Cadre co-founder raises $10M seed for private credit AI startup

Ellis AI announced Thursday its emergence from stealth with $10 million in seed funding from investors including First Round Capital, 645 Ventures, Harlem Capital, Khosla Ventures, Thrive Capital, Slow Capital, Kearny Jackson, and Ariel Alternatives CEO Mellody Hobson. The startup uses AI agents to tackle the fragmented workflow private credit managers deal with, including managing documents, spreadsheets, and correspondence.

Williams is best known for co-creating real estate investment platform Cadre alongside Josh and Jared Kushner in 2014. Cadre raised more than $160 million in funding and, at its peak, was valued at $800 million before being sold for an undisclosed sum to alternative investment company Yieldstreet in 2024. Williams said that experience showed him private markets’ front end had become more modern and accessible even as the operating infrastructure underneath stayed fragmented — the constraint he set out to fix with Ellis.

Williams started working on Ellis last year. The company aims to connect and centralize into one accessible platform the scattered software, accounting information, and documents a private credit firm already uses, rather than forcing it to rip everything out and start over. The system can flag discrepancies in the data and deploys AI agents to help with tasks like portfolio monitoring and preparing reports. Williams said the agents can help close a fund’s books at the end of the month — a process that otherwise requires a team to download files from several systems, reformat data, compare balances, investigate discrepancies, and re-enter information by hand. “In many firms, Excel becomes the operating system,” he said.

Williams said material decisions and actions remain with human experts, and that he expects that human loop to narrow over time rather than disappear. The company’s aim, he said, is not to replace human judgment but to help people cut through the noise and make educated decisions faster.

Why it matters

Williams is betting on private credit’s back office rather than its front end: even as access to private markets has modernized, the infrastructure managers use to run funds has stayed fragmented — a gap Ellis is targeting with AI agents instead of another investor-facing app.