Joseph Phillips and William Corbella are both entrepreneurs and have been friends for over a decade.
Corvera is the co-founder of RevoPay, a payment processing platform that was acquired by payment solutions company OSG in 2022. Meanwhile, Phillips 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, who have both worked in payments for many years, decided to join forces to found a payments-focused venture called Payabli, which will build an infrastructure to enable businesses, especially software companies, to embed and facilitate payments through APIs.
“Payabli builds payment acceptance and issuing solutions [and] “We provide a payments tool,” Corvera told TechCrunch. “We turn software companies into payments companies by providing them with payment intermediation capabilities without the heavy lifting, administrative burden and prohibitive costs of becoming a payments intermediary.”
Payabli is essentially trying to disrupt traditional payment intermediaries like Stripe, Adyen, and Paytrix. These companies allow customers to accept electronic payments using their platforms. Payment intermediaries act as middlemen between businesses and banks and provide the backend for payment processing.
Image credit: Payabli
Payabli offers the standard set of “incoming” payment acceptance tools, including tools for business customers to make regular or recurring payments and request invoices, as well as “outgoing” tools to help businesses themselves make payments to vendors and suppliers, including virtual credit cards, physical checks and bank integrations.
Payabli's services also span a range of “payment operations” products, including products designed to mitigate risk and fraud, address disputes and compliance, and facilitate underwriting.
“Payments and other fintech programs are the easiest way for software companies to develop new revenue streams and build more sticky, valuable customer relationships,” Corvera said. “And this isn't just true for software companies, but any organization that coordinates the movement of funds between payers and payees.”
Payabli's go-to-market approach has earned it the approval of venture capitalists, who are pouring money into the company: 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 funding to $32 million and valuing it in the “nine figures” (Corbera declined to disclose the exact figure).
Payaburi has about 60 clients and has tripled its revenue to “seven figures” in the past 12 months, Corbera said.
“The new funding round will be used to drive further product innovation, strengthen security and scalability, accelerate new customer acquisition, and make it easier and faster for our existing software partners to integrate and enable aggregate processing volume,” Corbera said. “At the time of the funding, we had more than 16 months of remaining funding, but we decided to opportunistically raise capital to further accelerate our growth and acquire larger enterprise customers.”
Miami-based Payabli has 49 employees and expects to grow to nearly 70 by the end of the year.