Startupsby GlyphWhy it ranks
How the rank works- went through YCProgram · this site+4
- team of 3Team size · YC's directory+3.1
A sum of public facts, not a judgement and not investment advice.
Competitors
| Company | Category | Status | Program |
|---|---|---|---|
| AI | Active | YCS24 | |
| Other | Active | YCW23 | |
| Other | Active | YCW25 | |
| AI | Inactive | YCS16 | |
| AI | Active | YCW22 |
Adjacent
| Company | Category | Status | Program |
|---|---|---|---|
| Other | Active | YCS19 | |
| Other | Not stated | Antler2025 | |
| Other | Active | YCW24 | |
| AI, Devtools | Active | YCW17 | |
| Other | Not stated | Antler2022 |
Also from W26 in AI
All of W26Founders
- Carmel LimcaocoFounder/CEO
- Rhea MalhotraFounder/CTO
About Kita
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.
- YC batch
- W26 · Winter 2026
- Status, per YC
- Active
- Category
- AI
- Team size
- 3
- Location
- San Francisco, CA, USA
- Founded
- 2025
- Checked
- 13h ago
YC tags: Fintech, Computer Vision, Lending, Emerging Markets
Kita: questions
Which YC batch was Kita in?
Kita was in Y Combinator's Winter 2026 batch (W26).
Is Kita still active?
Y Combinator lists Kita as active.
Who founded Kita?
Kita's founders, as listed on its YC page: Carmel Limcaoco (Founder/CEO), Rhea Malhotra (Founder/CTO).
Where is Kita based?
Kita lists San Francisco, CA, USA as its location on YC's directory.