Repeat founder Ryan Williams raises $10M seed for an AI startup for private credit managers. Ellis AI announced Thursday its emergence from stealth with $10 million in seed funding. 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. Ellis uses AI agents to tackle the fragmented workflow private credit managers deal with, including managing documents, spreadsheets, and correspondence. The company was founded by Ryan Williams, best known for co-creating the real estate investment platform Cadre alongside Josh and Jared Kushner back in 2014. That company raised more than $160 million in funding and, at its peak, was valued at $800 million before being sold for an undisclosed sum to the alternative investment company Yieldstreet in 2024. "At Cadre, I saw the next major constraint," Williams said. "Even as the front end of private markets became more modern and accessible, the operating infrastructure underneath it remained fragmented." He started working on Ellis last year. The company seeks to connect and centralize all the scattered software, accounting information, and documents a private credit firm would use into one easily accessible platform. The system can flag discrepancies in the data and uses AI agents to help perform tasks like portfolio monitoring and preparing reports. For example, Williams promises the agents can help close a fund's books at the end of the month. "A team may have to download files from several systems, reformat the data, compare balances, investigate discrepancies, and re-enter information by hand. In many firms, Excel becomes the operating system," he continued. "Ellis connects to the systems and documents a firm already uses rather than forcing it to rip everything out and start over." It keeps a human in the loop, too, he says. "Material decisions and actions remain with the human experts," he said. "I expect the human loop to become narrower, but not disappear," he continued, when asked if he sees a day when the AI works fully autonomously. "Our goal is not to replace human judgment; it's to help people cut through the noise and make educated decisions faster." _This piece was updated to add an investor. _

Ellis, the first-of-its-kind AI-native operations platform for private credit, launched today with more than $10 million in seed funding closed. First Round ...

Healia launches with $18M to cut healthcare costs for dual-income families. The company has given families nationwide access to $33 million in benefits, covering out-of-pocket costs for care from hospital stays to chronic conditions COLUMBUS, Ohio, July 28, 2026 /PRNewswire/ - Healia, a Columbus-based company that reduces health benefit costs for dual-income families and employers, today announced $18 million in funding, including a $14M Series A led by 111° West Capital, with participation from Y Combinator, First Round Capital, Pioneer Fund, GoAhead Ventures, and North Coast Ventures. To date, Healia has enabled employers to provide $33 million in additional coverage for families nationwide, equipping families to make healthcare's most consequential decisions as one household, with the full picture in view. Discover more Healthcare Roughly 30 million American dual-income families are underserved by a healthcare system designed for the 1960s household: one breadwinner, one plan, a spouse at home. Most of those families now have access to two employer plans, and the system quietly overcharges them for having both. That's because employers pay to cover working spouses who already have coverage elsewhere, and families default to the plan they know because comparing two plans across two enrollment portals is a headache no one is set up to solve. Healia is a healthcare benefits platform built for dual-income families. Healia's Total Care Option (TCO) enables employers to pay a family's out-of-pocket costs and premiums when they enroll in a spouse's health plan instead of the company's. Families pay little to nothing for their healthcare, and employers cut their spend significantly. Here's how the Total Care Option works: * Healia compares the family's health plan options: It prices every path, staying on separate plans or moving to the spouse's plan with the TCO, and identifies the least expensive choice for the household. * Families enroll in a spouse's plan and the TCO: When a family enrolls in their spouse's plan, they also receive the TCO to help reimburse essential medical expenses. * Healia manages the entire claims process: When the family incurs copays, coinsurance, deductibles, or premiums on the spouse's plan, the employer reimburses them through Healia in a matter of hours. "Healia saved us thousands during the most stressful year of our lives. When my husband's company implemented Healia, the decision support tool made it a no-brainer: we enrolled in the Total Care Option and added him to my employer's plan. We found out we were pregnant on New Year's Day, and between our daughter's birth and my own cancer diagnosis that year, we submitted a lot of claims. Often we'd get reimbursed before the provider bill even arrived. Our friends and family were shocked. Honestly, so were we," said one early Healia member in Phoenix, Arizona. The result is a rare win-win in employer-sponsored healthcare. A family expecting a baby, managing a diagnosis, or living with a chronic condition pays little to nothing out of pocket, saving up to $26,000 a year. Employers are able to provide meaningful benefits that retain and recruit employees while lowering their healthcare costs up to 76% per enrolled household annually. Discover more Medical Devices & Equipment Seniors & Retirement Neuroscience "In 5 years, picking a health plan will work the way it should have all along. Every family will see both plans side by side, know exactly what each one costs them, and get paid back for choosing well. When 30 million households make that decision with full information, the whole market has to respond. Plans will compete for families instead of families accepting the status quo," said Priyang Shah, founder and CEO of Healia. "Millions of dual-income families are paying twice for healthcare coverage they don't need, yet the employer healthcare system has largely ignored the problem. I spent more than a decade in healthcare operations, including co-founding TigerConnect, so I recognize structural inefficiencies when I see them. This is one of the clearest I've encountered. Priyang combines the product vision, operational discipline, and execution capabilities needed to solve it at scale and deliver meaningful savings for working families" said Andrew Brooks, M.D., Co-Founder and Managing Partner at 111° West Capital. Healia will use the funding to build its next generation of leaders across sales, engineering, and operations in Columbus while investing in the technology and AI underpinning the TCO. The company is recruiting people who want startup pace and ownership without leaving the heartland to get it. About Healia Healia is a Columbus, Ohio, health tech company that builds health reimbursement arrangements (HRAs) for employers. Its Total Care Option (TCO) reduces benefit costs for employers and out-of-pocket costs for dual-income employees: when an employee enrolls in a spouse's plan, Healia enables employers to reimburse the family's out-of-pocket costs in full. Employers using Healia have provided $33M in additional coverage to their employees since its founding in 2021. Learn more at healiahealth.com. Discover more Medical Facilities & Services Company News Engineering & Technology SOURCE Healia