Joseph Elias Phillips is co-founder and co-chief executive of Payabli, the Miami, Florida, company that gives software platforms one API to take payments in, send them out and run the operations in between. A sales builder who helped scale Seamless and ServiceTitan, he started Payabli in 2020 with William Corbera, a friend he met on a salsa dance floor.
A Salsa Club in Brickell
The two first crossed paths about 15 years ago at Kukaramakara, a salsa club in Brickell. The chance meeting became a friendship and later a partnership. Phillips grew up around entrepreneurs, and he credits his grandfather with teaching him to take action.
Seamless and ServiceTitan
After a bachelor's degree in innovation and entrepreneurship at Clark University and an MBA at USC Marshall, he helped scale the national sales force of Seamless through its merger with Grubhub and their IPO. He was then the original head of sales at ServiceTitan, the software platform for home services. There he and Corbera built ServiceTitan's payments business, which became a large revenue driver, and saw how hard it is for vertical software companies to scale embedded payments.
Building Payabli
"We started writing our first line of code in December 2020," he has said. "It's taken years of grinding, building integrations, and earning credibility in the market." Payabli serves "need-to-pay" sectors such as property management, government, utilities and education. In June 2025 it raised a $28M Series B led by Fika Ventures and QED Investors, and it now has more than 100 employees, a third in South Florida.
Many of them are Cuban, Venezuelan or Colombian engineers who started far from tech. He remembers one early hire who unloaded trucks at night and spoke no English when they met on Flagler Street. "Now he's part of a company backed by the world's best fintech investors," he said. "His kids are thriving. That's the American dream." The friendship that began on a Brickell dance floor now runs one of the city's fastest-growing fintech companies.
