Over a decade after founding real estate investing platform Cadre, Ryan Williams, 38, is back with another fintech startup. This time, he’s tackling a back-office problem that frustrated him for years and now plagues the fast-growing private credit industry—a market facing heightened scrutiny after an AI-driven pullback in investor confidence.

At Cadre, Williams built a platform that let affluent investors buy fractional stakes in commercial real estate. The company served more than 50,000 customers and managed $6 billion in asset value. After raising $160 million in venture funding and reaching an $800 million valuation, Cadre was sold in 2024 to Willow Wealth (formerly Yieldstreet) for more than $300 million, according to a person familiar with the deal.

The fintech founder got the idea for his new startup, New York-based Ellis, after he kept encountering a maddening problem at Cadre. Whenever he needed to know the value of Cadre’s real estate portfolio, the necessary data was scattered across bank accounts, home-grown spreadsheets and accounting-services firms called fund administrators. None of the systems talked to each other, and it sometimes took weeks to get an accurate answer. “I can't think of a quarter when we actually finished closing the books and getting to the right values on time,” he says today.

To try to fix this issue, Ellis uses AI to aggregate different sources of data and form a coherent perspective. Williams is initially focusing only on private credit firms because it’s a big enough industry facing so many of its own challenges. In April, he raised $11 million in seed funding for Ellis, a round........

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