A Decade-Long Friendship Leads to a Payments-Focused Venture
Joseph Phillips and William Corbera, both individuals with entrepreneurial backgrounds, have been friends for over a decade. Their friendship has led to the creation of their latest venture, Payabli, which aims to disrupt traditional payments facilitators like Stripe, Adyen, and Payrix.
A Background in Payments Processing
Corbera co-founded RevoPay, a payments processing platform that was acquired by OSG (an payments solutions firm) in 2022. Phillips, on the other hand, led the national sales team at Seamless before heading up sales at ServiceTitan, a web-based management tool for construction contractors.
The Birth of Payabli
In 2020, Phillips and Corbera decided to team up to found their own payments-focused venture called Payabli. They recognized that companies, especially software companies, needed a more efficient way to embed and facilitate payments through APIs. "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," Corbera told TechCrunch.
Payabli’s Mission
Payabli builds the infrastructure that allows companies to embed and facilitate payments through APIs. It offers standard "pay-in" payment acceptance tools, including recurring or scheduled payments, invoice requests, virtual credit cards, physical checks, and bank integrations. In addition, Payabli provides "pay-out" tools to help companies themselves pay vendors and suppliers.
Extending Services
Payabli’s services extend to various "payment operations" 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.
Go-To-Market Approach
Payabli’s go-to-market approach has won approval from VCs, who’ve poured a substantial amount of capital into the startup. In fact, 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.
Milestones
- Payabli has around 60 customers.
- Revenue grew 3x over the past 12 months to "seven figures."
- The company is based in Miami and has 49 employees.
- It expects to have nearly 70 employees by the end of the year.
Future Plans
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. "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," Corbera said.
Conclusion
Payabli is a payments-focused venture that aims to disrupt traditional payments facilitators like Stripe, Adyen, and Payrix. With its go-to-market approach winning approval from VCs, the company has raised substantial capital and achieved significant milestones. As it continues to grow and expand its services, Payabli is poised to become a major player in the fintech industry.
About the Authors
Joseph Phillips and William Corbera are the founders of Payabli. They have both had successful careers in payments processing and sales, respectively. With their combined expertise, they aim to create a more efficient way for companies to embed and facilitate payments through APIs.
