For a fund manager running a private credit portfolio, a typical week still involves reconciling figures across spreadsheets, chasing data from loan servicers and fund administrators, and assembling reports by hand. Ellis, a startup that emerged from stealth on 30 July 2026, is built around the idea that most of that work can be handled by software.
The company raised more than $10 million in seed funding, according to an announcement accompanying the launch. First Round Capital led the round. Participants included 645 Ventures, Harlem Capital, Khosla Ventures, Slow Ventures, Wilshire Lane, Westbound, Collide Capital, Gallery Ventures, and several individual investors: Mellody Hobson, chief executive of Ariel Alternatives; Josh Kushner, founder of Thrive Capital; and Immad Akhund, founder and chief executive of Mercury.
Ellis was founded by Ryan Williams, who previously built Cadre, a technology-enabled platform for institutional alternatives investing. Cadre facilitated approximately $6 billion in transaction value before being acquired by Yieldstreet in 2024. The deal was described at the time as one of the largest fintech transactions since the early 2010s.
The core of the Ellis platform is a unified data layer. It connects information from fund administrators, loan servicers, general ledgers, bank feeds, regulatory filings, and Excel models into a single view that general partners — the fund managers who make investment decisions — can consult in real time. Private credit managers currently tend to hold that data in fragmented systems, requiring manual effort to reconcile and interpret it.
On top of that data layer, Ellis has built AI agents designed to take the first pass at specific workflows: reconciliation, reporting to limited partners (the external investors in a fund), capital calls (requests for committed funds), and compliance checks. The company says these agents are purpose-built for private credit rather than adapted from general-purpose tools.
The exact number of funds currently using the platform is not known, and Ellis has not disclosed commercial pricing. The company says it plans to use the seed funding to expand its team and extend its capabilities, including tools for Small Business Investment Company (SBIC) compliance — a federal programme with specific regulatory requirements — and document intelligence.
Private credit has grown rapidly as an asset class in recent years, but operational infrastructure in the sector has not kept pace. Ellis enters a field where several startups are now targeting alternative asset managers with AI-powered back-office tools. How much of the manual workload such platforms can reliably replace, and at what cost, remains to be demonstrated at scale.
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