About the Company
Kita (YC W26) is building the AI credit infrastructure layer for lenders in emerging markets.
In much of the world, the important financial data to underwrite loans still lives in messy documents. Traditional OCR breaks on the files lenders actually rely on, so credit teams are still stuck doing manual review. We’re building VLMs to automate the work a credit officer does today: parsing documents, detecting fraud, cross-checking information, and extracting real risk signals for underwriting.
This is a deeply technical problem at the intersection of vision, reasoning, and financial systems.
As a founding engineer, you’d work across the stack on hard problems in enterprise software, DevOps, model evaluation, and production infrastructure for banks and microfinance institutions. We’re looking for a fast learner who can move between systems, product, and customers with ease. A background in DevOps for highly regulated industries, databases, compliance-heavy systems, fintech, credit, or data science is a strong plus.
You’d ship quickly, work directly with users, travel across LatAm, Southeast Asia, and Africa, and help define both the product and engineering culture from day one.
Founders
Carmel is the co-founder and CEO of Kita. She is from Manila and studied Symbolic Systems & Music at Stanford. Prior to Kita, she was completing her Master’s in Computer Science. She spent three summers in audio and music product at Apple, where she was one of few interns to ever ship a feature in iOS. She was awarded by the United Nations at 16, launched the first Product Fellowship in the Philippines, and co-founded DAHA in 2022, where she took Stanford’s first marketplace from 0 to 1.
Rhea is the co-founder and CTO of Kita. Rhea completed her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in Computer Science at Stanford, and was an incoming PhD in Computer Vision and Robotics at Princeton. She received the Firestone Medal, the sole highest honor of the Stanford CS Department, for her research in 2025. Rhea joined her first research lab at age 13, worked on the COVID-19 vaccine at Pfizer at 17, and has since authored 7 papers recognized and awarded internationally.
Open Positions at Kita (2 Jobs)
Ready to start your space career at Kita?
