A credit-card payment and an apartment key have surprisingly little in common, until you follow Sabin Burrell's career. One belongs to the machinery that lets a merchant get paid; the other opens a front door. Between them sits a working life spent founding companies, joining alliances, arranging capital and finding partners. The businesses change. The paperwork, one suspects, remains abundant.
Burrell co-founded and led BlueSquare Resolutions, became a founding partner in the alliance behind Aurora Solutions, and later ran Boom Commerce. Today, his public roles include founder and managing partner of Forza Holdings and principal at Passo, a Los Angeles housing developer. Read those titles together and the career acquires a particular shape: an operator's experience carried into investing, with several familiar collaborators along the way.
The interesting part is how the chapters connect. Payments businesses need distribution, banking relationships and technology. Software businesses need customers who will change their routines. Housing requires land, financing, design and construction to arrive in roughly the same century. Burrell's record offers a way into the practical work behind those rather handsome nouns.
Fifty transactions before the Aurora alliance
In April 2016, BlueSquare and Super G Funding partnered with Chosen Payments. Burrell was already discussing a busy deal book. “I've done over 50 transactions,” he said. The partners described a program that could help independent sales organizations obtain financing, sell portfolios and manage their next stage of growth.
That phrase, independent sales organization, deserves a moment out of its acronym. These are businesses that help merchants obtain payment services. A portfolio of merchant accounts can produce ongoing income, and its owner may want cash to expand, buy out a partner or sell. The partnership addressed those choices together, including back-office support. For someone selling payment services, administration has a habit of becoming a second occupation.
The 2016 announcement also put Burrell alongside Darrin Ginsberg and Chosen Payments founder Jeff Brodsly. Those relationships would matter again. This was a business built partly through transactions between people who already understood one another's corner of the industry.
A bigger company, with the old name on the door
Another step followed in September 2016, when Applied Merchant Systems merged with BlueSquare. Burrell became a shareholder and senior executive at Applied Merchant while continuing to head BlueSquare. Applied Merchant was handling more than $4 billion in annual payment volume. That number described money processed, rather than company revenue - a distinction worth keeping firmly attached to its dollar sign.
By April 2018, Burrell and Brodsly had joined Brian Goudie under a new parent, Aurora Solutions. Goudie became Aurora's CEO. Burrell remained BlueSquare's CEO, with the constituent businesses retaining their brands and operating autonomy. The arrangement brought shared financial, banking and processing relationships behind businesses that continued to face their own markets.
There is a useful detail in that structure. A founder could take part in a larger enterprise while continuing to run the business he had built. Aurora's founding announcement paired that continuity with a strategy focused on particular vertical markets and technology. The appeal was concrete: more resources behind specialist distribution. Even in finance, a bigger umbrella need not require everyone to wear the same hat.
Boom, and the people who came back
In January 2020, National Payment Systems announced its rebrand as Boom Commerce, with Burrell as CEO. He joined an executive group that included founder Jon Beckman, John Hynes as chief operating officer and general counsel, and Kevin Burson as chief financial officer. Acrewood Holdings supplied a credit facility to support expansion, acquisitions and investment in technology.
Burrell's explanation emphasized relationships developed through earlier transactions. The planned growth combined acquisitions with sales into specialist markets. It was recognizably close to the commercial language of the Aurora launch, now attached to a different company and team.
There was a more personal note that July, when Boom welcomed payments executive O.B. Rawls as a strategic adviser. Burrell recalled that they had nearly worked together before Rawls took the CEO job at iPayment. “Timing in life is everything,” Burrell said. A missed opportunity had acquired a second date in the diary.
On August 19, 2025, Priority Technology Holdings announced that it had acquired Boom's revenue agreements and customer relationships. Boom had already been a Priority reseller partner. The announcement said Burrell and Hynes would join Priority. The transaction brought the commercial relationships and their leaders into the buyer's business together, closing another chapter in Burrell's payments career.
The contract in the filing cabinet
Payments were only part of the story. Burrell also co-founded Counselytics, which used artificial intelligence and machine learning to analyze contracts and business documents. In April 2018, Conga announced an agreement to acquire it. The software extracted information from contracts so that customers could review and use material that otherwise sat inside unstructured documents.
The work had a wonderfully unglamorous starting point: a contract may contain valuable information and still be extraordinarily inconvenient to read at scale. Counselytics addressed contract discovery, due diligence and lease abstraction. A signature concludes a negotiation; it does very little to help the next person find the renewal clause.
Jason Gabbard, Counselytics' founder and CEO, appears again in Burrell's later investment activity. In November 2024, Burrell and Forza backed Gabbard's Bowtie, an AI business serving commercial real estate and asset management. One of its products automated responses to due-diligence questionnaires and requests for proposals. Different documents, another administrative workload, and a familiar business partner.
What comes with the check
Forza took on investment and wealth-management activities from Burrell's former family office. Its team includes Hynes, Marc Cole and Gabbard. The resulting network brings operating, legal, lending and software experience into the same firm. Burrell's own company-building record also includes point-of-sale software business Ovvi, which was sold to a public acquirer in 2022.
The investments range beyond payments. Forza announced additional backing for men's activewear company Ten Thousand in August 2025, following participation in an earlier funding round. In March that year, its credit division renewed and extended a $40 million facility for Sell Wholesale Funding, serving property investors in Arizona and Florida. Neither business fits neatly into a biography headed only “payments executive.”
The Sell Wholesale Funding relationship had its own history. The March 2025 renewal announcement described a partnership spanning nearly two decades, with the facility supporting financing for property investors. That duration puts another measure beside the dates of mergers and launches. A recurring lending relationship can continue across successive markets, while individual companies in the wider portfolio move through their own stages of growth. In this case, the announced renewal extended an existing arrangement rather than introducing a new investment.
KitchenSync supplied another example in November 2025. Forza confirmed debt and convertible-note investments in the restaurant and hospitality software business, alongside a $10 million credit facility arranged through its capital-markets network. The package connected investment with financing work and potential commercial introductions.
“We focus on driving impact.”
Sabin Burrell, on Forza's KitchenSync investment, November 2025
Burrell described the contribution in terms of customer introductions, partnerships and financing suited to the business. Those are specific services against which an investor's involvement can be judged. A check is admirably concise. The work surrounding it rarely is.
A different kind of portfolio
At Passo, the assets have addresses. Burrell is a principal alongside Daniel Glimcher, Simon Aftalion and Scott Pollack. Hynes is also named among the firm's founders. The firm develops affordable and workforce housing in Los Angeles, adding a tangible dimension to a career that has often involved the less visible systems behind everyday commerce.
Burrell had already created and financed a real-estate investment platform serving single-family property investors in Arizona. Passo brings that property and financing experience into apartment development. Its stated mission centers on affordable communities people are proud to call home.
In November 2025, Passo announced construction on four West Los Angeles developments: two on Centinela Avenue, one on Stoner Avenue and one on Barrington Avenue. Its announcement described more than 250 planned homes. Burrell spoke about the coordination required to bring design, approvals, financing and execution together. For a developer, the ceremony with a shovel comes after a considerable amount of work without one.
From announcements to timber
By July 2026, the buildings were taking visible form. Framing was complete at 1734 South Barrington Avenue, a seven-story project planned for 53 studio and one-bedroom apartments. All but the manager's unit were subject to income restrictions. Aero Collective designed the building, which used affordable-housing incentives and streamlined approvals under Los Angeles' Executive Directive 1.
1734 South Barrington Avenue
Framing complete by July 2026
Later that month, framing had reached its peak at 4706 Centinela Avenue, an eight-story development planned for 73 apartments. Its homes were also intended for income-restricted occupancy apart from a manager's unit. These were construction milestones, with the eventual work of finishing and occupying the apartments still ahead.
Burrell's public posts have drawn attention to Passo's progress and its work on housing for veterans. The aspiration is expressed in unusually direct terms: bringing veteran homelessness in Los Angeles to zero. It is a stated goal, and one that makes the distance between announcing homes and delivering them particularly consequential.
That is where this chapter leaves him: with a payments transaction behind him, investments across several businesses, and apartment buildings rising in Los Angeles. A career once described through merchant portfolios now includes homes with windows, kitchens and front doors. The next milestone will have an address.