Joseph Phillips and William Corbera, each from entrepreneurial backgrounds, have been friends for over a decade.
Corbera is the co-founder of 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 and then led sales at ServiceTitan, an online management tool for construction contractors.
In 2020, Phillips and Corbera — after many years working in payments-related roles — decided to affix forces and launch their very own payments-focused enterprise called Payabla. Payabli is building infrastructure that enables firms, especially software firms, to embed and facilitate payments via APIs.
“Payabli creates payment acceptance and issuance solutions [and] tools for payment operations,” Corbera told TechCrunch. “We are making software providers become payments businesses by giving them the capabilities to facilitate payments without the heavy burden, administrative burden and prohibitive costs of being a payment intermediary.”
Payabli is essentially attempting to disrupt traditional payment processors like Stripe, Adyen and Paytrix: firms that allow customers to just accept electronic payments using their platforms. Payment advisors act as intermediaries between firms and their banks, providing the facilities to process payments.
Payabli offers a standard set of tools for accepting “deposit” payments, including tools that allow a company’s customers to make recurring or scheduled payments or request invoices. However, it also offers “payout” tools that help firms pay their vendors and suppliers, similar to virtual bank cards, physical checks, and bank integrations.
Payabli’s services also include a number of “payment operations” products, including products designed to cut back risk and fraud, resolve disputes and ensure compliance, and facilitate underwriting.
“Payments and other fintech programs are the easiest solution for software companies to unlock new revenues and create longer-lasting and more valuable customer relationships,” Corbera said. “This applies not just to software companies, but to any entity that coordinates the flow of money between payers and payees.”
Payabla’s go-to-market approach has gained approval from VC investors who have invested a significant amount of capital into the startup. This week, Payabli announced it had raised $20 million in a Series A funding round led by TTV Capital, Fika Ventures and Bling Capital, bringing the company’s total to $32 million at a “nine-figure” valuation. (Corbera didn’t disclose the exact amount.)
Payabli has about 60 customers, Corbera said, adding that revenue has tripled in the last 12 months to “seven figures.”
“The new round of funding will be used to support further product innovation, increase security and scalability, attract new customers, and enable existing software partners to more easily and quickly integrate and activate their total processing volume,” Corbera said. “When we raised production, we had over 16 months of runway left, but we decided to raise production opportunistically to further accelerate our growth and acquire some large enterprise customers.”
Miami-based Payabli has 49 employees and expects to have nearly 70 by the end of the yr.