Kita Raises $4.5M to Make Credit Underwriting Smarter With AI

Kita is building for borrowers whose financial lives do not fit neatly inside a credit bureau. Bank statements, payslips, invoices, e-wallet records and photographed documents can contain the evidence lenders need, yet reviewing them manually can turn a credit decision into days or weeks of paperwork. Kita is building an AI-native underwriting stack that converts those fragmented files into structured credit analysis while leaving the final decision with the lender. The company is already live with banks, fintechs, and community lenders across Southeast Asia, Latin America, and the United States.

The San Francisco startup has raised $4.5 million in seed funding led by BoxGroup, with participation from Y Combinator, Golden Gate Ventures, US News Digital Ventures, BEENEXT, Kaya Founders, Genting Ventures and Apex Star Capital. Strategic angels include operators from Tala, Opendoor and Valon. Kita plans to grow its engineering team, strengthen underwriting and fraud detection, and support expansion across Latin America, Southeast Asia, Africa and the United States.

Kita was founded by Carmel Limcaoco and Rhea Malhotra, who met while studying at Stanford. Carmel Limcaoco, now CEO, grew up in Manila and previously worked on product at Apple. Rhea Malhotra, Kita’s CTO, studied computer vision and robotics at Stanford. Their early work with lenders in Manila exposed a recurring bottleneck: borrowers could have real income and repayment capacity while the evidence remained trapped in documents that traditional credit infrastructure struggled to interpret.

Kita attacks that workflow in stages. Its AI Credit Officer follows up with borrowers for missing information, while Kita Capture reads more than 50 document types and checks for inconsistencies or potential fraud. The AI Underwriter then applies the lender’s own credit policy and drafts a source-linked credit memo for human review. Kita says work that previously took days or months can now be completed in under 60 seconds.

The deeper opportunity is financial visibility. Kita says it has already processed more than $130 million in loan volume, while keeping human judgment at the centre of every approval or rejection. For lenders, faster underwriting could mean more capacity. For borrowers with thin or unconventional credit files, it could mean being assessed on financial evidence that was previously too difficult to process.