Press release
Ellis launches with $10+ million in seed funding to transform private credit operations
Fintech companies spent a decade rebuilding the front office. Ellis is rebuilding everything behind it with an AI-native operations platform.
New York, July X, 2026
Ellis, the first-of-its-kind AI-native operations platform for private credit, launched today with more than $10 million in seed funding closed.
Private credit is the fastest-growing asset class in the world, expanding from $1 trillion in assets under management in 2020 to a projected $3.2 trillion by 2028, but the operations underpinning the industry are fragmented, slow, and costly. Fund managers often depend on stale spreadsheet data to make multimillion-dollar decisions while sinking time, capital, and attention into costly, error-prone infrastructure.
Ellis solves that problem. Ellis’ operations platform continuously verifies the numbers investment firms and their funds run on, ingesting the unstructured disorder of disconnected PDFs, fund administrator outputs, Excel sheets, notices, agreements, and more. Ellis deploys custom AI agents tailored to each partner’s investment and operational workflows. With Ellis, there is the first ever fully consolidated, real-time firm and fund performance interface with verifiable, decision-ready insights and documentation on demand.
Ellis has already delivered tremendous results for GPs, enhancing margins, producing stronger investor relations, and unlocking faster fundraises. Ellis’ clients’ operating edge compounds as every fund close runs faster, cheaper, and sharper than the last.
First Round Capital led the seed round, with participation from a group of more prominent operators and investors, including Khosla Ventures, 645 Ventures, Harlem Capital, Ariel Alternatives Co-CEO Mellody Hobson, Thrive Capital Founder Josh Kushner, Mercury Founder and CEO Immad Akhund, and many others.
Ellis was born from the experience of Founder and CEO Ryan Williams, who most recently founded and scaled the leading fintech company Cadre, a technology-enabled institutional alternatives platform that pioneered online investing in real estate through a world-class team and product including the industry’s first secondary marketplace. Cadre grew to $6 billion in transaction value closed through the platform. The team Williams assembled at Cadre became a strategic advantage with more than a dozen of his employees, Cadre alumni, having gone on to found venture-backed companies. Williams is running the same talent playbook at Ellis to unlock innovation and scale across private credit and eventually the broader alternatives ecosystem.
“Ellis is the company I wished existed every day I was building Cadre. We pioneered first-of-their-kind ways to invest in private markets, but behind every innovation sat an unglamorous truth: fund operations ran on manual effort and systems that never talked to each other, at our firm and every firm we touched. That gap is the single biggest opportunity in private markets today. Ellis closes it with a single source of truth: numbers managers can trust, traceable to the source, and the same everywhere so the next generation of great firms can be built on infrastructure worthy of their ambition.”
Ellis has generated significant traction in a short time, engaging and working with a partner network with more than $50 billion in cumulative assets under management, and is managing growing demand and interest from investment firms and managers across the private credit ecosystem.
Ellis Chief Product Officer Jason Liao is a seasoned product and technology leader, having led product at WeWork and Wonder. He is working hand in hand with Williams, leading an AI-native engineering team to develop the platform alongside multiple fund design partners, with firms such as Treville Capital Group.
“When I learned what Ryan and his team were building, I knew we needed it. Closing our books has always meant an analyst cross-checking fund admin numbers against our own spreadsheet by hand, every month, hoping they’d match. With reconciliation happening continuously and automatically, I can always know where the portfolio stands—not rely on a snapshot that’s already three weeks old. That’s the kind of insight into our fund we’ve never had before.”
“Nearly every fintech cycle for the last decade has gone after the front office. Almost nobody has touched what happens behind it, and that’s exactly why it’s still broken. Ryan lived this problem for years at Cadre, and his team has the product and technical instincts to build a long-needed fix. That combination has the potential to be a category-defining company that we’re proud to back.”
Following today’s launch, Ellis will use the capital raised to expand its team and scale the platform’s capabilities across reconciliation, LP reporting, SBIC compliance, and document intelligence to serve the more than 7,000 private credit GPs in the U.S., and the fund administrators who serve them.
About Ellis
Ellis is the first-of-its-kind AI-native operations platform for private credit. Built around a unified data layer that connects every system a fund runs: fund administrator, loan servicing, general ledger, bank feeds, regulatory filings, and the Excel models in between. Ellis gives GPs a single real-time source of truth for their portfolio, with AI agents that take the first pass on the workflows their teams run manually today: reconciliation, LP reporting, capital calls, and compliance among many others. The platform is built on a simple principle: agents flag, humans decide, so every output is verifiable and traceable to its source. Learn more at ellis.ai.
Media contact
David Meadvin
media@ellis.ai