Payabli follows the money. All of it.

A contractor has the signed agreement. The customer wants the work. The software has done its job, right up to the moment somebody needs to collect a deposit. Then the process falls back to paper checks, phone calls or another drive across town. This was the awkward gap described by Builder Prime, a software company serving home improvement businesses. The digital workflow ended just before the money arrived.

There is a business hiding in that gap. Payabli, founded in 2020 by Joseph Elias Phillips and William Corbera, builds the infrastructure that lets software companies capture it. Its proposition starts with an observation: the application that knows what a customer owes is a sensible place to help that customer pay. Add the outgoing money and the records, and a software feature starts to resemble a payments business.

The trouble began after the button

Builder Prime had already tried a payment provider. According to Payabli’s account of the switch, the frustrations included inflexible pricing, limited support and fees that made reconciliation difficult. The problem was broader than collecting a card number. Contractors needed to understand what had been deducted and why. Builder Prime wanted control over the commercial arrangement, too.

It integrated Payabli in 2021. The case study describes an implementation measured in weeks, direct access to engineers through Slack, and more choice over pricing models. By September 2024, it reported a 1,000% increase in payment volume and adoption by nearly half of Builder Prime’s users. Those are vendor-published results across a growing business, rather than proof that switching providers alone caused the increase.

The lesson is useful without the headline percentage. A payment product has at least two audiences: the person paying and the person explaining the payment afterward. Make life difficult for the second person, and a successful checkout can still create an unhappy customer.

A successful checkout can still create an unhappy customer.

Three jobs. One financial workflow.

Payabli divides its platform into three product families. Pay In handles acceptance: cards, ACH, digital wallets, online and in-person transactions. Pay Out addresses the other direction, including vendor payments, managed payables and on-demand payouts. Pay Ops supplies onboarding, pricing, risk management, disputes and reporting. These are different jobs that repeatedly touch the same businesses.

Consider commercial property software. A repair generates a job, an approved invoice and a vendor waiting for payment. Fyxt and Payabli’s June 2025 Vendor Pay announcement connects those stages. Payments become part of completing the repair workflow. The software already has the context; the financial infrastructure makes that context actionable.

For developers, there are direct APIs and embedded components. Creator adds a no-code way to configure payment, reporting and onboarding interfaces. Payabli also offers integration advice and help with payment economics. That service matters because choosing a fee structure or handling a chargeback is a different discipline from shipping an attractive screen.

The price of being trusted

The founders brought experience from both sides. Phillips had worked at ServiceTitan and Seamless; Corbera had built payments company RevoPay. Their 2024 financing note describes bootstrapping Payabli to $50,000 in monthly recurring revenue. “We didn’t intend to raise Venture,” they wrote. Larger prospects liked the technology but hesitated to depend on a small, unproven supplier. Institutional backing could help answer that objection.

That changed the financing decision. An initial $4 million seed investment in May 2022 was followed by an $8 million extension announced in March 2023. QED Investors led the $20 million Series A in June 2024. Fika Ventures and QED co-led a $28 million Series B in June 2025, bringing announced funding to $60 million. Capital bought development capacity and a stronger answer to the question: will you be here tomorrow?

Customer economics are a separate calculation. Payabli describes revenue sharing and flexible pricing, rather than one universal tariff. A software platform can participate in payments revenue while using Payabli’s infrastructure. Our reading: the important number is the margin left after processing costs, support and implementation. A big transaction total alone cannot answer that question.

A crowded market, a specific bet

Stripe Connect, Finix and Adyen also serve platforms embedding financial services. Payabli’s pitch emphasizes the combination of incoming payments, outgoing payments and operations, with attention to industry workflows. That combination is its positioning; it does not establish that competitors lack comparable capabilities.

The scale needs careful reading. Forbes reported 95 customers, more than $6 billion in annualized transactions and $20 million in 2025 net revenue. Payabli had separately reported more than 50,000 merchants in June 2025. Platform customers distribute the service to merchants. Counting them as the same population would miss how the business spreads.

The next invoice may have an agent

In February 2026, Payabli announced a Huntington Bank integration bringing receivables and payables into online banking. July brought Amigo Insights and agents for vendor enablement and enrichment. The launch announcement distinguished available tools from capabilities still in development. The practical ambition is fewer payment questions and vendor chores requiring a human handoff.

For another software founder, the thing to copy is the investigation. Follow an invoice through collection, fees, settlement and the next vendor bill. Find the manual detour. An embedded payments strategy makes sense when customers will use it and its economics justify the operating work. A platform needing only occasional collections may have little reason to take on that ambition. Payabli’s opportunity lives where the detours keep happening.