Joseph Phillips and William Corbera, each from the entrepreneurial world, have been friends for over a decade.
Corbera co-founded RevoPay, a payment processing platform that was acquired by payments solutions company OSG in 2022. Phillips, in turn, led the national sales team at Seamless before leading sales at ServiceTitan, a web-based management tool for construction contractors.
In 2020, Phillips and Corbera – who had already been working within the payments industry for several years – decided to hitch forces and begin their very own payments-focused company called Payable. Payabli creates the infrastructure that enables businesses, especially software firms, to embed and enable payments via APIs.
“Payabli develops solutions for payment acceptance and issuance [and] tools for payment processing,” Corbera told TechCrunch. “We’re turning software firms into payments firms by giving them ways to process payments without having to cope with the heavy lifting, administrative burdens, and exorbitant costs that include being a payment intermediary.”
Payabli essentially seeks to disrupt traditional payment service providers like Stripe, Adyen and Paytrix: firms that enable customers to simply accept electronic payments through their platforms. Payment service providers act as intermediaries between businesses and their banks, providing the backend for payment processing.
Payabli offers the usual range of payment acceptance tools, including tools that allow an organization’s customers to make recurring or scheduled payments or request invoices. But it also offers “payout” tools that allow firms to pay suppliers and vendors themselves, reminiscent of virtual bank cards, physical checks, and bank integrations.
Payabli’s services also extend to numerous “payments” products, including risk and fraud mitigation, dispute resolution and compliance, and lending facilitation.
“Payments and other fintech programs are the easiest targets for software companies to capture new revenue and build more lasting, valuable customer relationships,” said Corbera. “This applies not only to software companies, but to all companies that coordinate the movement of money between payers and recipients.”
Payabli’s go-to-market approach has won approval from enterprise capitalists, who’ve poured a major amount into the startup. Payabli announced this week that it raised $20 million in a Series A funding round led by TTV Capital, Fika Ventures and Bling Capital, bringing the corporate’s total raised to $32 million at a “nine-figure” valuation. (Corbera declined to reveal the precise amount.)
Payabli has around 60 customers, Corbera said, adding that revenue has tripled to “seven figures” prior to now 12 months.
“The new round of funding will be used to drive further product innovation, strengthen security and scalability, acquire new customers and enable existing software partners to integrate and activate the full processing volume more easily and quickly,” said Corbera. “We still had over 16 months of startup time when we raised the funds, but we decided to invest opportunistically to further accelerate our growth and acquire some large enterprise customers.”
Miami-based Payabli employs 49 people and expects that number to grow to almost 70 by year-end.
