Founder Ryan Williams Raises More Than $10M In Seed Funding For Ellis AI-Native Operations Platform – AfroTech
Founder Ryan Williams is on a mission to help talented first-time or emerging managers operate private credit funds with the same confidence as a larger institution.
Williams grew up in Baton Rouge, LA, and carried a belief from his grandfather, who was raised in the Jim Crow South and led school integration in Louisiana, that he didn’t have to define his future by present limitations. Ultimately, that lesson has served as his north star as an entrepreneur, with his first business being a sports-apparel company at age 13. Williams got the idea after not being able to afford Nike or Adidas headbands worn by his teammates.
“I found inexpensive terry-cloth gear, partnered with a local embroiderer, personalized it, built a website, and eventually won a national business-plan competition,” Williams told AFROTECH™ in an interview. “The prize money mattered, but the mentors mattered more; they saw potential in me before I fully saw it in myself.”
Williams went on to attend Harvard University, earning an A.B. in economics with honors. While there, he launched Veritas Financial Group, building a finance and real estate curriculum taught by Harvard Business School professors he recruited. He noted that it became Harvard’s largest undergraduate financial-literacy organization at the time.
“It led me to more work focused on Black and economic empowerment,” he recalled.
Later, during the 2008 financial crisis while Williams was raising funds in southwest Atlanta to buy and rent property back to a community facing foreclosure, he was rejected by 10 banks before he received a yes from Black-owned Citizens Trust.
“Its chairman called me personally to say he believed in me. That experience made the lesson tangible: Talent is broadly distributed; access and infrastructure are not,” Williams told AFROTECH™.
He said his time working later at Goldman Sachs and Blackstone as an investment banker provided him with insights into how sophisticated capital and institutions worked.
“Technology became important to me because it is one of the most scalable ways to change that equation … My question became: How do you take what works in those rooms and open the doors?” Williams said.
That inquiry motivated him to walk away from his career at Blackstone, a move he acknowledges wasn’t the “safest path” or most “obvious” choice.
“I could spend my career navigating those systems, or I could build the systems I thought should exist … So the goal was never a title. It was leverage and impact. Founding was not a departure from the plan; it was the plan finding its moment,” he said.
Williams launched Cadre, a commercial real estate investment manager working with individuals and institutions on its tech-driven platform, per LinkedIn. Cadre went on to attract more than 50,000 customers and managed $6 billion in assets, Forbes reports. After raising $160 million in venture capital and reaching an $800 million valuation, it was sold in 2024 to Willow Wealth, per the outlet.
Ellis
Williams no longer serves in a full-time role at Cadre. He is now the founding CEO of Ellis, which is described as an AI-native operations platform for private credit with an all-in-one data layer connecting essential systems required for a fund to run. These systems fund administrator outputs, loan servicing, general ledgers, bank data, regulatory filings, and the Excel models, according to a press release shared with AFROTECH™.
AI agents assist with tasks that are typically done manually, such as reconciliation, LP reporting, capital calls, portfolio monitoring, and compliance. The AI agents will “take the first pass at recurring work,” noted Williams. While the AI agent will make flags, humans will still decide.
“Instead of waiting for a month-end exercise to discover that two systems disagree, reconciliation can happen continuously,” Williams told AFROTECH™. “Instead of accepting a number because it appears in a report, a user can trace it back to the underlying source. Instead of a highly trained analyst spending hours on repetitive first-pass work, an agent can surface the exception and let the human make the consequential call. That is the operating leverage I wish we had at Cadre, and it is especially powerful for lean and emerging teams.”
Williams said Ellis will create the infrastructure that ensures great managers can thrive and move capital to businesses they were intended to finance with speed and trust. Using Ellis, GPs are already seeing higher margins, stronger investor relations, and faster fundraises, according to the press release.
Ellis has raised more than $10 million in a closed seed funding round (more than five times oversubscribed). First Round Capital led the round, while 645 Ventures, Harlem Capital, Khosla Ventures, Slow Ventures, Wilshire Lane, Westbound, Collide Capital, Gallery Ventures, Ariel Alternatives CEO Mellody Hobson, Thrive Capital Founder Josh Kushner, Mercury Founder and CEO Immad Akhund, and more also participated.
“What is most meaningful to me is not simply the names on the cap table; it is the history and range of perspectives around it,” Williams said. “…It includes leading Black and diverse investors alongside some of the strongest venture, technology and operating investors in the market. That is intentional because diversity on a cap table is not cosmetic. It expands pattern recognition, trust, distribution, and the communities a company can credibly reach.”
The round will support team expansion and improve areas of private credit workflows such as reconciliation, LP reporting, SBIC compliance, and document intelligence.
