Filipino Co-Founded AI Credit Assessment Startup Raises $4.5 Million in Seed Round

AI credit-assessment platform Kita announced on Wednesday (August 19) that it has raised $4.5 million (roughly P278 million) in a seed round. The startup said the fresh funding will help it “automate loan origination and underwriting analysis to unearth creditworthy borrowers that traditional systems overlook.”

The funding was led by BoxGroup and also includes Y Combinator, Golden Gate Ventures, BEENEXT, Kaya Founders, U.S. News Digital Ventures and Apex Star Capital, the family office of Xiaomi co-founder Lin Bin. A group of strategic angel investors that includes Tala founder Shivani Siroya and Philippine business leader Lisa Gokongwei-Cheng also participated.

As an AI-native credit assessment platform, Kita’s model is designed around how credit teams actually work, automating the tedious, manual work from the loan origination to the underwriting and decisioning process. Credit underwriting remains heavily dependent on information buried in bank statements, pay slips, invoices, financial statements and other documents. For borrowers without extensive credit histories, that can make the process particularly difficult. Lenders, meanwhile, can spend hours or even days reviewing documents and following up on missing information. Kita's proposition is to automate much of that work.

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The platform’s AI Credit Officer communicates with borrowers through channels including SMS, WhatsApp and email, collecting information and following up on requirements. Kita Capture can read more than 50 types of financial, legal and identity documents, extracting relevant information while looking for inconsistencies and possible fraud. Its AI Underwriter then applies the lender's own credit policies, analyzes the borrower and produces a credit memo that can be reviewed by a human loan officer.

The company claims workflows that previously took days or months can now be completed in less than 60 seconds. Kita says it has already processed more than $130 million in loan volume for lenders across the United States, Southeast Asia and Latin America. Its technology is currently being used by lenders in the Philippines, Indonesia, Mexico and the US, with the company targeting consumer, microfinance, and SME lending.

Kita says it is not positioning AI as a replacement for credit officers. Its stated philosophy is that the technology should handle the repetitive work while humans retain responsibility for the final decision.

The company's name comes from the Tagalog word kita, which can mean both “to see” and “earnings.” The idea is to help lenders see borrowers who might otherwise be overlooked by conventional credit systems.

Built out of Stanford by a team from Apple, Tesla, and Microsoft, and based in San Francisco, Kita made headlines as the first AI company built for the Philippines to be accepted into the Y Combinator accelerator program (Winter 2026 batch).

“My co-founder, Rhea Malhotra and I became best friends after randomly sharing a one-bedroom apartment in Boston, and started building Kita while doing our master's in Computer Science at Stanford University,” co-founder Carmel Limcaoco posted on LinkedIn. “What started as a dorm room project has now evolved into a global platform helping lenders get capital into the hands of those who need it most.

“Our mission is to make fair, fast, high-quality credit assessment possible for anyone, anywhere,” she added.

That mission puts Kita in a part of the Philippine startup ecosystem that has continued to attract investors even as overall funding has contracted. Fintech was the country's strongest-funded startup sector in 2025, accounting for $72 million across nine transactions, according to Kickstart and DealStreetAsia.

Kita’s funding announcement comes as Philippine startups raised about $120 million in equity funding across 23 deals in 2025, down sharply from $428 million the previous year, according to a joint report by Kickstart Ventures and DealStreetAsia. Funding in the second half of the year fell to just $33 million from $86 million in the first half. Investors have become more selective, putting greater emphasis on governance, unit economics and credible paths to profitability.