Exclusive: Payabli raises $28M to scale embedded payments
Payabli, a Miami-based embedded payments platform, has raised $28 million in Series B funding led by existing investors Fika Ventures and QED Investors, its founders tell Axios exclusively.
Why it matters: Payments are becoming a core strategy for software vendors and SaaS platforms to unlock new revenue streams and deepen customer relationships.
How it works: Payabli provides vertical software companies with an embedded platform that combines payment acceptance, payment issuance, and payment operations under a single API.
This lets software vendors and vertical SaaS providers offer branded payment solutions without managing multiple third-party providers.
"We remain laser-focused on our mission of making all software companies payment companies," co-founder William Corbera says. "And on unifying pay-in, pay-out and pay-ops through a single, unified API."
What they're saying: "Vertical-SaaS platforms used to see payments purely as a cost center, but Payabli makes it so easy to embed and monetize that it's a no-brainer," Fika Ventures general partner TX Zhuo says.
By the numbers: Payabli has grown nearly 8x since its Series A, processing billions annually and supporting over 50,000 merchants, Phillips says.
He expects the company to support over 100,000 merchants by year's end.
Between the lines: Insiders QED and Fika decided to double down on the company less than a year after it raised its Series A round.
"We didn't need the money ... but our investors came to us. They see Payabli as a multiple-billion-dollar company and wanted to accelerate our growth," co-founder Joseph Elias Phillips says.
Zhuo notes that the Series B round was the largest check Fika has written to date.
"The team is building the go-to platform for software companies looking to embed payments, and we wanted to ensure they had capital to accelerate," QED partner Laura Bock said in an email.
The latest: With the new funding, the company is betting big on AI, which it uses for risk management, fraud detection, customer support, and platform integration.
It recently introduced an AI-powered support agent, Amigo, that is trained on extensive customer and platform data.
"We've been investing heavily in AI — from Amigo on the support side to risk-and-fraud models across the platform — to keep the infrastructure reliable as we scale," Phillips says.
Zoom in: The funding brings Payabli's total raised to $60 million, just nine months after its Series A.
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