Joseph Phillips and William Corbera, both from entrepreneurial backgrounds, have been pals for more than ten years.

Corbera co-founded RevoPay, a payments processing platform bought by payments solutions provider OSG in 2022. Phillips, for his part, oversaw Seamless’ national sales team before taking over sales at ServiceTitan, a web-based management solution for building contractors.

Phillips and Corbera, who had previously worked in payments-related positions, decided to join forces in 2020 to launch their own payments-focused startup, Payabli. Payabli develops the infrastructure that enables businesses, particularly software companies, to embed and process payments using APIs.

“Payabli builds payment acceptance and issuance solutions [and] payment operations tools,” Corbera told TechCrunch. “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.”

Payabli is attempting to disrupt existing payment facilitators such as Stripe, Adyen, and Paytrix: companies that allow customers to accept electronic payments through their platforms. Payments facilitators serve as liaisons between businesses and their banks, providing the back end for payment processing.

Payabli provides the conventional “pay-in” payment acceptance facilities, such as those that allow clients to make recurring or scheduled payments or request invoices. However, it also includes “pay-out” options to assist businesses in paying vendors and suppliers, such as virtual credit cards, physical checks, and bank interfaces.

Payabli’s services include a variety of “payment operations” products, such as those aimed to reduce risk and fraud, manage 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,” Corbera told analysts. “This is not only true for software companies, but any entity that coordinates money movement between payers and recipients.”

Payabli’s go-to-market strategy has received approval from venture capitalists, who have invested heavily in the firm. Payabli said this week that it has raised $20 million in a Series A fundraising round headed by TTV Capital, Fika Ventures, and Bling Capital, bringing the total amount raised to $32 million at a “nine-figure” valuation.

Payabli has about 60 customers, according to Corbera, and revenue has increased thrice over the last year to “seven figures.”

“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,” says Corbera. “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.”

Payabli, based in Miami, employs 49 people and hopes to have over 70 by the end of the year.