Kita Raises $4.5 Million to Help Lenders Underwrite the Borrowers' Credit Bureaus Miss

Kita, an AI-native credit assessment built for lending globally, led by Carmel Limcaoco and Rhea Malhotra, has raised $4.5M 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, the family office of Xiaomi co-founder Lin Bin. The round is supported by angels including Shivani Siroya (Tala), Kaz Nejatian (Opendoor), Linda Du (Valon), Kulveer Taggar (Zeus), Jason Miller, and Philippine business leader Lisa Gokongwei-Cheng, alongside founders and operators from Apple, Mercor, and others.

The funding will support engineering expansion, stronger underwriting and fraud capabilities, and growing demand across Latin America, Southeast Asia, Africa, and the United States.

Credit Underwriting Is Still Painfully Manual.

Critical credit data is often buried in bank statements, financials, payslips, and invoices, making underwriting slow and manual. Lenders can spend days or months reviewing files, particularly for thin-file borrowers.

Kita has processed more than $130 million in loan volume across the U.S., Southeast Asia, and Latin America, reducing underwriting tasks that once took days or months to under 60 seconds.

Underwriting Shouldn’t Still Be This Hard.

 

Kita is an AI-native credit assessment platform that automates manual work across loan origination, underwriting, and decisioning.

Its AI Credit Officer communicates with borrowers through SMS, WhatsApp, and email, while Kita Capture processes more than 50 types of financial, legal, and identity documents, extracting credit data and flagging inconsistencies and potential fraud.

The AI Underwriter applies each lender’s credit policy, analyzes borrowers, and generates decision-ready credit memos with every figure traceable to its source.

Kita is designed to augment credit teams, not replace them, automating information gathering and analysis while keeping human judgment and oversight at the center of lending decisions.

Credit Inclusion at the Core.

Kita was founded out of Stanford Computer Science and shaped by work with lenders in Manila. Across markets, the same challenge emerged: document-based underwriting remains a major bottleneck to serving more borrowers.

Existing tools automate individual steps, but few handle the full complexity of modern credit assessment. The name Kita comes from the Tagalog word for “to see” and “earnings,” reflecting the company’s mission to help lenders identify creditworthy borrowers overlooked by traditional systems.

Underwriting Across Four Markets.

Kita is live with lenders across the Philippines, Indonesia, Mexico, and the United States. What began with document-based underwriting has expanded into AI agents handling increasingly complex workflows across consumer, microfinance, and SME lending.

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