Ryan Alfred

As CEO of Atrium Data, a five-person, San Diego-based analytics startup founded in 2024, Ryan Aflred is all in on AI.

After developing two apps tracking the financial data of cryptocurrency and asset managers, Alfred began leveraging AI to document where all the debt in commercial real estate goes, as well as who benefits — and who loses — on those deals. 

“We’re working with massive datasets and finding interesting ways of combining data together that reveal new insights,” said Alfred, who emphasized the firm exclusively used AI to build Atrium’s platforms. “It’s built the entire company basically using frontier models and using orchestrated systems and techniques to write the code and data analytical work across several hundred data sets.”

Atrium’s AI reads the debt documents that cover the financings of every parcel of land in the U.S. and covers every major asset class. 

“We are CRE writ large,” said Alfred. “I don’t speak ‘real estate attorney’ — I just want to know what’s going on here [with the credit].”  

This August, Atrium launched its new interactive data and research platform, “Who Finances America’s Data Centers,” to track the debt dollars behind every U.S. data center deal. The first-of-its-kind tool combines data from property records, SEC credit agreements, CMBS originations, and commercial bank and private credit issuances to track $1.3 trillion of identifiable debt behind the data center development boom.

“Most real estate platforms are all about the building, or the owners, and have a footnote on the credit, and we flipped it around because we believe the credit, in this part of the cycle, is the most important thing,” he said. 

“What we found is that by enriching the property on the credit side, with all these other datasets, gives you a much more nuanced view,” Alfred added. “It’s really meant to show how deep we can go to fill out our understanding of these loans.”