Launch HN: Kita (YC W26) – Automate credit review in emerging markets

Hey HN! We’re Carmel and Rhea, the founders of Kita ( https://www.usekita.com/ ). We automate credit review for lenders in emerging markets using VLMs. In many emerging markets, like the Philippines and Mexico, credit infrastructure is weak. Open finance is still nascent, and credit bureaus are unreliable. So to apply for a loan, lenders rely on borrowers submitting documentation to understand their ability to repay. A borrower can submit financial documents, such as bank statements and payslips, in any format, from pdfs, images of physical documents and screenshots. On top of that, financial documents in these markets are highly unstandardized, with no consistent templates lenders can rely on. Existing OCR and document AI tools break on these highly variant, messy real-world documents. Generic tools are not built for lending workflows like verification, fraud detection, and risk extraction. As a result, credit teams fall back on manual review, making underwriting slower, more expensiv