William Corbera is co-founder and co-chief executive of Payabli, the Miami, Florida, company that builds embedded payments for software platforms. He met his co-founder, Joseph Elias Phillips, on a dance floor.
The University of Miami and RevoPay
He graduated from the University of Miami in 2004. He co-founded RevoPay and served as its head of product, building electronic payments software for real estate, education, giving, business-to-business and retail. RevoPay was later acquired by OSG Billing and folded into its suite of payments, billing and print and mail services.
A Salsa Club in Brickell
He and Phillips first crossed paths about 15 years before Payabli took off, at Kukaramakara, a salsa club in Brickell. The friendship became a partnership. They wrote Payabli's first line of code in December 2020, building payments that plug into property management tools, homeowners' associations, school districts and local governments.
The AWS of Payments
As co-founder and product architect he sets the product vision. "We want to be the AWS of payments," he has said, stitching together payments in and out, billing, analytics and underwriting so software companies can offer their customers invoicing and bill pay today and payroll, lending and treasury later. From its Series A in mid-2024 to its $28 million Series B in June 2025, revenue grew nearly ninefold, and it tripled again in about eight months. Payabli has more than 100 employees, about a third in South Florida, many of them Cuban, Venezuelan and Colombian engineers.
Miami's Tech Layer
"This city has always been entrepreneurial," he said. "Now it has the tech layer on top." When the founders tell investors they are based in Miami, he added, the investors get excited.
He met his business partner in a Brickell salsa club. He is now building one of the companies that make Miami a place investors seek out.
