When Joseph Elias Phillips and William Corbera first crossed paths 15 years ago, it wasn’t in a boardroom or on a Zoom call. It was at Kukaramakara, a salsa club in Brickell.
That chance encounter would eventually spark a friendship — and later a business partnership — that today powers one of Miami’s fastest-growing fintech companies.
Payabli, their venture together, just earned recognition on the Inc. list thanks to explosive growth, including a $28M fundraise earlier this summer. But the co-founders and co-CEOs are quick to point out that their trajectory wasn’t overnight.
“We started writing our first line of code in December 2020,” Phillips told Refresh Miami. “It’s taken years of grinding, building integrations, and earning credibility in the market.”
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The company provides embedded payments technology to software platforms: think property management tools, HOAs, school districts, and local governments. Payabli’s tech allows these platforms to plug in payments seamlessly, giving their customers the ability to move money in and out while layering in financial services.
“What’s exciting is that once a partner integrates with us, they keep growing,” Phillips asserted. “At the same time, we’ve been able to win larger and larger deals with enterprise customers, which lights up even more volume.”
That flywheel has generated major momentum. Corbera noted that from their Series A in mid-2024 to their Series B less than a year later, Payabli grew revenue nearly ninefold. “Even this year alone, we’ve already tripled in about eight months,” he said.
The team has scaled in step. Payabli now counts more than 100 employees, with about a third based in South Florida. Despite being remote-first, Miami remains its cultural home. “We’ve got engineers and early team members who go back to some of the first fintech experiments in Miami,” Phillips said. “It’s in our DNA.”
That Miami DNA shows up in more ways than geography. The co-founders highlight how the city’s immigrant hustle has shaped the company. Many Payabli team members are Cuban, Venezuelan, or Colombian engineers who started out far from tech. Phillips recalled one early engineer he first met working out of a small office on Flagler Street while unloading trucks at night to make ends meet.
“He didn’t speak a word of English back then,” Phillips said. “Now he’s part of a company backed by the world’s best fintech investors. His kids are thriving. That’s the American dream.”
Stories like that, Corbera added, are part of what they hope Miami’s tech ecosystem embraces and amplifies. “This city has always been entrepreneurial,” he said. “Now it has the tech layer on top. You feel the energy in Brickell or Wynwood. And investors are noticing. When we tell them we’re based in Miami, they get excited.”
The company’s ambitions are as bold as its backstory. “We want to be the AWS of payments,” Corbera said. Payabli is stitching together fragmented financial services – payments in, payments out, billing, analytics, underwriting – into one infrastructure stack. The goal is to let software companies become “financial powerhouses,” offering their customers everything from invoicing and bill pay today to payroll, lending, and treasury management tomorrow.
Artificial intelligence plays a big role in that future. The company recently hired an AI product strategist whose sole focus is to weave AI into both Payabli’s product suite and its internal operations. “It’s about 10x-ing every team member,” Phillips said. “She’s only been here a few months and already the impact has been huge.”
As for what comes next, the co-founders keep circling back to the ecosystem they call home. “Miami’s always been a melting pot for entrepreneurship,” Corbera said. “Now the challenge and the opportunity is to show the world that you can build world-class tech here too.”
This story was originally published by Refresh Miami, a WLRN News partner. Refresh Miami is the oldest and largest tech and startup community in Miami with over 16,000 members.
