringing the company’s total raised to $32 million at a “nine-digit” valuation. (Corbera did not disclose the exact amount.)
Payabli has about 60 customers, Corbera said, adding that revenue has grown threefold in the past 12 months to “seven figures.”
“The new round of funding will be used to drive further product innovation, enhance security and scalability, fuel new customer acquisition, and empower existing software partners to integrate and enable their overall processing volume easier and faster,” he said. Corbera. “We had over 16 months of runway left when we grew, but chose to grow opportunistically to further accelerate our growth and take on some large enterprise clients.”
Payabli, based in Miami, has 49 employees and expects to have nearly 70 by the end of the year.
