Ellis AI emerges from stealth with $10 million seed round

Ellis emerged from stealth with $10 million in seed funding, pitching an AI-native operations platform for private credit firms that are still forced to juggle spreadsheets, service providers and disconnected systems. The company says its software turns those inputs into one reconciled, source-verifiable book for close, reporting and portfolio monitoring.

The launch is aimed squarely at a corner of finance where data is often fragmented and the operational burden is heavy. Ellis says it was built alongside private credit managers representing more than $50 billion in assets under management, a sign that the market it is targeting already has scale and enough complexity to make automation attractive. The company’s website describes Ellis as the preeminent intelligence layer for private credit.

Ryan Williams, who founded Cadre, is the public face of the company. Ellis says its platform pairs the data foundation with purpose-built AI agents designed to help managers scale without relying on manual reconciliations across separate systems. In a quoted endorsement on Ellis’s site, Ali Hamed said, “Ellis gives our team real-time data on the book, so we run the fund on numbers we can actually stand behind.”

Investor interest surfaced quickly around the launch. Sriram Krishnan congratulated Williams, Jason Liao and the Ellis team and said the seed round was co-led by Kearny Jackson and Josh Kopelman at First Round Capital, with participation from Khosla Ventures, Slow Ventures, Exceptional Capital, Josh Kushner, Immad Akhund and others. Henri Pierre-Jacques said he was excited to partner with Williams and the Ellis team, while Brett Berson said he was excited for more people to see what Williams and his team had been building.

Williams’s background gives the company an established name in private markets. He founded Cadre in 2014, and a Forbes item published July 30 said he sold Cadre two years ago for more than $300 million before turning to AI to solve problems in how private credit firms track investments. Ellis said its launch post went live July 30, after the company had been in stealth until then.