Ryan Williams Raises $10M Seed To Build an AI Operating Layer for Private Credit

Ryan Williams, the entrepreneur who co‑created real estate investment platform Cadre alongside Josh and Jared Kushner, has emerged from stealth with a new company called Ellis and more than 10 million dollars in seed funding to tackle a problem he says he first spotted while running his previous startup.

The round was led by First Round Capital, with participation from 645 Ventures, Harlem Capital, Khosla Ventures, Slow Ventures, Wilshire Lane, Westbound, Collide Capital, and Gallery Ventures. Individual backers include Ariel Alternatives chief executive Mellody Hobson, Thrive Capital founder Josh Kushner, and Mercury founder and chief executive Immad Akhund.

Ellis is built to serve private credit managers, a corner of finance that has grown into a multi‑trillion dollar market even as the software supporting it has lagged behind. Williams said that gap became obvious to him while building Cadre, the platform he founded in 2014 that eventually facilitated close to 6 billion dollars in transaction value and raised more than 160 million dollars in funding before merging with alternative investment company Yieldstreet in 2024.

"At Cadre, I saw the next major constraint," Williams said. "Even as the front end of private markets became more modern and accessible, the operating infrastructure underneath it remained fragmented." That fragmentation shows up in mundane but costly ways. Private credit funds routinely rely on analysts manually cross‑checking fund administrator numbers against internal spreadsheets every month, hoping the figures line up, a process that eats time and still leaves firms working from data that can be weeks out of date by the time it is reviewed.

Ellis addresses this by pulling together disconnected outputs from fund administrators, ledgers, loan management systems, banking data, legal documents, and spreadsheets into a single reconciled and source‑verifiable foundation. On top of that data layer, the platform runs purpose‑built AI agents that automate recurring workflows including position and cash flow reconciliation, anomaly detection, exception tracing, LP reporting, portfolio monitoring, and compliance support, while keeping human teams in control of final decisions.

Treville Capital Group founder and partner Ali Hamed, one of the firm's design partners, described the shift in practical terms, noting that continuous automated reconciliation means a fund can always know exactly where its portfolio stands rather than relying on a snapshot that may already be several weeks stale.

Ellis is currently working with multiple private credit design partners and has engaged a broader partner network representing more than 50 billion dollars in cumulative assets under management. Leading product development alongside Williams is Chief Product Officer Jason Liao, who previously led product at WeWork and Wonder.

To illustrate the complexity Ellis is built to handle, consider a private credit firm that lends 100 million dollars to a fintech lender, which then distributes that capital as thousands of individual loans worth around 30,000 dollars apiece to consumers. The private credit firm must track which of its own investors carry exposure to each underlying loan, a reconciliation problem that scales in complexity far faster than the underlying math would suggest.

The timing of the launch is notable. Earlier this year, the private credit industry faced growing scrutiny as concerns spread that AI could disrupt the very software companies many private credit firms had extended loans to. That environment has pushed some investors toward increased caution and a desire for sharper visibility into portfolio performance. Williams has framed this scrutiny as an opportunity rather than a headwind, arguing that a more challenging market cycle increases demand for tools that can withstand closer examination of every number and valuation, particularly as default rates climb.

To start, Ellis is targeting smaller private credit shops, specifically firms with up to 20 employees managing funds ranging from 100 million to 1 billion dollars in assets, a segment large enough to need serious infrastructure but often too small to have built custom tooling of their own.

First Round founder and partner Josh Kopelman said his firm's bet on Ellis rests heavily on Williams' depth of understanding of private credit's data problems, a familiarity Kopelman argued is difficult for other founders entering the space to replicate without having lived through the same operational headaches first hand.

With its seed round closed and a network of design partners already testing the platform, Ellis is positioning itself as one of a growing wave of AI‑native tools aiming to modernize back‑office financial operations, an area that has historically lagged well behind the more visible, investor‑facing side of private markets technology.