Ellis AI raises $10M seed for private credit agents
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- Ellis AI emerged from stealth Thursday with a $10 million seed round from First Round Capital, 645 Ventures, Harlem Capital, Khosla Ventures, Thrive Capital, Slow Capital, and Ariel Alternatives CEO Mellody Hobson.
- Ryan Williams, who previously co-founded real estate investment platform Cadre with Josh and Jared Kushner in 2014, began building Ellis last year.
- Cadre raised more than $160 million in funding and hit an $800 million peak valuation before being sold to alternative investment company Yieldstreet in 2024.
- Ellis uses AI agents to connect and centralize the scattered software, accounting data, and documents private credit firms rely on, flagging discrepancies and assisting with portfolio monitoring and report preparation.
- Williams said Ellis's agents can help close a fund's books at month-end — a task he described as requiring teams to manually download, reformat, compare, and re-enter data across systems where, in many firms, "Excel becomes the operating system."
- Williams stressed that material decisions remain with human experts and said he expects the "human loop to become narrower, but not disappear."
Why it matters: Private credit firms still rely on Excel as their operating system for end-of-month close, per Williams — manual re-entry across fragmented systems. Ellis's $10M bet tests whether AI agents can absorb that back-office drag, and with a repeat founder who just exited Cadre to Yieldstreet in 2024, it signals where ex-Cadre talent is placing its next swing.
