Over a decade after founding real estate investing platform Cadre, Ryan Williams, 38, is back with another fintech startup. This time, he’s tackling a back-office problem that frustrated him for years and now plagues the fast-growing private credit industry—a market facing heightened scrutiny after an AI-driven pullback in investor confidence.
At Cadre, Williams built a platform that let affluent investors buy fractional stakes in commercial real estate. The company served more than 50,000 customers and managed $6 billion in asset value. After raising $160 million in venture funding and reaching an $800 million valuation, Cadre was sold in 2024 to Willow Wealth (formerly Yieldstreet) for more than $300 million, according to a person familiar with the deal.
The fintech founder got the idea for his new startup, New York-based Ellis, after he kept encountering a maddening problem at Cadre. Whenever he needed to know the value of Cadre’s real estate portfolio, the necessary data was scattered across bank accounts, home-grown spreadsheets and accounting-services firms called fund administrators. None of the systems talked to each other, and it sometimes took weeks to get an accurate answer. “I can’t think of a quarter when we actually finished closing the books and getting to the right values on time,” he says today.
To try to fix this issue, Ellis uses AI to aggregate different sources of data and form a coherent perspective. Williams is initially focusing only on private credit firms because it’s a big enough industry facing so many of its own challenges. In April, he raised $11 million in seed funding for Ellis, a round that was led by early-stage venture firm First Round. Kearny Jackson, Wilshire Lane Capital, Slow Ventures, Khosla Ventures, 645 Ventures and Thrive Capital also invested. The financing values Ellis at $40 million, according to one backer.
The math required to track a loan is simple, but the complexity of managing bundles of them quickly compounds. Let’s say a private credit firm lends $100 million to a fintech lender, which in turn doles out $30,000 apiece to thousands of consumers. The private credit shop must then record which of its own investors are exposed to each loan. For asset-backed credit like mortgages, auto loans and accounts-receivable financing, it must track the performance of each loan. The loans start and mature at different times, spawning varying schedules of borrower payments. And separate investors enter the private credit fund at separate times.
Suddenly, the private credit firm has a dizzying number of data points to track, and the information lives in different places. Fund administrators track data like fund-account records, investors’ capital accounts and management-fee calculations. Loan-level information like interest rates and borrower payments often reside with loan servicers, the investment manager or other third-party systems. Investor identities and compliance records can be distributed across law firms, fund administrators and other specialized providers. Excel is used to run investor-payout calculations.
“I’ve got an auditor, a fund administrator, my own tax accountants, my own law firm and valuation consultants,” says Ali Hamed, who runs private credit firm Treville, which has $2.6 billion in assets and is an Ellis customer. “That’s five partners that all need to access this data, all from my fund finance team. And every time a partner asks a question, it creates manual work.” Then when fund managers want to buy new loans, they must decide how much to buy and which funds to hold them in based on allocation policies.
Ellis’ software uses AI to collect all of these disparate pieces of data and standardize them. Instead of asking customers to rip out their current accounting systems and replace them with Ellis, Williams’ software sits on top of lenders’ current infrastructure. When it serves up data, it shows how the numbers were calculated and where they came from.
First Round founder and partner Josh Kopelman says a big part of his bet on Ellis is that Williams understands private credit’s complex data problems with an unusual depth that’s hard for other entrepreneurs to match.
Earlier this year, the private credit industry was thrust into the spotlight as fears spread that AI would disrupt many of the software companies that private credit firms had lent money to. The worries have spurred many investors to try to cash out. “This is a challenging market cycle for private credit, and that presents an opportunity for us,” Williams says. “There’s a lot more scrutiny on how every number and every valuation is coming to bear when you’re seeing more defaults than ever.”
To start, Ellis is targeting small private credit shops with up to 20 employees and funds ranging from $100 million to $1 billion in assets. Four thousand firms this size exist, Williams says, and they control about one-third of the $2.5 trillion global private credit market. This fragmented space is more attractive to sell into than one with a small number of big players, says Sriram Krishnan, an Ellis investor and cofounder of venture firm Kearny Jackson.
Ellis has signed up five firms so far, with customers on average paying $175,000 annually for its services. These firms lend to businesses ranging from airplane manufacturers and music studios to sports leagues and venture-backed startups. Williams says it takes about three weeks for firms to get set up on Ellis’ system and aims to shrink that time to three days by the end of the year.
Of course, his tiny startup faces steep competition. The fund administrators, including $18 billion (market cap) SS&C, Apex Group and Alter Domus are among them. Software outfits Allvue Systems and FIS Private Capital Suite are, too. Rafael Telahun, a private equity investor and Ellis backer, says the industry is known for “co-ompetition, where companies will sometimes compete or work together.” For example, Ellis could partner with fund administrators or software firms, or it could eventually expand to do more of what they do, trying to go head to head with each of them.
Other software startups are also pursuing similar opportunities. Two other Cadre refugees founded New York financial software firm Maybern in 2020. It uses AI to streamline the back-office management of private capital funds, including critical accounting tasks like capital calls, investor allocations, distributions and fees. Maybern, which targets larger funds with $2 billion or more in assets, is backed by Battery Ventures and was valued at $270 million after its November 2025 fundraise.
