Payabli is building payment management tools for software startups

Joseph Phillips and William Corbera, both of whom come from entrepreneurial backgrounds, have been friends for over a decade.

Corbera co-founded RevoPay, a payments processing platform that was acquired by payments solutions firm OSG in 2022. Phillips, for his part, led the national sales team at Seamless before heading up sales at ServiceTitan, a web-based management tool for construction contractors.

In 2020, Phillips and Corbera — having worked in payments-related jobs for a number of years — decided to team up to found their own payments-focused venture called Payabli. Payabli builds the infrastructure that allows companies, specifically software companies, to embed and facilitate payments through APIs.

“Payabli builds payment acceptance and issuance solutions [and] payment operations tools,” Corbera told TechCrunch. “We make software companies payments companies by giving them payment-facilitating capabilities without the heavy lift, administrative burden and exorbitant cost of becoming a payment facilitator.”

Payabli is essentially trying to disrupt traditional payments facilitators like Stripe, Adyen and Paytrix: Companies that let customers accept electronic payments using their platforms. Payments facilitators act as middlemen between businesses and their banks, delivering the back end for payments processing.

Payabli offers the standard array of “pay-in” payment acceptance tools, including tools to let a company’s clients make recurring or scheduled payments or request invoices. But it also provides “pay-out” tools to help companies themselves pay vendors and suppliers, like virtual credit cards, physical checks and bank integrations.

Payabli’s services extend to various “payment operations” products, as well, including products designed to mitigate risk and fraud, handle disputes and compliance and facilitate underwriting.

“Payments and other fintech programs are the lowest-hanging fruit for software companies to unlock new revenue and create stickier, more valuable customer relationships,” Corbera said. “This is not only true for software companies, but any entity that coordinates money movement between payers and recipients.”

Payabli’s go-to-market approach has won approval from VCs, who’ve poured a substantial amount of capital into the startup. Payabli this week announced that it raised $20 million in a Series A funding round led by QED with participation from TTV Capital, Fika Ventures and Bling Capital, bringing the company’s total raised to $32 million at a “nine-figure” valuation. (Corbera wouldn’t reveal the exact amount.)

Payabli has around 60 customers, Corbera said, adding that revenue grew 3x over the past 12 months to “seven figures.”

“The new round of funding will be used to drive further product innovation, reinforce security and scalability, fuel new customer acquisition and empower existing software partners to integrate and activate total processing volume easier and faster,” Corbera said. “We had over 16 months of runway left when we raised, but we chose to raise opportunistically to further accelerate our growth and take on some large enterprise customers.”

Payabli, based in Miami, has 49 employees and expects to have nearly 70 by the end of the year.