Ryan Williams

Ryan Williams is a technology entrepreneur who founded the companies Cadre and Ellis. He served as chief executive officer of Cadre, a digital real estate investment platform, through its acquisition by Yieldstreet in 2024. Williams is the founder and chief executive officer of Ellis, an artificial intelligence-based operations platform for private credit. Ellis publicly launched in July 2026 after raising $11 million in seed financing led by First Round Capital.

Williams raised and invested more than $1.2 billion in real estate investments through Cadre, including receiving investments from Jared Kushner, Mark Cuban, Soros Fund Management, Vinod Khosla and Andreessen Horowitz. As one of few African American real estate technology founders and CEOs, he has often advocated for actionable change in his industry and society. Among other specific changes, he has advocated for increasing education about financial literacy as a key to closing America's racial wealth gap.

In a 2025 interview with the podcast Masters of Scale, Williams indicated that he was forming a new company "at the intersection of financial services and technology."

In mid-2025, Williams was named as partner of Jay-Z in building inclusive ownership in a potential Times Square, New York casino as part of Caesars' bid to secure a New York gaming license. The partnership is intended to allow low-income and diverse households, which have often been excluded from capital markets, to participate in the growth of the gaming project.

Early life

Williams was born in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and founded a sports apparel company at 13. Williams matriculated to Harvard University, where he founded the Veritas Financial Group, the school’s largest undergraduate financial literacy group.

Career

Early career Williams began his career in real estate technology during his undergraduate term at Harvard. He was inspired to create a system to track foreclosed homes after seeing the impact of foreclosures during a trip to Atlanta. In 2020, he highlighted the importance of Citizens Trust Bank, an Atlanta bank founded by five Black businessmen and currently a Black-owned bank, to his early success. As a young Black man he was denied loans by 10 other banks before the then-chairman of Citizens Trust personally called to say that he believed in Williams.

Cadre At 26 years old, Williams left Blackstone to found Cadre, a financial technology platform that seeks to make the real estate market more like a stock market. Williams served as CEO of Cadre and led it through its acquisition by Yieldstreet.

Williams led fundraising for Cadre including investments by Jared Kushner, Mark Cuban, Soros Fund Management (George Soros), Vinod Khosla

According to Williams, “Cadre’s mission is to create a more efficient economy, where we can connect the world’s buyers and sellers in opaque assets that have been inaccessible to many.” He believes that increasing the ability of investors to participate in alternative asset classes (such as "energy, natural resources, oil, infrastructure or anything that’s historically been privately held or inaccessible" ) will expand the opportunity to build multi-generational wealth to many more members of the world by "giving people direct, deal-by-deal access to commercial real estate, like you would buy and sell something on Amazon." To him, that mission includes a secondary market and the ability of investors to select the deals they are most interested in, at lower cost.

In 2018 Williams announced a deal through which Cadre would receive at least $250 million (USD) in real estate investments from clients of Goldman Sachs. In 2020, Williams published a widely-linked op-ed in CNBC recounting his experience being supported by a Black-owned and Black-founded bank early in his career, and his commitment to increase diversity among participating banks and real estate operators in the future. It is a $400 million fund investing in commercial real estate and backing minority operators and partners to help produce greater economic equity. Williams later announced that his alma mater, Harvard University, invested in both Cadre and in the $400 million fund intended to drive diversity through democratization.

He followed with the Cadre Direct Access Fund II, a value-add real estate fund.

In late 2021, Williams publicly announced that Cadre sold three buildings for a total of approximately $312 million, providing $95 million in returned capital to investors and an internal rate of return of approximately 17%. Williams described one of the sales as the largest-ever digital real-estate transaction (i.e., a property bought, sold, and managed using a digital platform).

In early 2023, he led Cadre to secure a spot on the Forbes Fintech 50 for a seventh consecutive year.

Later in 2023, he led the company to a liquidity event with its merger with Yieldstreet, a global alternative investment platform focused on credit investments. The company’s combined assets totaled $9.7 billion. At the time of the merger, Cadre and Yieldstreet together had produced more than $3.1 billion in returns for clients with a total investment value of $9.7 billion. Williams continued to serve as the CEO of Cadre, which will operate independently, as well as lead global institutional client relations and business development partnerships for the combined business. According to Forbes, Cadre served more than 50,000 customers and managed approximately $6 billion in asset value. Yieldstreet completed its acquisition of Cadre in January 2024 as one of the most significant exits in fintech. Williams later cited data fragmentation and reconciliation problems he encountered while building Cadre as an influence on the creation of Ellis.

Ellis In early 2025, Williams was interviewed by Jeff Berman on the podcast Masters of Scale, an interview-format podcast covering leaders from Barack Obama to Mark Zuckerberg. Williams indicated that he would be starting another growth venture.

Ellis connects private credit managers’ existing fund-administration, accounting, loan-servicing, banking and spreadsheet systems and reconciles the information into a source-verifiable operating record. Ellis emerged from stealth in July 2026 following an $11 million seed financing led by First Round Capital. Other investors included Kearny Jackson, 645 Ventures, Khosla Ventures, Slow Ventures and Josh Kushner's Thrive Capital. The company initially focused on private credit managers with between $100 million and $1 billion in assets under management. Treville Capital Group was reported as an early customer and design partner. Ellis states that it developed the platform alongside private credit managers representing more than $50 billion in cumulative assets under management.

Other ventures

Jay-Z and Caesars Palace Times Square partnership In 2025, Williams joined a group with Jay-Z and Al Sharpton to promote inclusive ownership of a potential Caesars Palace Times Square casino. The stated goal of the project is to allow underrepresented communities to own a portion of the casino, including permitting investments as small as $500. The project's backers describe it as offering "tangible investor education and meaningful equity investment opportunities for everyday New Yorkers."

Other activities Williams is a regular speaker at conferences and in news programs regarding real estate technology.

In 2020, he published a plan to help increase economic opportunity for diverse communities through "formal mentorship programs to provide hands-on guidance, and ... comprehensive skills-training programs that help people of all ages get a start in careers that will allow them to succeed in a fast-changing economy." Forbes, and others in response to his call for proactive steps to increase economic equality. Later in 2020, he reiterated the importance of remedying racial wealth and power disparities in the United States, noting for example that only 21 of over 4,700 banks in the United States are Black-owned or Black-led.

Recognition and awards He was named to Fortune's "40 under 40" list for 2019, Forbes' "30 under 30" list for 2018, "Crain’s 40 under 40" list for 2017, and has been profiled in Forbes, and other publications.

In late 2024, he was awarded a Beacon Award by the Ellis Island Honors Society at its Medals of Honor ceremony, based on "entrepreneurial impact, leadership in innovation, commitment to diversity and inclusion, and contributions to the broader community."

Personal life

As a native of Baton Rouge, Louisiana, Williams is a fan of LSU football. He lives in Brooklyn, New York and says "I've never let anyone outwork me."