Kita YC Application

Winter 2026Active

Kita went through Y Combinator in the Winter 2026 batch as a Fintech company. Below: what the company does, who founded it, and its application to YC, reconstructed question by question in the real YC form.

YC batch: Winter 2026
Industry: Fintech
Team size: 2
Status: Active
Launched: 2026

Founders

Carmel LimcaocoFounder
Rhea MalhotraFounder

What Kita does

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.

Kita's YC application, reconstructed

Y Combinator application

Kita, Winter 2026 batch. The real form questions, answered from public data.

Founders2
Company7
Progress7
Idea4
Equity3
Curious2
Batch Preference1

Company

Company name

Kita

Describe what your company does in 50 characters or less.

Automate credit review for lenders

What is your company going to make? Please describe your product and what it does or will do.

We built an AI platform that helps lenders in emerging markets automate the review of financial documents like bank statements, utility bills, and e-wallet records. Our system extracts verified data and localized risk signals from these messy, unstructured documents so credit teams can make decisions faster and more accurately.

Where do you live now, and where would the company be based after YC?

We live in San Francisco, CA, and intend to keep the company based here after YC.

Explain your decision regarding location.

San Francisco offers access to strong technical talent and a network of fintech investors and customers. We also want to stay close to YC and the startup ecosystem here.

21 more answers in the full application

Founders, Progress, Idea, Equity, Curious, Batch Preference are in the full version. Create a free account to open it in YC Insights, next to every other YC batch.

See full application

Frequently Asked Questions

Is this the real Kita YC application?

No. Y Combinator keeps submitted applications private. This is a reconstruction: the real YC form questions, answered from Kita's public data (launch notes, founder backgrounds, product description). It shows how a company like Kita would present itself to YC, not the text they submitted.