Kita
Kita is a YC Winter 2026 (W26) company. Based in San Francisco, CA, USA. Team of 2.
About Kita
Summary
Kita builds an AI platform that automates credit underwriting for lenders in emerging markets and community-focused institutions in the US. It ingests unstructured borrower documents, such as e-wallet records, bank statements, and utility bills, extracts fraud-checked data, and produces decision-ready credit files, replacing the manual review work that credit and risk teams currently do file by file. Its models learn from document signals linked to repayment outcomes, continuously refining fraud detection and risk scoring over time.
Business model
Demo and trial to start, with enterprise pricing for lenders and banks
Go-to-market
Kita targets enterprise lenders, banks, CDFIs, community banks, fintechs, and SOFOMs across Southeast Asia, Latin America, and the US, acquired through direct sales via demo and trial onboarding on its website.
From the Y Combinator listing
Automate credit review for lenders in emerging markets
In emerging markets, open finance is still nascent. Most of the population is traditionally unbanked, banking APIs don’t exist, and a borrower’s financial history lives in documents: e-wallet records, bank statements, utility bills, and more. Because this data is unstructured, credit and risk teams are forced into manual review. This slows decisioning, increases costs, and caps lending volume. Kita is the AI platform for global lending operations. We help lenders in emerging markets automate application completion, document verification, and underwriting from messy financial documents — using AI to extract fraud-checked data and localized risk signals that power faster, better credit decisions. Under the hood, Kita is a learning engine. We link document-level signals to repayment outcomes, allowing our models to continuously improve fraud detection and risk assessment over time. This creates a compounding advantage for lenders as their distinct underwriting decisions feed back into the system. We’re Carmel and Rhea. We met before Stanford and have been building together ever since. Carmel is from Manila, is a repeat founder, and spent three years in product at Apple. Rhea has a research background in computer vision and received the highest honor in Stanford Computer Science. Together, we combine deep local context with strong technical execution to build the infrastructure that expands access to credit in emerging markets.
Facts
- Fintech / Fintech
- San Francisco, CA, USA
- 2
- Active
- Early
Founders (2)
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